The Ragged Edge of the World

A pioneering work of environmental journalism that vividly depicts the people, animals and landscapes on the front lines of change's inexorable march.

A species nearing extinction, a tribe losing centuries of knowledge, a tract of forest facing the first incursion of humans-how can we even begin to assess the cost of losing so much of our natural and cultural legacy?

For forty years, environmental journalist and author Eugene Linden has traveled to the very sites where tradition, wildlands and the various forces of modernity collide. In The Ragged Edge of the World, he takes us from pygmy forests to the Antarctic to the world's most pristine rainforest in the Congo to tell the story of the harm taking place-and the successful preservation efforts-in the world's last wild places.

The Ragged Edge of the World is a critical favorite, and was an editors' pick on Oprah.com.

"Thoughtful and compelling." — National Geographic

"Linden is a well-versed guide to complex ecosystems and remote cultures. . . . His recollections are vivid." — The New Yorker

"From Borneo to sub-Saharan Africa . . . firsthand accounts by a veteran environmental journalist." — Oprah.com (18 Books to Watch)Eugene Linden is an award-winning journalist and the author of The Parrot’s Lament, The Future in Plain Sight, Silent Partners, and other books on animals and the environment. He has consulted for the U.S. State Department, the UN Development Program, and he is a widely traveled speaker and lecturer. In 2001, Yale University named Linden a Poynter Fellow in recognition of his writing on the environment.  He lives in Nyack, New York, and Washington, D.C.