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Endangered species have a lot more to fear than logging companies and housing developments. The real threat, these days, is poaching. Many are sought after because they're rare. Protection, even in the U.S. is nil- equivalent to having three cops for all of L.A.. Tobias gives you the details, and tells what you can do to help.

Review...

Nature's Keepers by Michael Tobias

Reviewed by Michael Pastore

Nature's Keepers: On the Front Lines of the Fight to Save Wildlife in America.

Killing and poaching wildlife, illegally, then selling the animals -- or carcasses or parts -- is a big business. And a highly profitable one. One feather of a bald eagle is worth one hundred dollars. The horns of the Rocky Mountain bighorn (a wild sheep) sell for one-thousand dollars per inch. And not long ago, in South Korea, someone wanted one gall bladder of a bear enough to pay sixty-four thousand dollars. Worldwide, observers estimate that the illegal wildlife trade does as much as thirty-billion dollars worth of business every year.

Of course, since nobody pays that kind of cash for common critters like sparrows and squirrels, much of this hunting and poaching is perpetrated against species that are rare and in danger of extinction. How pervasive are these crimes? What is being done to stop them? These questions, and much more, are answered in Nature's Keeper's, a just-released nonfiction book that tells the stories of the steadfast women and men who battle every day to save American wildlife in our national and state forests and parks.

Every chapter of the book is superb reportage from two dozens states across America, filled with accurate and stunning facts and anecdotes, and tales of human courage under great duress. The fact, for example, that there are only 235 special agents in the whole country, to protect over 3 million square miles of wildlife habitat. The equivalent of asking a single cop to patrol three L.A.'s. These matters -some dark, others illuminating- are electrified by Tobias's literary style and unmatched scholarship, and his vision of pure compassion for all living things. While some readers may -- and rightfully -- grow angry at the state of affairs the book describes, I found it a book of hope. Not the hope that waits, but the hope that looks into the face of things then acts. All told, Nature's Keepers is a powerful book that takes us one step closer to a better world -- a place where humans act on the belief that wild animals -- and all the earth's species -- have the right and the opportunity to live as their God intended.

Copyright (c) 1998 by Michael Pastore. All rights reserved. Michael Pastore can be reached via Youthtopia website:

http://www.prairienet.org/youthtopia

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