The Ragged Edge of the World Read Online Free

make a career out of writing, I regret that decision to avoid publicity. I’ve learned since how rarely the brass ring is offered. But these regrets are mild. Much more important was the certainty that my misgivings about the war were more than an artifact of convenience.
    And then there were the ontological issues the war raised. A need to know whether I was right about the conflict got me to Vietnam, but once I was there, coincidence or some law of quantum destiny gave me the opportunity to observe my life as it might have been lived had I taken another path. As a journalist I could meet my West Point doppelganger; as a journalist I found myself in the field confronting the very situation that as a thought experiment had impelled me toward leaving the military. What is a career compared with that?
    Vietnam put me on the road, but I had no interest in becoming a war correspondent. Rather than cover wars between nations or the war on terror, I devoted the next thirty-odd years to another conflict: the war on nature. The reporting I did in 1971 enabled me to pursue the questions that underlie most of my subsequent travels and writings: What drives the consumer society and where is it going? How are we different from animals and how is the consumer society different from other cultures? What is the price of material progress? In what manner does the way we think impact the natural world? What are we losing, and what can be saved?
    I stopped in Cambodia, Thailand, Iran and Ireland on my way home. I did not get back to Vietnam for twenty-three years. When I did return, the threat to the land was not war, but peace.

PART I
    WAR AND PEACE

CHAPTER 1
    Vietnam 1994
    F rom the minute I arrived in Vietnam in 1971, I wanted to leave. During wartime any country will reveal its ugly side, and the conflict in Vietnam was one of the ugliest in which the United States had ever been involved. By that point we and the corrupt and incompetent regime we were propping up were well on the way to losing the war.
    But the first thing that struck me about Saigon then was the heat: It was just impossibly hot and humid. Since that first trip I’ve been to many of the hottest and most humid places on the planet, and, until I returned to Vietnam in 1994, I had always wondered whether that initial experience reflected (a) a true measure of the heat or (b) the fact that in 1971 I really did not have much to compare it with. The answer, which became obvious as soon as I alighted in Hanoi in May, was (a): Vietnam has a combination of heat and humidity matched by few if any regions on earth.
    If its climate was consistent, the Vietnam I encountered twenty-three years later was an entirely different landscape. Most of the surface scars of war had long since faded, and I was able to travel to parts of the country that would have been impassable three decades earlier.

    I came back to Vietnam on assignment, in response to a series of reports that had come out of the country about discoveries of three new species of large animals in a lost world, a remote region high up in the cordillera that divides Vietnam from Laos.
    The news of these findings was nothing less than astonishing, since only five new species of animals larger than 100 pounds had been discovered since the beginning of the twentieth century. One of the animals (variously called the Vu Quang ox, the pseudoryx or the saola) represented an entirely new genus, and only three other new genera had been documented in the century.
    Since my visit in the early 1990s, other new species have been found in the region, and new species have surfaced in Borneo and the highlands of New Guinea as well. While welcome for science, this boom has an ominous side, as it is in part the product of disquieting forces at work around the world. The world’s great wilderness areas have been so reduced that more and more animals are being forced into contact with humans. Similarly, with forests growing ever smaller