Gold Rush in the Jungle is not a book I would have normally picked out from the bookstore; though I care about sustainable tourism, conservation work, and that side of travel, it just wouldn’t occur to me that a narrative on conservation work would be interesting.
An engrossing, adventure-filled account of the rush to discover and save Vietnam's most extraordinary animals
Deep in the jungle where the borders of Vietnam meet those of Laos and Cambodia is a region known as "the lost world." Large mammals never seen before by Western science have popped up frequently in these mountains in the last decade, including a half-goat/half-ox, a deer that barks, and a close relative of the nearly extinct Javan rhino. In an age when scientists are excited by discovering a new kind of tube worm, the thought of finding and naming a new large terrestrial mammal is astonishing, and wildlife biologists from all over the world are flocking to this dangerous region. The result is a race between preservation and destruction.
Containing research gathered from famous biologists, conservationists, indigenous peoples, former POWs, ex-Viet Cong, and the first U.S. ambassador to Vietnam since the war's end, Gold Rush in the Jungle goes deep into the valleys, hills, and hollows of Vietnam to explore the research, the international trade in endangered species, the lingering effects of Agent Orange, and the effort of a handful of biologists to save the world's rarest animals.
The book billed itself as a journey into one of the last wild places on earth, and it really was all that. I finished the book in record time because I was really keen to follow the conservation work being done in some of the most remote areas of Vietnam, and more than that the story of the people and history that have shaped Vietnam into what it is today.
More than anything this book was readable.
He tempers his scientific background with a strong grasp of storytelling and wrote a book that makes a poetic case for conservation in an appealing way that doesn’t shove an agenda, but rather outlines a lot of the really amazing work being done right now. And the heartbreak of extinction. And those animals on the brink.
You know, I had no idea that conservationists discovered several large mammal species in the past decade alone (and here’s 10 species discovered in 2012 alone). We’re talking large animals never before documented by science because they lived in no-man’s-land on the edges of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Ironically, because this region’s history of war and fighting, uncertain politics, and a lack of technological developments for a long time, the remote areas of Vietnam’s wilderness flourished. In the past 20 years, however, animals are facing new threats as population growth moves into the more remote areas and as the international black market deals in these rare animals.
And thus you have the plot of this book—conservationists working in the region to protect critically endangered animals, many of which we still haven’t discovered. The author weaves his travels into the story as he visits the conservation efforts in Vietnam, Hawaii, Europe, and really all over the world to interview other researches and leading conservation programs.
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