I recommend this book highly to everyone. We have for a long time avoided looking at what has now become an urgent issue.


Finally--the African bushmeat crisis explained   May 28, 2003
 9 out of 9 found this review helpful

I have been seeing references to the African trade in wild meat, including primates, for a couple of years now--Jane Goodall mentions it in her talks--but searched unsuccessfully for an intelligent guide to the issue. Now it's here, and it's clear that this subject is urgent, appalling, and very very complex. Dale Peterson's gift is to explain the crisis in accessible terms, dispassionately (though the problem arouses passions across the political spectrum), with a wealth of information, and in a lucid, utterly compelling manner. With Karl Ammann, who took the riveting photgraphs, Peterson has visited the meat markets where ape meat is sold as exotic--not subsistence--food, tracked the loggers whose commercial enterprises have opened up the forests to hunters on a scale heretofore unimagined and completely unsustainable, and walked into hunting camps and interviewed the hunters themselves. The story of one of these men, Joseph Melloh, gives the book a human face and a narrative frame; one of the most powerful effects of this study of cultural and political conflict is that it reads like a novel, with this man at its heart, and we see the issues through African eyes--no First World condescension to Third World problems. The book also shows the full range of the catastrophe--environmental, economic, political, social, and ethical--while at the same time showing how readers can make a difference through a few simple steps, by working to change public opinion and shift economic goals. The great apes are humans' closest relatives, and we are destroying them. This book faces a crisis that most people are hardly aware of, and explains it in a way that makes change thinkable and possible. ...