Explore the wilderness with us… This week we share the “golden wilderness”! The rich colors and textures of the wild can never be replaced or surpassed. Within the next 10-15 years we will see the last-remaining wilderness area on earth dominated by the demands of growing human populations and undermined by accelerated climate change. When the earth’s last wild places are gone, all we will have are fenced off protected areas dependent on constant intervention to persist and marginalized by the demands of sustained development in emerging markets. Guides, rangers, researchers, ecotourists, photographers, artists and conservationists around the world apply themselves everyday to sharing, studying, photographing, writing about, protecting, conserving and celebrating the “wild” with their guests, co-workers, colleagues, and local communities. These amazing photographs are a window into their world, a world where the lions, elephants, orangutans and leopards still reign supreme and we can dream of that perfect morning in the wilderness.
Ranger Diaries and The Bush Boyes have teamed up to bring you the “Top 25 Photographs from the Wilderness”. These stunning photographs are selected from hundreds of submissions and are intended to bring the beauty, freedom and splendor of the wilderness to as many people as possible around the world. Please submit your best photographs from the wildest places to the Bush Boyes wall or Ranger Diaries website, and stand a chance of being featured in the “Top 25 Photographs from the Wilderness” published each week. This initiative is all about SHARING and CARING about wild places. Please “Like” this blog post and share this link with as many people as possible… So begins the “Ranger Revolution”… Anyone can be an “Honorary Ranger” if they share and care about the wilderness, stimulating positive change for wild places around the world… Join the “Ranger Revolution” now!
“Like” the Bush Boyes or Ranger Diaries Facebook page before 29 March and you could WIN an amazing SUUNTO Compass!!! Follow both these pages a be eligible to WIN great prizes with the “Top 25 Photographs from the Wilderness”…
“There is just one hope for repulsing the tyrannical ambition of civilization to conquer every inch on the whole earth. That hope is the organization of spirited people who will fight for the freedom and preservation of the wilderness.” — Bob Marshall (Co-founder of the Wilderness Society)
“The wilderness is a place of rest — not in the sense of being motionless, for the lure, after all, is to move, to round the next bend. The rest comes in the isolation from distractions, in the slowing of the daily centrifugal forces that keep us off balance.” — David Douglas (Scottish botanist)
“The love of wilderness is more than a hunger for what is always beyond reach; it is also an expression of loyalty to the earth … the only home we shall ever know, the only paradise we ever need — if only we had the eyes to see.” — Edward Abbey (American writer and naturalist)
“In God’s wildness lies the hope of the world – the great fresh, unblighted, unredeemed wilderness.” — John Muir (American naturalist and co-founder of the Sierra Club)
“If you know wilderness in the way that you know love, you would be unwilling to let it go. We are talking about the body of the beloved, not real estate.” — Terry Tempest Williams (American nature writer)
“The Wilderness holds answers to questions man has not yet learned how to ask.” — Nancy Newhall (Conservationist writer and photography critic)
“When all the dangerous cliffs are fenced off, all the trees that might fall on people are cut down,all of the insects that bite are poisoned… and all of the grizzlies are dead because they are occasionally dangerous, the wilderness will not be made safe. Rather, the safety will have destroyed the wilderness.” — R. Yorke Edwards
“Plans to protect air and water, wilderness and wildlife are in fact plans to protect man.” — Stewart Udall (Arizona cabinet member)
“Wilderness is the raw material out of which man has hammered the artifact called civilization.” — Aldo Leopold (American ecologist, forester, and environmentalist, considered to be father of American wildlife management)
“As long as there are young men with the light of adventure in their eyes or a touch of wildness in their souls, rapids will be run.” — Sigurd F. Olson (Naturalist author of The Singing Wilderness)
“Wilderness itself is the basis of all our civilization. I wonder if we have enough reverence for life to concede to wilderness the right to live on?” — Margaret (Mardy) Murie (Known as “Grandmother of the Conservation Movement,” wife of Olaus Murie)
“Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clean air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence, so that never again will Americans be free in their own country from the noise, the exhausts, the stinks of human and automotive waste.” — Wallace Stegner (American writer, historian, and environmentalist), 1960, from the “Wilderness Letter,” written to the Outdoor Recreation Resources Review Commission, 1960
“Wilderness is a necessity … They will see what I meant in time. There must be places for human beings to satisfy their souls. Food and drink is not all. There is the spiritual. In some it is only a germ, of course, but the germ will grow.” — John Muir (American naturalist and co-founder of the Sierra Club)
“These are islands in time — with nothing to date them on the calendar of mankind. In these areas it is as though a person were looking backward into the ages and forward untold years. Here are bits of eternity, which have a preciousness beyond all accounting.” — Harvey Broome (Co-founder of The Wilderness Society)
“To me, a wilderness is where the flow of wildness is essentially uninterrupted by technology; without wilderness the world is a cage.” — David Brower (American environmentalist and mountaineer, founder of the Sierra Club)
“The wilderness that has come to us from the eternity of the past we have the boldness to project into the eternity of the future.” — Howard Zahniser (Author of the Wilderness Act), from The Need for Wilderness Areas
“We are part of the wilderness of the universe. Some of us think we see this so clearly that for ourselves, for our childres, our continuing posterity, and our fellow men we covet with a consuming intensity the fullness of human development that keeps its contact with wildness.” — Howard Zahniser (Author of the Wilderness Act)
“Many of our greatest American thinkers, men of the caliber of Thomas Jefferson, Henry Thoreau, Mark Twain, William James, and John Muir, have found the forest and effective stimulus to original thought.” — Bob Marshall (Co-founder of the Wilderness Society)
“What we are doing to the forests of the world is but a mirror reflection of what we are doing to ourselves and to one another.” — Mahatma Gandhi
Destroying rainforest for economic gain is like burning a Renaissance painting to cook a meal.”– Edward O. Wilson (an American biologist, researcher, theorist, naturalist and author)
“I hope the United States of America is not so rich that she can afford to let these wildernesses pass by, or so poor she cannot afford to keep them.” — Margaret (Mardy) Murie (Known as “Grandmother of the Conservation Movement,” wife of Olaus Murie)
“If we kill off the wild, then we are killing a part of our souls.”– Jane Goodall (International advocate for primate conservation)
“Nature is not a place to visit. It is home.” ― Gary Snyder (American poet)
“Every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine trees, and he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it.– Henry David Thoreau (American author, poet, philosopher)
“To those devoid of imagination a blank place on the map is a useless waste; to others, the most valuable part.”– Aldo Leopold (American ecologist, forester, and environmentalist, considered to be father of American wildlife management)
“Every year, my brother (Chris Boyes), Pete (“the Nare”) Hugo, Giles (“Prince William”) Trevethick and I (Dr Steve Boyes) cross the Okavango Delta, top to bottom, on mokoros (dug-out canoes) to survey the distribution and abundance of wetland birds, advocate for World Heritage Status, and share this amazing wilderness with accompanying scientists, explorers and special guests. My wife, Dr Kirsten Wimberger, joined us for the first time this year. No one will forget what happened on the 2012 expedition…”
In 2013, we are embarking on the Okavango River Expedition. This will be a 1,750km odyssey down the Okavango River from the source near Huambo (Angola) all the way down the catchment, across the Caprivi Strip (Namibia), and into Botswana to cross the Okavango Delta via one of our planet’s last untouched wilderness areas. Our objective is to support the Okavango World Heritage Project and achieve UNESCO World Heritage Status for the Okavango Delta and the entire catchment. See: http://www.okavangofilm.com/
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