Micronesia: Island Wilderness

by Kenneth Brower

photographs and an introduction by

Robert Wenkam

Preparatory statements by

David R. Brower and Raymond F. Dasmann

FRIENDS of the EARTH  SAN FRANCISCO, NEW YORK, LONDON, PARIS

Copyright all countries of the International Copyright Union by Friends of the Earth. All rights reserved.

A CONTINUUM BOOK / THE SEABURY PRESS
NEW YORK

 

from the foreword . . .

. . .One omen lies in a remark now well known to all literate micronesians. When their need to own their own land was being urged by then Secretary of the Interior Walter Hickel, Henry Kissinger replied: "There are only 90,000 people out there. Who gives a damn?"
     There are now 110,000 Micronesians who do, and we hope there will be millions of other people elsewhere. It is hard to tell from someone else's book just what Dr. Kissinger had in mind. Perhaps he alluded to the attitude shared by generals and admirals that the islands are strategic and the people aren't. Certainly no one who remembers the changing of the island guard in World War II will deny how strategic some of those islands were in the battle era, so technologically long ago.
     Just as certainly, there are now better games that may here be played, and more Thoreauvian, hopeful attitudes to be brought to bear. One of the most hopeful is that there be a revised strategy for preserving what makes life possible on a small planet. The national-park idea is one of strategy, and Friends of the Earth has proposed in several earlier books in this series that the idea evolve to include people who have lived long in the equilibrium with the earth, who have treated it as if it were all an Earth National Park. . . .

David R. Brower  President,
Friends of the Earth International

San Francisco
May 9, 1975