Wild South Africa - Hardcover

Mountain, Alan G.; Hes, Lex

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0262133474 ISBN 13: 9780262133470

Publisher: Mit Pr, 1998

with photographs by Lex Hes
South Africa is a land of hauntingly beautiful and diverse landscapes. Its wild places encompass rugged mountain ranges, sweeping sand beaches, indigenous coastal forest, and sun-blistered arid plains, with each environment supporting its own distinctive plant and animal life.

The beauty and diversity of South Africa's unspoiled and untamed places are celebrated in this latest addition to the Wild Places of the World series. South Africa's topography is characterized by a great interior plateau fringed on three sides by an irregular chain of mountains and hills that descend to a narrow coastal strip. The chapters focus on each ecological region in turn, from the Maputaland, a wetland area of great natural diversity, to the mountains of the Cape and Natal, the desert lands of the Karoo and the Kalahari, the coastal zone, the highveld grasslands, and the bushveld. The main focus is on wilderness areas and national parks, each chosen for its wild, unspoiled character, and the book emphasizes the need to preserve the country's natural heritage in a time of increasing demands for human development.

Wild South Africa contains 350 stunning full-color photographs that illustrate all aspects of Nature's cycles in each region. The book features the uniqueness of each region's fauna, flora, and geography, from tiny insects, birds, and larger mammals to fruits, flowers, and sweeping landscapes.

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Review:

South Africa can be divided into three major geographic regions: a nearly mile-high interior plateau, a series of tall mountain chains encircling it, and coastal plains and marshes that in turn ring the mountains. In these three regions exist very different biogeographic features, among them deserts, upland forests, grasslands, inland seas, and broad rivers. The South African team of writer Alan Mountain and photographer Lex Hes capture some of the beauty of their homeland in this oversize, heavily illustrated book, which treats these biogeographic features in turn; they also provide ample notes on the region's highly specialized flora and fauna, from sugarbirds to cheetahs to towering succulents. (Wary readers will be interested to know, for instance, that South Africa contains some 130 species of snakes--of which, the authors helpfully note, only 14 have been known to cause death in humans.) Hes and Mountain are especially attentive to conservation issues, which are becoming ever more pressing in South Africa, owing to development and population growth. They note, for example, that where large tracts of forest used to exist along the coastal plains, only a section of about 125 miles of forested land now stands on the southern Cape, the last of the indigenous hardwoods. And they note that any meaningful conservation measures will depend on the active involvement and good will of the rural poor, whose numbers are rapidly growing. --Gregory McNamee

About the Author:

Alan G. Mountain has long been involved in issues of rural community development and nature conservation. The former director of the Nature Foundation in South Africa, he is the author of Paradise Under Pressure, which explores the natural history, ecology, and development of Maputaland. Lex Hes is a renowned South African wildlife photographer and natural history guide. He is the author of The Leopards of Londolozi.

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