Saturday, February 03, 2007
1:33 pm
*taken from Reader's Digest, january 2007 edition*
WONDERLESS WORLD:
see these places before they fall off the face of the earth.
(as selected by Wish magazine)
1. Kauai's North Shore, Hawaii
high-rise buildings are encroaching on this previously unspoilt coastline.
2. The Maldives, Indian Ocean
global warming may drown 1190 beautiful islands that sit just one metre above sea level.
3. Mt Kilimanjaro, Tanzania
just 20 per cent of the imposing peak's original glaciers remain, due to rising temperatures.
no new snow is accumulating on the top.
4. Highlands, Iceland
untouched highland landscapes, from windswept rocky meadows to deep, blood-red canyons, are being drowned by Europe's biggest dam project.
5. The Three Gorges, China
a great wall of water will soon flood China's grandest canyons as the world's largest hydropower station and dam is built.
6. Bioluminescent Bays, Puerto Rico
sediment from coastal construction and diesel fuels from tour boats threaten to extinguish this stunning night-time glow.
all these just somehow touch that geography student deep down inside me, untouched for three years since graduating from secondary school.
i could still remember how psyched my geography teacher would be whenever she talked about all the different places and geological wonders.
and really, it isn't difficult to understand why, because although we only had the chance to see those places from books and documentary tv channels, it was already enough to stun us with their mere majestic beauty.
it was mind-boggling, trying to comprehend how these places could actually be formed just like that over near-countless billions of years, and now they will all be destroyed just like that in a heartbeat, possibly forever.
is it really justifiably, that we can exchange these marvels with our techonological advances?
is it even a remotely equal trade-off?