BioGems: Saving Endangered Wild Places

The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) has set up a special website (www.savebiogems.org) to enable you to take fast and effective action in defense of our planet's most endangered wild places. The BioGems initiative is aimed at saving wildlands of exceptional natural values. They have selected these BioGems not only for their ecological importance and their imminent plight, but also because well-coordinated web activism by people like you can make a very big difference in saving them
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A BioGem may represent the last vestige of a vanishing ecosystem, like the temperate rainforest of the Tongass National Forest, or serve as a crucial refuge for endangered wildlife, like Belize's Macal River Valley. A BioGem may function as a critical link in the chain of life, like Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, where bears, wolves and caribou breed. Or it may offer the sole remaining recourse to wilderness for the people of a densely populated urban area, like the Great North Woods of the northeastern United States. Some BioGems, like Canada's Great Bear Rainforest or Utah's Redrock Wilderness, have little or no protection at all. Others, like Greater Yellowstone in the United States and the Maya Biosphere Reserve in Guatemala, have high-level national or international protection. Yet all of these BioGems are facing—or are already suffering from—commercial exploitation that threatens their natural integrity and wildlife populations.

One key factor in the ongoing destruction of even the most famous natural treasures is the lack of public awareness of their plight. Nothing can achieve swift and momentous change as effectively as an energized public. You can help by pressuring multinational corporations to abandon ecologically destructive projects and pushing governments to act on behalf of people and nature. Working together we can save these last wild places, both for their own sake and for our sake. (If you want proof, read about the NRDC victory in Mexico's Laguna San Ignacio, the Pacific gray whale's last pristine breeding ground.) So please take a few minutes to explore—and help save—some of the world's last BioGems.

For more information about BioGems visit their web site at http://www.savebiogems.org/. For more information about the Natural Resources Defense Council visit their site at http://www.nrdc.org/