Book review by Shambhala Sun

Shambhala Sun

This beautiful coffee table book is a visual and textual homage to the preservation of the natural world and to the individuals, worldwide, who protect it. Husband and wife team Michael Tobias and Jane Gray Morrison traveled the world to document twenty-four havens for non-human life forms, from the Alertis bear refuge near Utrecht in the Netherlands to Gene Baur’s farm animal sanctuary in Upstate New York; from Howard Buffet’s cheetah reserve near Johannesburg in South Africa to the Kingdom of Bhutan, where 60 percent of the country is protected as inviolable primeval forest. Tobias and Morrison suggest that there is a “sanctuary movement” afoot, a spontaneous worldwide happening that will “rectify ongoing anthropogenic (human-induced) assaults on biodiversity; and halt the global epidemic of cruelty to animals.” This book gives us some evidence for hope.