Gadling

Hey, a quick heads up for y’all. If you haven’t already
taken a peek at Tim Leffel’s new online travel magazine Perceptive
Travel, you should do so. The March/April
issue is now online, and chock full of articles about travel to all parts of the globe, music and book reviews, as
well as some insightful commentary in the pieces themselves.

Let me call out one article, in particular that I
enjoyed. This piece on the restoration of coral reefs by writer/vagabond/photographer Jeff Greenwald is very
interesting. Greenwald examines the broader question of how to preserve the global reef system in the context of
efforts to protect a reef in Indonesia. The crux of the issue, it seems, is providing management responsibilities to
the local population (i.e. villagers, fishermen, and dive operators) who, one might argue, has a deeper vested interest
in preserving the area’s ecology.

I was interested to learn from Greenwald’s piece that all the
world’s reefs put together would only cover an area half the size of France. For some reason, I would have guesses it
was much larger than that. I thought the Great Barrier Reef alone might have been near that large. Almost looks like it
on a map. The big issue, of course, is that coral reefs are being decimated at an alarming rate. Currently, according to
Greenwald, 70% of them are so threatened that they will cease to be viable within 50 years. That’s very bad news
for divers and the local population as a whole…not to mention scientists and, well, all of us who know that
these reefs are “rainforests of the ocean” that hold a stunning biodiversity of life forms worthy not only
of study and protection, but admiration.

There are some other fine articles at the site as well. And
we’ll go back to Perceptive Travel in the future. So far
it’s creator, Tim Leffel, has done a really fine job with it.