The land the world forgets

The ?lost World? unearthed recently in West Papua is as remarkable as it is poignant.

The ‘lost World’ unearthed recently in West Papua is as remarkable as it is poignant. An international team of scientists reportedly stumbled on to the 300,000-hectare treasure house of biodiversity in the Foja Mountains of the Indonesian province during an expedition late last year. Teeming with new species of exotic giant flowers and rare wildlife that show no fear of humans, this paradise seems to owe its existence to the fortuitous coincidence of being in a unique geological blind spot, where no humans ever lived.

HT Image

This is evident from some of the animals the scientists have found, like the long-beaked echidnas — a primitive egg-laying mammal — that have long been hunted into extinction elsewhere. These last niches of mega flora and fauna remind us that if they remain intact it’s only because they have escaped the impact of human activities. We pay an appallingly high price every time an axe is wantonly wielded or a forest razed, wiping such pristine islands of biodiversity off the face of Earth. It is sad to think that beyond mammals, birds and plants, we probably don’t even know how many species of plants and animals there are on the planet, forget how many are disappearing. Even with species that we do know about, little is understood about their distribution, ecology or population size. It is particularly unfortunate that our knowledge is most limited for geographic areas where the biodiversity is richest: principally in the tropics.