Three Rivers: The Yukon's Great Boreal Wilderness

Finalist for 2006 BC Book Prize - Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize

Three Rivers: The Yukon's Great Boreal Wilderness is a gorgeous coffee-table book about a wilderness area so vast and so crucial to planetary survival it defies comprehension. Previously unknown to the outside world, the Yukon's Three Rivers watershed is emerging as an environmental issue of global importance--a key piece of the boreal region.
The boreal forest is like a green banner draped around the northern hemisphere. It is the world's largest expanse of intact forest, covering nearly 11 percent of our planet's surface. Every breath we take is in part a gift from this immense, earth-circling ecosystem.
Now the renewed Mackenzie Valley pipeline proposal, the Alaska Pipeline and escalating energy and mineral exploration in the north all threaten this last world-scale refuge of natural values--and conservationists around the world are mobilizing to defend it. Three Rivers focuses on one of the most strategic undisturbed regions left in the world, an oceanic wilderness that is under threat from gas and mining development.
Packed with awe-inspiring photography, art and writings by such notables as Courtney Milne, Margaret Atwood and John Ralston Saul, this sumptuous volume offers an unforgettable tour of a natural wonderland so rich in grizzly bears, wolves, caribou, peregrine falcons and wildflowers most will have difficulty believing such a place still exists. Three Rivers is a prize to be cherished by anyone who appreciates great photography, fine writing and untrammelled nature, and a must-have for anyone who takes an interest in the fate of our beleaguered but still awe-inspiring planet.

Juri Peepre coordinated the Three Rivers project and was Yukon Executive Director of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society until 2004. Peepre led the Yukon's Endangered Spaces campaign, part of a national conservation effort. He has contributed numerous essays and photographs to books on the Yukon environment, including Yukon Wild, and was a contributing author to Parks and Protected Areas in Canada, Protecting Canada's Endangered Spaces and Unimpaired for Future Generations: Conserving Ecological Integrity with Canada's National Parks. He lives in Whitehorse, Yukon.

Art and writings by such notables as Courtney Milne, Margaret Atwood and John Ralston Saul, Sarah Locke et al.