The Alfred Russel Wallace Website

Higher Considerations: An expedition to revisit key Wallace collecting sites in the Malay Archipelago

If this [habitat conservation] is not done, future ages will certainly look back upon us as a people so immersed in the pursuit of wealth as to be blind to higher considerations. They will charge us with having culpably allowed the destruction of some of those records of Creation which we had it in our power to preserve; and while professing to regard every living thing as the direct handiwork and best evidence of a Creator, yet, with a strange inconsistency, seeing many of them perish irrecoverably from the face of the earth, uncared for and unknown.

ARW (1863), ‘Physical Geography of the Malay Archipelago’ Journal of the Royal Geographical Society, 33: 217-234.

The Australian Geographical Society has part-funded a 2008 expedition to revisit key Wallace collecting sites in the Malay Archipelago. The aims of the expedition are simple: i) to understand the ongoing environmental change taking place at each site; ii) comment on the conservation status of flagship ‘Wallace species’ in the region; and iii) find out how Wallace is being remembered by communities at each key collecting site.

This blog will contain entries following each visit to a Wallace site by the expedition team. Jeff can be contacted at j.neilson@usyd.edu.au