Most of us know what it’s like to find a baffling gap between what appears on a map and what the map is supposed to portray. This can be downright scary when our safety depends on the map’s accuracy. But the recent experience of Chinese ecologists is scary at another order of magnitude, and it dramatically illustrates the accelerating degradation of our global ecosystems. “We set out to check the status of the 50,000 rivers the maps showed us in our country,” Prof Jungou Liu of Beijing told the World Conference of the Society for Ecological Restoration in Manchester recently. “We found that 28,000 of them were missing altogether.” Some had silted up, some had dried out completely, all...
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