Description:
If you put two scientists who work in the same discipline in a room and ask them to observe the same phenomenon, chances are you'll wind up with two very different interpretations of what they've seen. While science sometimes seems to thrive on disagreement, the distinguished contributors to Heather Newbold's anthology come together on one major point: that the global biosphere is by no means assured of a happy future, especially if current trends of human population growth and resource exploitation continue. "At this pivotal point in history," Newbold writes, "consequential decisions about our collective fate need to take account of the circumstances that enable life to exist--and the requisite conditions for its continued existence." In her pages, eminent biologists and conservationists such as Paul Ehrlich, James Lovelock, Ruth Patrick, Peter Raven, and Thomas Lovejoy consider some of those circumstances. Recalling his graduate studies in entomology, Ehrlich writes of seemingly innumerable, once-common butterfly populations that have all but disappeared in their former ranges, a disappearance that speaks volumes about the worldwide destruction of habitat in just a few decades. Similarly, Canadian scientist David Suzuki remembers his youth, when the bodies of short-lived mayflies hatched from Lake Erie "piled up four feet high on the beach"; now, because the lake has been so badly polluted with pesticides and detergents, those mayflies hatch there no more. And marine biologist Elliott Norse observes how his studies have changed in a time when "national governments spend $125 billion every year to catch $70 billion worth of rapidly declining fish," a strange economy that suggests that humans, as Norse says, are now eating what they used to use for bait--a situation that likely cannot continue much longer. Sobering and thought-provoking, Newbold's book finds these students of life on earth in a dark mood, and for abundantly good reasons. --Gregory McNamee
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