Book Review

This book is an extensively rewritten version of Odum's textbook Ecology (Saunders College Publishing, 1963, 1975) for beginning students. Chapters have been added to provide specialists from other fields with a review of the major principles of ecology as they relate to today's environmental problems. An attempt has been made to separate basic principles from opinions by putting the latter in text 'boxes'. Important recent propositions such as Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis and the 'selective economic growth' approach of the World Commission on Environment and Development ('Our Common Future') are included. The book is a very readable and useful attempt to illustrate the dependence of human society on the environment, appropriately called 'life-support systems', and the limits to economic growth implied by this dependence. The treatment of biological issues is excellent, except for a minor flaw where the subject of evolution is concerned. Alternatives to Gould's far from universally accepted 'punctuated equilibrium' theory should have been presented, and Dawkins' work on the subject might have been usefully quoted. The book has, however, two important shortcomings which reduce its usefulness in particular to students of tropical biology. First, it is strongly oriented towards the situation in North America and the developed countries in general. Thus, its treatment of agriculture as being uniformly high-input and wasteful of energy fails to account for the fact that many agro-ecosystems in the tropics are low-input and do not involve the use of fossil energy. The inclusion of Conway's pioneering work on agro-ecosystems analysis in the tropics could have provided a more balanced treatment of the world's agriculture. Second, much of the book's social science content if one can call it that concerning developing countries is contentious to say the least. Again, the developed country bias is probably to blame for errors such as failing to distinguish between open access and restricted access common property, which gives rise to blanket statements on management of the commons which are pertinently untrue. Much of Odum's treatment of the 'commons' issue seems to be based on Hardin's 'Tragedy of the Commons', an article based on data which have been repeatedly discredited since it appeared in the late 1960s. The treatment of the issue of population growth is very simplistic, and shows a profound ignorance of both older (e.g. Boserup) and more recent publications on the subject. Many countries in Africa face severe problems due to regional or even national underpopulation, and the notion of general overpopulation of the African continent is a nonsensical, though oft repeated dictum. This criticism apart, Ecology and our endangered life-support systems provides a good alternative, especially for students of non-biological disciplines, to books such as Blackwell's Ecology by Begon, Harper and Townsend, which concentrate exclusively on biological aspects.