environment and civil strife

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Conservation Biology, Pages 1213–1220Volume 14, No. 4, August 2000

A Tool for Change

Communication Skills for Con-servation Professionals.

Jacobson,S. K. 1999. Island Press, Washington,D.C. 340 pp. $27.50. ISBN 1–55963–509–6.

How many times have you encoun-tered a staff member from a publicagency muddling through a publicmeeting or press interview or pain-fully listened to a poorly presentedscientific explanation aimed at con-vincing the public they should be-have in a certain way to benefit theenvironment? Too often conserva-tion efforts are strangled by the lackof communication skills of the mes-senger. An education in the fields ofconservation biology, environmentalmanagement, and natural resourcesis often rich in scientific theory, maybesocial theory, and even technicalskills, but often it does not providethe basic tools needed for getting amessage across, effectively assess-ing public need, or communicatingwith constituents and supervisors.Susan Jacobsen tries to fill that voidwith

Communication Skills for Con-servation Professionals.

The book is a step-by-step lessonin successful communication. It istargeted to students, scientists, man-agers, professionals, and activistsin conservation and environmentalfields. It reads as a how-to guide tocommunicating effectively with thelarger world. Topics discussed in-clude how to talk to the press, de-velop a public relations campaign,and develop educational and inter-pretational materials and programs.Jacobson provides specific instruc-tions, with case studies and exam-ples in each chapter to illustratethe instructions provided. The sevenchapters take the reader from basiccommunication theory and process

through evaluation and assessmentof the communication task. Chapter1 covers basic communication the-ory, including how to influence atti-tudes and behaviors, with examplesfrom successful campaigns such asthe U.S. Forest Service’s Smoky theBear fire prevention program com-pared with less successful and morerecent efforts to garner public sup-port for prescriptive burning. Chap-ter 2 describes setting a researchagenda for communication projectsand discusses research in commu-nication, including audience iden-tification, survey techniques, groupmeetings, and content review andanalysis. This chapter provides step-by-step guidelines on how to deter-mine the needs and desires of theaudience with whom one is trying tocommunicate. Chapter 3 providesplanning and programmatic avenuesfor creating a public communicationplan to “move” people, starting withdeveloping or assessing a missionstatement and program objectivesand ending with implementation andevaluation. In chapter 4, Jacobsenexpains how mass media can fit intoa campaign, examining the benefitsand risks. She provides tips for pre-senting information in press releases,interviews, news conferences, pub-lic service announcements, letters toeditors, and the World Wide Web.

Chapters 5 and 6 focus on gettingone’s message across in terms of in-terpretation and education. Thesechapters will be of great use to parkpersonnel, grassroots organizations,and conservation professional in-volved with providing public out-reach. Chapter 6 addresses environ-mental education efforts with basicinstructions for targeting specific au-diences, and it provides myriad ex-amples of environmental education

programs in a number of venues,from the Canadian Wildlife Service’ssuccessful program to educate localresidents on their impact on declin-ing seabird populations to the GlobalRivers Environmental Education Net-work (GREEN), an international en-vironmental education program thatbegan in a Michigan high school in1984. The last chapter deals withevaluating the success of a programto provide confirmation of objec-tives achieved or to initiate improve-ments specifically geared to address-ing confusion, misinterpretation, orpoor management.

Throughout the book, Jacobsenprovides many case studies and ex-amples to illustrate the main points.Examples are mainly from the UnitedStates, with a few international cases,and many of the examples come fromthe state of Florida, the author’s ap-parent area of expertise. The authoralso provides comparative charts andtables for evaluating the communica-tion strategies presented.

The book is well written, as onemight expect from a text on commu-nication. It provides theoretical strat-egies and explicit technical informa-tion to guide the reader. The authordraws from her own experience aswell as from research in the fields ofcommunication, public relations, be-havioral science, environmental edu-cation, environmental management,wildlife biology, restoration ecology,and conservation biology. Few bookson the market explicitly target com-munication for conservation profes-sionals. By providing examples ofgreat relevance to students, profes-sionals, and activists in the arena ofconservation and environmental stud-ies, Jacobsen offers a complete guidefor people at all levels. Offering acourse using this book would be of

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Book Reviews

Conservation BiologyVolume 14, No. 4, August 2000

great benefit to students in programsin conservation biology and environ-mental studies. It could also be usedas a reference for those planningconservation or environmental out-reach programs or educational en-deavors. Effective communication isvital to creating change.

Communi-cation Skills for Conservation Pro-fessionals

is a tool to make changehappen.

Barbara A. Holzman

Environmental Studies Program, San FranciscoState University, San Francisco, CA 94132, U.S.A.,email [email protected]

One for Models, and Modelsfor All

An Illustrated Guide to Theoreti-cal Ecology.

Case, T. J. 2000. Ox-ford University Press, Oxford, UnitedKingdom. 449 pp. $49.95. ISBN 0–19–508512–4.

Ecology is in a period of transition.Long accustomed to the value of thetwo tools of observation and experi-mentation, ecologists are beginningto recognize that these methods havesome serious limitations in practice.It is clear that observation is impor-tant to ecology, but it is rarely suffi-cient for rejecting hypotheses. It isless obvious that ecological experi-ments have equally serious flaws, inthat some problems have too longa time scale or too great a naturalcomplexity to attack experimentally.Their precision is sometimes accom-plished by simplification that callsthe domain of application of the re-search into question.

Mathematical models provide onesuitable alternative to solving thisproblem. Of course, a model by it-self has limited value with thoroughtesting, but it may represent the onlyfeasible solution to generating initialtests of hypotheses when empiricalexperiments are costly or even im-possible. Yet even with this attrac-tive potential future contribution,

modeling remains a method poorlyappreciated and regarded with greatsuspicion by many ecologists. Eventhough tools such as population via-bility analysis, which is based in pop-ulation modeling, are commonplacein conservation ecology, few havemastered them sufficiently to usethem confidently in research.

An Illustrated Guide to Theoreti-cal Ecology

is the latest contributionto changing this situation. The subjectof ecological modeling has tradition-ally been covered by mathematiciansor mathematical ecologists address-ing a more quantitatively sophisti-cated audience. Few volumes havebeen written to inform biologistswithout such mathematical training,the notable exceptions being

Star-field and Bleloch (1996, BuildingModels for Ecology and Conserva-tion

, MacMillan, since transferred toBurgess Publications) and

Hilbornand Mangel (1997, The EcologicalDetective

, Princeton University Press).

An Illustrated Guide to Theoreti-cal Ecology

is more mathematicalthan the former and more accessibleto the nonmathematician than thelatter. This new volume is thereforesuitable for the student or profes-sional who wishes to increase his orher skills in understanding and build-ing models. For example, chapters 1and 2 cover exponential populationgrowth. Chapter 1 combines the stan-dard analytical treatment of exponen-tial growth with a larger-than-usualsection devoted to interpretation ofmathematical results. From this chap-ter a student can gain a better ap-preciation of the consequences ofexponential growth and can still re-late these results to the mathemati-cal structure producing them. I canthink of no better place where anyreader, ranging from the mathemati-cally unsophisticated to the sophisti-cated, can gain fundamental insightin exchange for a reasonable invest-ment in time and effort. Chapter 2builds on the exponential growthmodel with a thorough discussion ofspatial and temporal variation in birthand death rates. This is not really

new—it is one of the few choicesavailable for sensitivity testing of sucha simple model—but is far more ex-pansive and sophisticated in its treat-ment. Case’s declared intention ofmaking the text palatable to a vari-ety of readers is met in this chapterby “truth in advertising.” Mathemati-cally more difficult sections are la-beled as “advanced” or “requiringcalculus.” The same combination ofinsight into equation behavior andmathematical detail is also present inthis chapter.

In the book’s title,

theoretical ecol-ogy

is used instead of the seeminglymore appropriate

mathematical ecol-ogy

. In retrospect, this was an ap-propriate choice because it conveysthe intention of the author more ac-curately. Although it is true that the-oretical development frequently isaligned closely with progress in math-ematical models, the distinguishinghallmark of this book is that it genu-inely attempts to show that, althoughtheory may arise from mathematics,it is not restricted to the mathemati-cally inclined.

The organization of

An IllustratedGuide to Theoretical Ecology

is fairlystraightforward. Case proceeds withsimple population dynamics. Chapter6, on population regulation, followschapter 2 in combining quantitativeecology with theory, particularly inthe use of statistical analysis to de-tect density dependence in popu-lation dynamics and random fluc-tuations from autocorrelated cyclicfluctuations. Chapter 6 was the mostfascinating in the first section, al-though I concede that my prefer-ence might be nothing more than amatter of background and taste. Oth-ers might find the less-conventionalchapters on evolution, chapters 7–9,more interesting. The second sec-tion, chapters 10–16, cover popula-tion interactions and community dy-namics. Readers of this journal mightbe particularly attracted to chapter16, which covers island colonizationand metapopulation dynamics as wellas I can remember anywhere. Six ap-pendices, dealing with mathematical

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details and techniques, complete thevolume.

Each chapter contains a set of prob-lems that are both conceptual andmathematical. Generally the solu-tions to these will be fairly evident,although no keys are provided. Nor-mally, keys will be found in a teacher’sguide, something not mentioned inthe book’s introduction. If a teacher’sguide is not available, this is a weak-ness that should be remedied, per-haps with a key at the back of thetext for the reader who is using thetext outside the classroom. Other-wise, these exercises provide noth-ing to verify the reader’s progresswhen using the text as a self-guidedtutorial. Case also maintains a website at www.nceas.ucsd.ed/BookCase,where students can refer to support-ing simulation models, mostly devel-oped with the simulation languageSTELLA. These models link the textto practice in building models.

My reservation about the lack ofsolutions to the problems and ques-tions does raise an issue that mightbe important to some readers.

An Il-lustrated Guide to Theoretical Ecol-ogy

is a comprehensive text that var-ies in sophistication from chapter tochapter. In a classroom situation, un-der the direction of a capable teacher,this text will be useful for ecologicalmodeling and exposition of theory—perhaps the best for this purpose Ihave seen in over 20 years. The prob-lem lies with potential readers whowish to use the book on their own.If the reader has the freedom tochoose among topics and is willingif necessary to settle for improvedunderstanding of a given topic, thiswill be a satisfactory and useful vol-ume. The major weakness is that theprocess of actually building a modelis not as well covered in this vol-ume. In this area, the Starfield andBleloch volume or its later version(Starfield et al. 1990,

How to Model It

,McGraw-Hill) remain better choices.The tutorial associated with STELLAsoftware would be particularly use-ful for readers wishing to use themodels in the web site, more so than

simply using the run-only STELLAavailable on-line to support runningthose models.

On balance,

An Illustrated Guideto Theoretical Ecology

is a useful vol-ume. Case has devoted great care toproviding insightful explanations,and Teachers of ecological modelingwill find this a satisfactory textbookresource. Students and profession-als who acquire this volume will findit encyclopedic in its scope and cov-erage and will find it useful for its in-sights into how mathematics cancontribute to problem solving. Mostimportant, conservation ecologistsstruggling with serious problems withinsufficient data and pressing timeconstraints may be made more re-ceptive to the idea that models reallydo offer an alternative means to solv-ing problems. If this volume contrib-utes nothing more than this, it willhave been a laudable and worth-while effort.

Ted Foin

Department of Agronomy and Range Science,University of California, Davis, CA 95616, U.S.A.,email [email protected]

Environment and Civil Strife

Environment, Scarcity, and Vio-lence.

Homer-Dixon, T. F. 1999.Princeton University, Princeton, NewJersey. 253 pp. $27.95. ISBN 0–691–02794–3.

Scarcities of renewable natural re-sources, whether inherent due toecological constraints or created bysociopolitical factors, are a principalcause of sectarian violence and eth-nic conflict in modern human societ-ies. Environmental degradation hascrossed a threshold of irreversibilityin many parts of the world, and itmay now function as a permanent,independent cause of civil strife andethnic violence in developing coun-tries. These are the conclusions ofan important new book by ThomasHomer-Dixon, which summarizes andsynthesizes the findings of a decade-

long, international program of re-search into the effects of scarcities ofnatural resources on social conflictsand civil strife in developing coun-tries. Conservation biologists takenote: Homer-Dixon’s findings indicatethat the geopolitical effects of envi-ronmental problems driving the cur-rent biodiversity crisis may be evenworse than those predicted by theardent pessimists among our ranks.

The 16 case studies cited by theauthor, which involved more than100 investigators from 15 countries,indicate that this phenomenon af-fects hundreds of millions of peoplein Asia, Latin America, Africa, andthe Caribbean. These case studies,along with findings of collateral re-search programs based in Norwayand Switzerland, demonstrate thatscarcity of renewable natural re-sources may not be subordinate topolitical, economic, or social factorsas a principal cause of civil strife andviolence in developing countries.

The author’s key conclusions aretwo. First, scarcities of renewablenatural resources (e.g., cropland, for-est products, water, pasturage, fish-eries stocks) function as an impor-tant cause of civil strife and socialviolence in modern societies. Sec-ond, scarcities may be created by in-herent ecological factors such as cli-mate and soils, or by sociopoliticaland economic forces such as the in-equitable distribution of resourcesamong different social or ethnicgroups within societies. Resourcescarcities do not function indepen-dently of societal factors as a causeof violent civil strife but instead in-teract closely with social, political,and economic factors that are oftenunique to a particular society or situ-ation. Irreversible ecological damageresulting from the human degrada-tion of landscapes has the potentialto become a permanent source ofsocial conflict in certain societies,even when the political and eco-nomic factors that originally causedsuch degradation have been resolved.

Homer-Dixon’s analysis is keyed tothe concepts of “resource capture”

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Book Reviews


and “ecological marginalization”—structural imbalances in resource dis-tribution within modern societies thatfrequently result in mass displace-ments of economically disenfranchisedrural populations into marginally pro-ductive and ecologically sensitive ar-eas. The resulting concentrations ofhuman populations in areas of shal-low soils and hilly terrains in tropicalrainforest and dry woodland biomesmay have devastating consequencesfor regional landscapes. Homer-Dixonpoints out that although scarcity ofrenewable natural resources frequentlyappears to be a major cause of eth-nic violence and guerrilla insurgen-cies within countries, it is not cur-rently a major factor in internationalconflicts.

In chapter 6 the author presentshis thesis that cultures differ in theirinherent resilience to the effects ofresource limitations according to theavailability (or lack thereof) of an en-abling societal milieu for develop-ing technological fixes that can alle-viate natural or induced constraintson resource availability—what Homer-Dixon terms the “ingenuity” factor.Although the concept has some heu-ristic value, the term as used in thisbook strays uncomfortably close towhat biologists could characterize asthemes of social Darwinism and groupselectionism. I believe that many ifnot most of the stipulated societaland economic constraints on inge-nuity may be more tightly linked tomodern political milieus than to “tra-ditional” cultural mores. The precisedifferentiation of political and cul-tural factors in national economies isbecoming increasingly difficult, how-ever, given the ongoing effects ofglobalization of trade and capitalinvestment and homogenization ofmodern urban cultures.

The interrelationships of urbangrowth, rural poverty, and violentcivil strife are discussed at length inchapter 7. The role of resource scar-city per se as a driving factor of rapidurbanization in developing countriesmay be somewhat overemphasized,given the interaction of other potent

factors. Urban migration is a phe-nomenon of major significance toeven the most prosperous farmingcommunities of Europe and NorthAmerica, where the amenities andeconomic opportunities offered byurban life cast a pall over the exigen-cies of rural occupations such asranching, farming, logging, and min-ing. In other words: How are you go-ing to keep the children home onthe farm, once they’ve seen MTV?

Homer-Dixon’s analysis provideslittle comfort for conservationists andenvironmentalists concerned withthe escalating, deleterious effects ofhuman impacts on global ecosys-tems. Social and political scientistsmay find this work a stimulating andprovocative look at the complexityand importance of interactions be-tween human societies, their geo-physical environment, and their po-litical milieu. Devout technophiles,neoclassical economists, and otherspossessed of an unbounded faith inthe infinite capacity of human inge-nuity to cope with environmentalconstraints on resource availabilitywill undoubtedly give short shriftto the author’s conclusions. Suchmarket-obsessed economic optimistswould do well to recall that, in hu-man societies as well as stock ex-changes, past performance providesno guarantee of future gains.

Most chapters would serve as ex-cellent, stand-alone supplementalreadings for undergraduate or gradu-ate courses in human ecology, con-servation biology, resource econom-ics, and environmental science. Theterminology employed will be chal-lenging for biologists and students,because the functional definitions ofkey words and concepts often differgreatly from those associated withbiological or vernacular idioms. Theauthor is careful, however, to iden-tify explicitly and define novel or id-iosyncratic terminology when theseare first introduced into the text.Subsequent editions of this bookwould benefit greatly from the addi-tion of an extensive glossary and anexpanded and upgraded index.

University libraries should take ad-vantage of the relatively low price ofthe current hardcover edition to putit on their shelves as a reference vol-ume. The availability of a discountedpaperbound edition would greatlyfacilitate the dissemination of thisimportant volume to students, pro-fessionals, and libraries everywhere.

Joseph P. Dudley

U.S. Agency for International Development, Wash-ington, D.C., Institute of Arctic Biology, Univer-sity of Alaska, Fairbanks, AK 99775-7000, U.S.A.,email j.p.dudley@ worldnet.att.net

Simple Concepts, Elusive Clarity

Forest Fragmentation: Wildlifeand Management Implications.

Rochelle, J. A., L. A. Lehmann, and J.Wisniewski, editors. 1999. Brill Aca-demic Publishers, Leiden, The Neth-erlands. 301 pp. $95.00. ISBN 90–04–11388–6.

As a student of ecology in Wiscon-sin, I was introduced to the conceptof habitat fragmentation through re-productions of the gradual cutting offorests in Cadiz Township. John Cur-tis’s 1956 reconstruction of how theonce contiguous pre-European set-tlement forests of Green County,Wisconsin, had been gradually clearedand isolated between 1831 and 1950was the proverbial “picture worth athousand words.” It is one thing,however, to provide a superb illus-tration of the process and product offragmentation and quite another toelucidate the ecological processesthat result from and characterizefragmented habitat. That a landscapeis fragmented—so that habitats spa-tially separated from one another—can be conveyed quickly with a sin-gle map or air photo. A challengethat continues to face conservationbiologists is building a generalizableconceptual framework that can beapplied to predicting the effects offragmenting habitat. What, then, areconservation biologists to do with a

Book Reviews

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concept that is both simple and use-ful in the abstract, yet which oftenfails to lend clarity when applied toreal landscapes? This is the centralquestion that

Forest Fragmentation:Wildlife and Management Implica-tions

seeks to address.This 15-chapter volume stems from

a 1998 Portland, Oregon, confer-ence organized with the goal of pro-viding “a synthesis of the currentstate of knowledge related to frag-mentation in managed forests of thePacific Northwest.” The editors as-sembled regional authorities on hab-itat fragmentation in the westernUnited States and Canada with thefollowing objectives: (1) “to bringmore clarity to the terms describingphenomena at the forest level (phe-nomena such as fragmentation, con-nectivity, and edge effects)” and (2)“to collate and present what evi-dence could be found of the ex-pected outcomes of habitat fragmen-tation in western forests” (p. vii).

Only in the last 20 years has frag-mentation received widespread at-tention from ecologists. The result oftwo decades of research into frag-mentation (primarily in forested hab-itats) is a body of knowledge charac-terized by substantial taxonomic andgeographic biases. Moreover, thereappears to be a growing consensusthat habitat fragmentation, althougha useful conceptual tool, may havelimited value as a generalizable phe-nomenon. In the foreword of this ed-ited volume, Bunnell makes preciselythis point, defining the little-usedterm

panchreston

as “a proposed ex-planation intended to address a com-plex problem by trying to accountfor all possible contingencies buttypically proving to be too broadlyconceived and therefore oversimpli-fied to be of any practical use” (p.vii). The editors are left with the self-appointed task of nailing down whatforest fragmentation means in west-ern North America.

The language is largely jargon-freeand accompanied throughout by use-ful graphics (color and black andwhite). Chapters range from land-

scape design to vertebrate genetics.In the first chapter, Bunnell followsthe thread laid down in the fore-word with a discussion of why habi-tat fragmentation has defied easytranslation from concept to applica-tion; he then critically evaluates theusefulness of applying island bioge-ography theory to heterogeneouswestern forests. Additional chaptersreview past research on edge effectsand the effects of forest fragmenta-tion on avian nest predation ratesand on the distribution and composi-tion of bird communities in severalwestern forest types. Birds featureprominently in the book—four chap-ters are devoted to birds and birdstudies are heavily cited in severalothers—an unavoidable artifact ofan avian bias in the fragmentation lit-erature.

Resource management profession-als in agencies and universities willfind this book an accessible overviewof current thinking on forest frag-mentation in the western UnitedStates. It could also serve as a textfor upper-level or graduate seminarswith a regional focus on PacificNorthwest forests. Most chapters arestructured around reviews of the lit-erature, with some new analyses ofpublished data, although substantialnew data are presented in chaptersby Schmiegelow and Hannon, Mc-Garigal, and Bunnell et al. McCombconcludes with a valuable synthesisof the book and the 1998 conference.

One conclusion that emerges isthat much of the early work on habi-tat fragmentation occurred in placeswhere edges were crisp and habitatpatches could be defined clearly, suchas England and eastern North Amer-ica. Such studies translate poorly tomost forests in western North Amer-ica. Issues of natural landscape het-erogeneity, edge permeability, andthe relative importance of absolutehabitat loss versus fragmentationmake it difficult to identify wildlifedistribution patterns that are attrib-utable to fragmentation alone. Sev-eral chapters make the convincingargument that habitat fragmentation

should usually be viewed as less im-portant to most vertebrate popula-tions than simple loss of habitat. Atthe landscape level “. . . it is thesheer amount of habitat of [sic] aparticular species present in the land-scape that is the most significant as-sociate of animal abundance and onlysecondarily does the pattern influ-ence abundance” (p. 296). A relatedpoint made throughout the book isthat scientists and managers mustpay attention to scale when dealingwith fragmentation. Several of thebook’s authors (especially Fahrig)claim that, too often, results frompatch-level studies are presumed toapply equally well to landscapes.This point is well supported.

One weakness of the book is its fo-cus on individual abundance ratherthan on the potential effects of land-scape pattern on the demographiccharacteristics of populations, suchas productivity and mortality rates.To some degree, this reflects a lackof available data on how demo-graphic traits are influenced by land-scape pattern. Several recent studiesthat address the relationship be-tween vertebrate demography andlandscape pattern are not includedin the book, perhaps because theyhave come from eastern and centralNorth America. The book’s regionalfocus is its strength, however, andsuch efforts may prove to be themost useful way of bridging the cur-rent gap between the abstractionsand applications of fragmentationscience.

David J. Flaspohler

School of Forestry and Wood Products, MichiganTechnological University, Houghton, MI 49931,U.S.A., email [email protected]

Conservation Prophet

The Essential Aldo Leopold: Quo-tations and Commentaries.

Meine,C., and R. L. Knight, editors. 1999.The University of Wisconsin Press,

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Madison. 384 pp. $27.05. ISBN 0–299–16550–7.

For the Health of the Land: Pre-viously Unpublished Essays andOther Writings.

Leopold, A. E. T.Freyfogle and J. B. Callicott, editors.1999. Island Press, Washington, D.C.243 pp. $22.05. ISBN 1–55963–763–3.

Aldo Leopold was arguably the great-est conservationist of the twentiethcentury, equally key in developingconservation philosophy and fur-thering conservation on the ground.Reading these two new collectionsof his writings, it is obvious that 50years after his death Leopold has lostnone of his power to engage, in-spire, and provoke thought.

In

The Essential Aldo Leopold

, ed-itors Meine and Knight have assem-bled a rich collection of quotationsfrom Leopold’s published and un-published writings. These are ar-ranged in chronological order within21 different categories, allowing thereader to follow the evolution of Le-opold’s ideas about forestry, rangemanagement, economics, environ-mental history, ecological restora-tion, land esthetics, environmentaladvocacy, and more. Most readers ofthis journal are familiar with Le-opold’s change of heart regardingpredator control, recounted in

ASand County Almanac

, but it is fas-cinating to follow this change ingreater detail here. On other topicswe see no such dramatic about-face,but rather a gradual deepening of Le-opold’s thought. Wilderness, for ex-ample, earlier valued primarily as aplace for primitive recreation, cameto be valued in addition for its rolesas a baseline of land health, as thecrucible of future biological evolu-tion, and as an appropriate expres-sion of humility and respect for theland. The breadth of Leopold’s inter-ests and the depth of his thinkingwithin these varied areas are aston-ishing. Equally impressive is his open-mindedness—his willingness to trynew ideas and his frequent acknowl-edgment that he did not know theanswer to some pressing question.

Each of these sections is prefacedby a two- to six-page introduction bya leading conservationist, such asDavid Orr (education), Gary PaulNabhan (arts and sciences), Jack WardThomas (range ecology and manage-ment), and Wes Jackson (agriculture).Uniformly intelligent and frequentlyeloquent, these short essays are them-selves worth the price of the book.Gary Meffe, introducing the sectionon “Biodiversity and ConservationBiology,” emphasizes Leopold’s pre-science. Consider one short quota-tion (p. 133):

There is a puzzling absence of[ruffed] grouse from many is-lands in the Great Lakes whichare said [to] have the appear-ance of being excellent range.. . . It would appear that thesmaller the island and the fur-ther from shore, the less theprobability of ruffed grouse. Itshould be noted, however, thateven the small islands containunits of seemingly suitablerange very much larger thanthe woodlots in which the spe-cies successfully persists, in ap-parent isolation, further south.

Does this ring any bells? It was writ-ten in 1931.

Another area where Leopold’sthought developed and deepened in-volved his views on artificiality andmanagement. Early on, he had greatfaith in the possibilities of “scientificmanagement,” as shown in this quo-tation from 1923 (p. 53):

Every species in every localityhas a limiting factor. It may bewinter feed, or spring cover, orunlawful hunting, or overstock-ing, or a certain kind of vermin,or a shortage of water, salt,dust, grit, or what-not. What-ever it is, a skilled man can iso-late and identify it. A problemcorrectly stated is often a prob-lem solved. If we can intensifythe limiting factor by careless-ness (as when somebodyburned the deer yards), whycan we not mitigate it by skilland care? We can. Artificialcontrol of limiting factors is theessence of practical game man-agement.

As this volume shows, Leopoldnever stopped advocating improvedgame management. Yet he grew

much less sanguine about how muchmanagers knew, how easily theycould find out what they needed toknow, and how well they could ex-ercise restraint in order to manageland successfully. At the same timehe was promoting management tobring back depopulated game spe-cies, Leopold was coming to realizethe dangers of over-artificialization totraditional hunting and fishing val-ues. In reporting on German gamepractices, he bemoaned the artificial-ity or “cubism” of German forests,which he tied to an unhealthy desireto control and dominate the land. Itis fascinating to follow this dialecticon control—the need to manage, thelimits to the success and value ofmanagement—in a whole range ofareas, from hunting to forestry to es-thetics to ecological restoration. Thequestion of management and artifici-ality has lost none of its urgency inthe years since Leopold’s death. Idoubt there is a more informed orwide-ranging discussion of it to befound elsewhere.

Students of Leopold’s “land ethic”will find much to value in this book.An ethic cannot be understood apartfrom its applications, and this collec-tion gathers together Leopold’s man-agement suggestions for a variety oflands and situations, public and pri-vate, large and small, wild and tame.

The Essential Leopold

also suggests,as does

A Sand County Almanac

, thatthe land ethic is as much about en-larging the bounds of human knowl-edge and experience as it is aboutenlarging the circle of moral consid-erability to include the nonhumanworld of animals, trees, forests, andrangelands. “The good life,” Leopoldbelieved, was not a matter of morepeople employing more gadgets tocreate more wealth, but rather of anincreased perception and a richerexperience of nature and culture.These, he insisted, are the propergoals of a university education—goalsthat should also inform conservationpolicy.

The Essential Aldo Leopold

givesus the full spectrum of Leopold’s life

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and vision, whereas

For the Healthof the Land

focuses more narrowlyon Leopold as an advocate for the re-habilitation of private land. EditorsCallicott and Freyfogle believe thatscholars have overemphasized Le-opold’s concern for the preservationof remote wilderness areas, or atleast neglected his commitment toconservation on private and “work-ing” lands. They have a point. Afterall, Leopold did devote considerabletime to just such a project: the reha-bilitation of the worn-out sand countyfarm that he immortalized in the

Almanac.

Callicott and Freyfogle’sbook brings together previously un-published or obscure writings onthis theme. Its centerpiece is a seriesof short, two- to three-page essaysLeopold wrote for the

Wisconsin Ag-riculturist

between 1938 and 1942.Here Leopold gently tries to con-vince his practical readers to pre-serve windbreaks to control erosionand increase cover for gamebirds,leave dead snags for owls, raccoonsand other cavity-dwellers, and ingeneral to appreciate and help themyriad wild things that

might

befound on a Wisconsin farm to flour-ish. He concludes a short piece ti-tled “Pheasant Damage” thusly: “Thedamage done by birds is like thatdone by dogs or children; if you likethem well enough there are ways toget along” (p.129).

These writings are more practical,less lyrical than many familiar Leo-pold pieces, and for that reason theygive valuable insight into Leopold’sconservation work. Compared withthe quotations in

The Essential Le-opold

, more of the references hereare dated, and the writing rarelyrises to the heights of the

Almanac.

Still,

For the Health of the Land

makes a useful addition to the Le-opold bibliography. It is beautifullyillustrated by Abigail Rorer, withmany fine line drawings of flora andfauna and a charming portrait of Le-opold, pipe in hand. I strongly rec-ommend both books, for classroomuse and for personal enjoyment andedification.

Philip Cafaro

Department of Philosophy, Colorado State Uni-versity, Fort Collins, CO 80523, U.S.A., [email protected]

Documenting the Apocalypse

The Condor’s Shadow: the Lossand Recovery of Wildlife in Amer-ica.

Wilcove, D. S. 1999. Freeman,New York. 339 pp. $24.95. ISBN 0–7167–3115–0.

If historical accounts of wildlife re-sponses to human occupation of theEarth interest you, then you will en-joy reading

The Condor’s Shadow.

Ifyou are not sure how wildlife re-sponds to human domination of theEarth, then you should be requiredto read this fascinating, well-written,popular account of endangered wild-life in America. In it, David Wilcovetreats us to an ecologist’s view ofthe changes wrought by humans onAmerica’s once wild places. By aug-menting clear examples from thewell-cited scientific literature withhis unique personal experiences as aresearch ecologist and land stew-ard, Wilcove updates Matthiessen’s(1959) classic

Wildlife in America.

His account is necessarily biased to-ward the plight of birds and mam-mals, but it also provides interestingglimpses into the challenges facingplants, fish, and mollusks.

The story begins 12,000 years agowhen humans and their “mindlesshorsemen of the environmental apoc-alypse”—overkill, habitat destruc-tion, exotics, and disease; Wilson1992—arrived in the heart of NorthAmerica. The result of this prehis-toric immigration and subsequentexploration and colonization fromEurope started the continuing trans-formation of the land cover of NorthAmerica which is responsible for theendangerment of roughly 16% of thepresent biota. Wilcove takes us on afascinating, albeit depressing, tourof this conquest across the conti-nent and associated islands. He em-phasizes a recurrent process in how

we use the land: we log it, farm it,and then pave it.

Starting near his present home(Washington, D.C.), Wilcove dis-cusses the loss of large predatorsand tasty passenger pigeons to per-secution and overhunting. The changein land here is personal: his trips be-tween D.C. and Baltimore that takeonly an hour would have been majorexpeditions through glorious old-growth forests 500 years ago. An en-lightening early history of the area isrecounted, and an important, unsus-pected theme arises: despite massivechange in land cover and extensiveoccupancy by humans, relatively fewanimals native to our eastern decidu-ous forests have gone extinct (e.g.,only 4 of 160 species of birds).

We learn more about how theearly pioneers, explorers, conquista-dors, and settlers shaped our west-ern forests, Midwestern grasslands,and southern borderlands in chap-ters 2, 3, and 6. The effects of pred-ator removal, timber harvest, firesuppression, subdivision, agriculturalintensification, and overharvest aretraced through the last 200–300 years.National extinctions are rare (e.g.,thick-billed parrot), but regional onesare more common (wolves, grizzlies,and bison over much of their range).An ebb and flow of animals in thewake of human expansion appearsmore common than absolute exclu-sion. Wilcove provides new insightsinto old stories such as the slaughterof bison, noting that these beastsonce wandered east to the Atlanticcoast and south to Florida. He de-bunks the notion that cows are eco-logical equivalents of bison by notingcritical differences in size, mobility,and sociality, and he wryly notesthat “unlike the sight of bison, chil-dren in a car will not demand thattheir parents pull over when a herdof cows is seen grazing near theroad.” Brewing conservation battles(e.g., prairie dogs) are also discussedclearly and put into historical per-spective.

In chapters 4 and 5 we are brieflyintroduced to the effects of overfish-

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Book Reviews


ing, water pollution, unsustainableirrigation, and oil spills on lakes, riv-ers, and coastal waterways. Wilcovebreathes new life into many familiarstories here, noting for examplehow we have completely redesignedwestern water flow and overfishedthe Great Lakes. He notes that thereare 2.5 million dams in the UnitedStates and reminds us that duringthe last 30 years a new exotic spe-cies has become established in theSan Francisco Bay ecosystem every14 weeks! Two counterintuitive ob-servations stuck with me. First theeffects of massive oil spills are rela-tively minor; leaky two-stroke mo-tors and discarded oil from our carspose much more serious problems.Second, trash on beaches is a sign ofecosystem health; trash accumu-lates on wild beaches because hu-mans continually tidy up the beachesthey affect the most.

In stark contrast to earlier chap-ters, in chapter 7 Wilcove deals withthe true killing fields of biodiversity,the Pacific Islands. Prehistoric hu-mans likely drove 50–70% of all Ha-waiian birds to extinction. We havefollowed closely in their footstepsby knocking off another half of the50 native bird species known since

Cook dropped anchor in KealakekuaBay in 1778. Twenty percent of theworld’s avifauna has already beenextinguished by our propensity tosettle, bomb, and maroon exotic spe-cies on the islands of the tropical Pa-cific. Despite the catastrophic impactof humans on Hawaii, Wilcove down-plays its uniqueness, noting simplythat it might foreshadow events onthe mainland. I would have preferreda more detailed assessment of simi-larities and differences between hu-man effects on islands and mainlands.Quammen’s (1996) popular accountof extinction more carefully high-lights the plight of island species.

Despite my praise for the discus-sion of endangerment in chapters 1–7, I believe that Wilcove missed agreat opportunity in the last chapter.He leaves us with a few personalmusings about condors and the U.S.Endangered Species Act, but he doesnot synthesize earlier messages and,more important, he does not offersuggestions for the maintenance andrestoration of wildlife. He writes that(1) lack of information, (2) a ten-dency to ignore problems until theybecome crises, (3) failures to com-mit adequate resources, and (4) fail-ures to reward landowners for spe-

cies protection and habitat restorationare the greatest obstacles to effec-tive conservation. He does not tellus how to overcome these obstacles.How do we embrace a more sustain-able tenure on the Earth? What cur-rent opportunities exist to move fur-ther down the path of sustainability?Wilcove should have hit these andother such questions square on. Hisfailure in this respect puts an alarm-ist rather than a constructive spin onan important book. Nonetheless,

TheCondor’s Shadow

will inform andmotivate the public, educate the un-dergraduate, and expand the profes-sional ecologist’s understanding ofwildlife endangerment.

John M. Marzluff

College of Forest Resources, University of Wash-ington, Box 352100, Seattle, WA 98195, U.S.A.,email [email protected]

Literature Cited

Matthiessen, P. 1959. Wildlife in America (re-vised and updated in 1987). Viking, NewYork.

Quammen, D. 1996. The song of the Dodo: is-land biogeography in an age of extinc-tions. Scribner, New York.

Wilson, E. O. 1992. The diversity of life.Belknap Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

environment and civil strife

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