Customer Reviews

Discordant Harmonies: A New Ecology for the Twenty-first Century

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

First, let me say that this is a very good book, and that my comments are only meant as a cautionary note. Second, Botkin does know his "stuff" when it come to understanding ecological applications, theories, and the use of metaphors. This book was a useful, popular, corrective to the vast number of misunderstood ecological concepts at the time of its publication. That said, however, Botkin is also like a rooster: he crows too loudly, every morning. By page 38, I was already tired of his "this requires a new view and understanding of nature" which had been stated at least a dozen times before said page. Perhaps some readers will need this prose "boot to the head" reminder. Many readers will find this irritating. He is very much preaching to the choir as well. Changes in Ecology and parallel fields (Conservation Biology, Physical Geography, etc...) had already understood the past mistakes of such concepts as "equilibrium" (static) and "climax community." Botkin was about ten to fifteen years too late in writing Discordant Ecologies. Keep that in mind as you read it. If you start saying "Aha!" a lot just remember that others have already said this for decades, and that the corrective suggestions that Botkin produces have already been incorporated in the vast variety of ecological fields he discusses. This is a great book to use in a history of science, history of ecology, or biogeography class. It will also be useful to a lay audience, unfamiliar with the last 50 years or so of ecological literature. It is also rather easy to read in one sitting.

I liked this book. It was a bit difficult to get through at first. I started the book and put it down for a few months, in chapter 3. But I picked it up again and read it all the way through. Botkin (the author) writes repeatedly about a new way of thinking that incorporates both environmental awareness and the need not to go too far in our concern about the environment. He discusses how the movement of environmentalism is basically operating on false principles, just as our mainstream industrial ways of thinking are perpretrating untold destruction of the natural world.
Botkin talks about the need for compromise, and specifically the need to think of nature in a new way. This new way that he iterates is the recognition of nature as a chaotic system. It is not constant, it is not irreversible (in some ways), and populations fluctuate under certain circumstances.
He describes how we need a new kind of ecologist. How we need people to study the animals and the ecosystems they inhabit with the idea of chaos in mind. But not complete chaos, there is structure to nature, but it is not formalized, nor is it constant. It is changing patterns that never repeat themselves, I guess Botkin might say, more eloquently than I no doubt.
He has a lengthy discussion about the role of religion in this book, which I found interesting. He even talks about the GAIA theory. Botkin re-iterates his points on numerous occasions, to the point that you almost get sick to hear them again. But he drives the point home, and his points are valid, and his view of nature, based on his own experiments is enlightening, scientific, and refreshing.

In the space of two hundred pages, Professor of Biology and Environmental Studies Daniel Botkin offers us this concise and absorbing assessment of man's role in shaping the landscape with which we are now confronted, and suggests this perspective of the future: "Nature in the twenty-first century will be a nature that we make... We no longer have the luxury to believe that we can live in harmony with the environment without knowledge and understanding of natural systems." This is not a simple suggestion. Botkin reminds us of the intricacies that comprise every earth-nestled rock, every butterfly's wing, every molecule of water that falls from above. Science and knowledge, he suggests, are the keys to our future, our Promethean fire. How we use them will determine how long we will hold sway here. With a reverence for the observations of past and contemporary philosophers, scientists and nature writers, he leads us from the timbered foundation of Venice's church of Santa Maria della Salute to Eat Africa's Tsavo National Park to the remnant ancient forest woodlands of New Jersey's Hutcheson Forest to the remote and mysterious Isle Royale in Lake Superior to the lonely emptiness of te Moon and back again to Venice, on an expedition as valuable in its authenticity of observation as it is poetic in its rhythms.

In Discordant Harmonies, Daniel Botkin tackles one of the most difficult questions in all of current ecological thought - what *is* 'natural', anyway?

On one hand, you have wise-use yahoos insisting that massive exploitation and pollution are merely another evolutionary pressure under which organisms must sink or swim. On the other, you have fanatics who can only relate to a concept of nature so pristine that it reveals underlying self-hatred, and people who would sooner see California Condors extinct than in captivity.

Botkin lucidly explains why both such views of nature are based on misunderstandings and outdated cultural paradigms. Using a number of case studies and an accurate yet entertaining style, he points the way toward a new conception of nature and the human role in it.

I wish this book had been written about 15 years earlier & I wish it was currently read by a wider audience. This is a well written book in which Botkin does an excellent job at articulating some of the troubling aspects of ecological theory as they move out into the world of policy, conservation, and belief. Like many of us Botkin was obviously raised in the academic environment of "equilibrium models" or "Balance of Nature" ideologies, and like some of us he found that what he actually saw in the field didn't really match up with what the theoreticians on the one hand and the hard-core "environmentalists" on the other were saying we had to believe. Botkin recognizes and revels in the complexities of the natural world and asks some difficult questions about the role that theory plays in shaping our overall perceptions. Anybody interested in conservation, land-use, or applied ecology would do well to spend some time with this book. The only reason that I don't give it 5 stars is that I wish that Botkin had gone a little farther -one gets the sense throughout that he has seen a promised land of a "New Ecology" but he keeps drawing back, he knows that there are fatal flaws in much ecological rhetoric, but he can't quite bring himself to say "away with this nonsense". Other than that, if there was one semi-popular ecology book that I would want folks to read, this would probably be a top candidate.

Utilitarian to boot - this book is exactly the kind of ecological thinking that will do nothing but further the culture of control and domination that is destroying what's left of the world's wilderness.

The essential message of the book is that humanity needs to control and dominate nature more, not less, in order to save it. This is progressive humanistic delusion at its worst.

Botkin's "new ecology" discounts what he calls the "old" theories of interconnection, balance, and cooperation and argues in favor of an ecology that describes a disconnected, unbalanced, opportunistic and fundamentally disordered and chaotic natural world.

Thomas Hobbes would be proud!

But wait, there's more:

Discordant Harmonies was awarded the Mitchell International Prize for Sustainable Development in 1991. The Mitchell prize was established by George P. Mitchell, a Houston Texas based billionaire who made his fortune in Petroleum and Natural Gas development.

A quick study of the Mitchell Center for Sustainable Development reveals that it is funded by some of the world's most ecologically destructive corporate entities including: Enron, Ford, Shell Oil, Texaco and the World Bank.

As if that's not enough to reveal the agenda behind the Mitchell Center, one of the projects of the Center was to help the World Bank "relocate" the indigenous people whose land it flooded by financing an enormous dam project in the Brazilian state of Ceará.

With supporters like these, it should be obvious that Botkin is much more concerned with the "development" of wilderness than he is with its preservation.

Unfortuantely, this book has been highly influential for many environmental historians and has inspired many
anti-environmental and anti-indigenous books and papers.

One example is the book "The Destruction of the Bison." In this book the author, Andrew Isenberg, argues (contrary to massive ammounts of primary historical sources) that it was the actions of The Plains Tribes (not the White colonists) that caused the Buffalo to nearly go extinct; a disgusting example of blaming the victim for the actions of the oppressor.

Botkin's book is dangerous - a tool of the dominant culture.

Read this book? Yes - but read it with extreem skepticism.