Customer Reviews

Life in the Balance

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Dr. Eldridge, a curator at the American Museum of Natural History, recently directed a huge display on the biodiversity of life. His book reflects the science behind this exposition. It begins with a description of the Okavango Delta in Africa, as a model of our own "Eden." Subsequent chapters reveal the wide variety of life in a text understandable to the layman, proceeding then to the dangers life on earth faces in the destruction of biodiversity, leading to the "Sixth Extinction." (Readers will already be familiar with the rain forest threats in the Amazon basin.) Five prior mass extinctions of life on earth have been experienced, the last being 65 million years ago, resulting in the extinction of the dinosaurs (save the surviving birds). The Sixth we face with the destruction of earth's biodiversity as Eldridge points out.

Ozone. Spotted owls. Coral reefs. Frogs. Rainforest. Passenger pigeons. The bulk of this book hits the standard guideposts in the "save the Earth" argument, and as such it's well-written and compelling (with nice illustrations) but hardly original.

More interesting are the places where the author strays off the standard screed to discuss why the tropics contain more diversity, but fewer individuals, than arctic regions. How the Panama Canal is absolutely dependent on rainfall. Why a vacant lot outside Chicago gives hope for environmental recovery. How global warming may simply be part of a normal 12,000 year ice age cycle.

In all this was an attractive, well-written book with a lot of important information -- but somehow I expected more from the co-author of the Punctuated Equilibrium theory. Maybe that's not fair -- authors cannot be revolutionary every time out.

I was disappointed both by the inaccuracies (for example, the population of Botswana at Independence in 1966 was slightly more than half a million, not 330,000 (it is now about 1.2 million); the people who live in Botswana are Batswana, not Botswanans; and Nelson Mandela is a Xhosa, not a Xhosan) and by the superficiality of the section on the Okavango. For example, Ian Scoone's work in neighboring Zimbabwe shows that, although overgrazing certainly can reduce biodiversity, semi-arid regions are more resilient than was previously thought. With adequate rainfall, the previous vegetation reappears in many cases. No mention was made of any of the positive steps taken by the Botswana government to protect the Okavango. I expected more from this book given the importance of the topic and the author's background.