Sparing Nature: The Conflict between Human Population Growth and Earth's Biodiversity [Paperback]

Jeffrey K. McKee (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 31, 2005

"With an elegant and earnest writing style more common among nature writers than academics, McKee tallies the value of a balanced ecosystem." --Nation "McKee is bringing to Sparing Nature the same graceful writing style combined with insights of a fine scientist that I found in The Riddled Chain. Furthermore, his timing is exquisite, since the close relationship of human population growth to the decay of biodiversity has not been brought to popular audiences in far too long." --Paul Ehrlich, Bing Professor of Population Studies, Stanford University Are humans too good at adapting to the earth's natural environment? Every day, there is a net gain of 200,000 people on the planet--that's 146 a minute. Has our explosive population growth led to the mass extinction of countless species in the earth's plant and animal communities? Jeffrey K. McKee contends it has. Exploring the cause-and-effect relationship between these two trends, McKee demonstrates that nature is too sparing to accommodate both a richly diverse living world and a rapidlly expanding number of people. He probes the past to find that humans and their ancestors have had negative impacts on species biodiversity for nearly two million years, and that extinction rates have accelarated since the origins of agriculture. Today entire ecosystems are in peril due to the relentless growth of the human population. Providing a guided tour of the interconnections within the living world, Sparing Nature makes the maze of technical research and scientific debates accessible to the general reader. McKee not only encourages more responsible reproductive habits, but also takes an objective look at the means that might be employed to decrease fertility rates and stop the population explosion. Jeffrey K. McKee is a professor in the department of anthropology as well as the department of evolution, ecology, and organismal biology at The Ohio State University.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Sparing Nature will exceed all your expectations -- New Scientist.com --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

About the Author

Jeffrey K. McKee is an associate professor in the department of anthropology as well as the department of evolution, ecology, and organismal biology at The Ohio State University. He is the author of The Riddled Chain: Chance, Coincidence, and Chaos in Human Evolution (Rutgers University Press) and coauthor of Understanding Human Evolution.

Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press (January 31, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0813535581
• ISBN-13: 978-0813535586
• Product Dimensions: 6 x 0.5 x 9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,318,095 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Dare to spare, else irreversibly impair November 14, 2003

By Jeremy M. Harris

Format:Hardcover

I am doubly familiar with this book because, in addition to reading the published version, I served as one of eight evaluators who provided feedback in the latter stages of manuscript preparation.

In chapter one the author points out that he had two meanings in mind when he chose "Sparing Nature" as a title. The first echoes a warning from Malthus that nature has generously distributed the seeds of life, "...but has been comparatively sparing in the room and nourishment necessary to rear them."

The second meaning comes straight from Prof. McKee. To secure our own future and that of our planet, we must spare nature from the devastation human overpopulation can and will wreak if we don't voluntarily act to limit it. In a country like America the problem is particularly insidious because we don't feel personally crowded, having had plenty of exposure to seemingly endless open spaces. We take the food that crams our markets for granted, as if it grew in the backs of trucks. We have little sense of the contiguous ranges that wild creatures need to survive, or of the degree to which forests, trees, plants, people, animals, insects and microbes are interdependent. The aim of "Sparing Nature" is to gently but firmly raise our consciousness on all these issues in an entertaining and edifying way. As a scientist the author would rather persuade than simply preach, and therein lies the strength of the book.

McKee's case is built on three theses:

1. Human population growth has had a long-standing causal relationship with loss of biodiversity. In other words we have, deliberately or not, acted from the very beginning to reduce the variety of living things on Earth.

2. The most effective measure available to combat further loss of biodiversity in our late-stage predicament is proactive slowing, halting or reversing of net population increase.

3. Conservation of nature's variety is vital to the health of our planet and therefore equally vital to our own self-interest.

To succeed the author must convince us that theses (1) and (3) are true, and that thesis (2) is not only correct but presents a clear and present danger if not heeded. Hence he is invested in an advocacy position and wants to enlist the reader as both believer and activist. This is a tall order, far more difficult than simply identifying and elucidating a problem.

Since the themes implicit in the theses are both historical and global, the reservoir of possible talking points is enormous. McKee chooses well and constructs a cogent set of chapter topics and subtopics designed to progress logically and incrementally to the appropriate conclusions. His initial strategy is to define the nature and extent of plant/animal biodiversity, and to trace its evolutionary development together with that of early and modern humans. The results reveal an inexorable Homo sapiens "wedge" steadily forcing other species into extinction and thus indicating that thesis (1) is true. Additional evidence connecting biodiversity loss to harmful trends such as disease-prone monocrops, erosion-driven soil depletion, eutrophication of water habitats, thermal pollution, desertification and vanishing potable water sources supports the conclusion that thesis (3) is also true.

To establish the danger of ignoring thesis (2), the author argues strongly that neither resource rationing (i.e. conservation) nor improved technology, no matter how conscientiously pursued, can keep up with an essentially unregulated exponential population growth in the long run. Further, we are a lot closer to the long run than the perennial "eco-optimists" realize. On this point McKee is an unapologetic neo-Malthusian, and justifiably so because he shows quantitatively that Earth's usable land per person is already in the scary zone. The finiteness of our planet and the mathematics of human reproduction (six billion and counting) virtually mandate an accelerating slide toward disaster if we don't voluntarily curb our built-in urge to procreate. In the final analysis, a worldwide policy of self-motivated population control is the ONLY humane and practical measure available to sustain Earth in an ecologically viable equilibrium with nature.

Deadly serious as these matters are, reading "Sparing Nature" is by no means a depressing experience, nor is its tone even remotely overbearing or coercive. McKee approaches the reader in a relaxed and friendly fashion, using the recurring theme of his outdoor "office" on the banks of the Olentangy River in central Ohio to personalize his view of nature, family and the good things in life. The book opens with an informal survey contrasting creature variety in the author's suburban yard with that in a nearby patch of woods, and readers are encouraged to see for themselves what a toll human incursion exacts on biodiversity. As in his previous book, "The Riddled Chain," McKee sometimes underscores points by referencing his extensive anthropological field work in South Africa.

Greatly to the author's credit is his refusal to oversimplify or resort to hand waving. The many difficult aspects of determining the true extent of biodiversity, estimating rates of loss, and assigning causes are not minimized. For anyone interested in delving deeper, the chapter notes provide a comprehensive list of source material. Although it wasn't much fun to see the spread of humanity likened to proliferating weeds and cancer cells, I could not fault McKee's reasons for doing so, and he is clear about taking no pleasure in using the metaphors. Reading "Sparing Nature" will prove more than worthwhile for anyone with an open mind -- and a little time to spare.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Won't you not be... my neighbor? April 2, 2004

By Russell Finley

Format:Hardcover

"And without trees for shade, it would be pretty darned hot on this planet." No, that is not a quote from the late Mister Rogers; welcome to Mister McKee's neighborhood. Shunning traditional bar charts, McKee, begins his book by comparing relative quantities of biodiversity found in his neighborhood to a nearby nature park using contrasting silhouettes of a squirrel, a tree, a bird, and...you guessed it, a bee. The point: biodiversity decreases as human numbers increase. At first, it was unsettling to me that a book about biodiversity loss was being written by a guy who didn't know a termite when he saw one and as soon as it was identified for him, he immediately called the exterminator-it having been found in his yard. However, this is not a book about sustainable lifestyles, it is about overpopulation and its effect on biodiversity. You might not have guessed it, judging from my excessively critical remarks, but this book is a good read. McKee proves to be a gentle and persuasive writer.

I gleaned several pearls from Sparing Nature. I learned that Ohio once harbored a wetland the size of Connecticut called the "Black Swamp." It was drained before the turn of the century. We are told that McKee's brother-a botanist-had located one of the last remaining bogs in Ohio, and in the name of conservation, the McKee family had chipped in to buy it

McKee talked about the loopholes in laws that allow developers to drain and fill wetlands as long as they create new ones someplace else. His point, "One simply cannot transplant an ecosystem." In terms of biodiversity, the artificial wetlands bear little resemblance to the ones that were destroyed. These laws are trading ancient wetlands for duck ponds. Extinction of a complex ecosystem is analogous to the extinction of a life form and just as permanent.

Rush Limbaugh-not generally known for his intellectual acuity-is mentioned along with his propensity to confuse population density with overpopulation. Apparently, Limbaugh uses the fact that every person on Earth could fit into the state of Texas as proof that overpopulation is a myth propagated by environmentalist wackos.

McKee makes a stronger than usual argument that humankind was responsible for the extinction of the large mammals that once roamed Europe, Australia, and the Americas. Those animals had survived multiple global warming trends. The only thing new with the last warming trend was a human population expansion of hunters with Clovis tipped spears. These creatures were surviving in shrunken habitats when man came along and administered a lethal blow. He reinforces this argument by noting that large animals are the first to be driven to extinction when humans colonize islands. Creatures without effective defense mechanisms against humans are history, literally.

He defines a keystone species and suggests that because of their extinction, many other life forms that depended on them were also driven to extinction. Although not mentioned in the book, the California condor comes to my mind. They evolved to feed on the carcasses of large mammals. They were hanging in there along with their keystone species the bison. The end of the bison herds doomed these birds. The fact that we have, over the course of thirty years and after having spent millions of dollars, managed to multiply the last twelve condors into a few hundred is largely irrelevant. Without human intervention-feeding, monitoring, and protection-the California condor would go extinct within a few years because the world they evolved to live in is gone. McKee ties into this concept the fact that the extinction of a species lags behind the eradication of its environment. This implies that the extinction of many species is already in the pipeline. Our zoos are filling with animals that are or will soon be extinct in the wild because their habitats are gone.

The next climatic shift will be the final straw for thousands of species that have survived humankind's onslaught because they have no place to weather the change. McKee considers the plight of orangutans. If a change in rain patterns causes their remaining habitat to dry out there will not be remnant populations surviving in pockets of wet jungles waiting to repopulate. There are people in those places now, billions, and billions of them.

Sparing Nature is unique in that it bypasses the usual debates about the causes of hunger, war, and poverty, and instead, focuses on the devastation being wrought on biodiversity, the cause of which is undeniable. There is something fundamentally wrong with today's contraceptive technologies when you consider that even here in the US over half of all pregnancies are unplanned. This statistic strongly suggests room for improvement. Halting our growth at something like 7.5 billion instead of 9.5 would prove critical to preventing the extinction of many thousands of species.

Although fertility rates are falling, world population is still growing rapidly. This falling fertility rate reinforces all of our hopes that when our growth finally does stop-as the laws of physics say it must-it will be the result of low birth rates instead of high death rates. At that point, the struggle to slow our growth will be won and will then be replaced by the struggle to allow our numbers to decline. While humanity will continue to fight over this and millions of other issues, quietly, in the background, the remnants of our planet's biodiversity will continue the struggle for existence.

Russ Finley, Author of "Poison Darts-Protecting the biodiversity of our world."

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Sparing Nature June 23, 2003

By A Customer

Format:Hardcover

Jeff McKee has written an excellent and important book on the topic of global biodiversity loss. By drawing on his experience as professor and nature enthusiast, he provides an overview of the issues in an easy to read writing style. He takes the reader from the soil in their backyard to the biodiversity trends in countries around the world while maintaining a positive spin on things. This book is highly recommended for anyone interested in the current and possible future state of the earth's biosphere.