Book Review

Gaining or losing groundGaining Ground: In Pursuit of Ecological Sustainability edited by David M. Lavigne, International Fund for Animal Welfare and the

University of Limerick, 2006. £30.00 pbk (425 pages) ISBN 0969817177

David B. Lindenmayer

Centre for Resource & Environmental Studies, The Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, 0200, Australia

176 Update TRENDS in Ecology and Evolution Vol.22 No.4

David Lavigne has edited a diverse andmulti-faceted volume of discussion chap-ters on the vexed problems of ecologicallysustainableresourcemanagement.Aswithall edited volumes, a potential inherentweakness is the marked differences instyles and approaches taken by differentauthors in different chapters. This can leadto contradictions and inconsistencies inarguments between chapters. However,

Lavigne has acknowledged this at the start of GainingGround and has not taken a heavy-handed approach tohomogenize authors’ contributions. Indeed, diversity alsocan be a strength of an edited volume, as it is with this text.

The chapters span fascinating (albeit often extremelydepressing) case studies of failures in ecological sustain-ability, such as those in fisheries, whaling, bush-meathunting and the ivory trade. Other chapters explorediverse and often non-mainstream issues associated withwildlife conservation and natural resource management,including those on ethics, philosophy, religion, politics,values and economics. There is even a chapter on com-munication and media and its relationships with wildlifeconservation. The author of this contribution (Worchester)rightly points out that most ecologists and conservationbiologists have not tried to communicate the extent ofecological problems or articulate ways to solve them.

Gaining Ground contains some truly provocativechapters that will deeply challenge most conservationbiologists. An example is the somewhat sobering andbluntly written chapter by Brooks, who suggests that, asdarwinian animals, humans should not be expected to actin ecologically sustainable ways or to adopt medium tolong-term actions that would benefit the environment orthe conservation of other species. The kernel of his’ argu-ment is that we need to find more compelling reasons tomotivate the world to care about wildlife conservation.Another of the book’s major challenges for many conserva-tion biologists is the argument by Lavigne et al. in thesynthesis chapter at the end of the book. They argue thatconservation is more about value sets than it is aboutscience. The chapter by Best will be an anathema to manyof the world’s leading environmental organizations. Heargues that these groups have failed miserably and chal-lenges them to refocus on tackling the major wildfireconservation problems. In particular, Best urges them to

Corresponding author: Lindenmayer, D.B. (davidl@cres.anu.edu.au).Available online 29 December 2007.

www.sciencedirect.com

move to achieve real ‘on-ground’ outcomes as opposed todwelling too much on the ‘process tasks’ of writing reports.Although there is somemerit in this argument, I do believeit is too negative and fails to acknowledge at least some ofthe substantial positive environmental outcomes that havebeen realized in the past few decades. The contribution byCzech is fascinating, based, in part, on his earlier book [1].It highlights the deeply entrenched problems of traditionalneo-classical economic models of constant economic growthand ever-increasing levels of resource consumption. Czechmakes a strong case for ecological economics and steadystate economic models.

Perhaps one of my few criticisms of the book would bethat, aswould be expected from the organization publishingthe volume (International Fund for Animal Welfare), manychapterspresentargumentsbasedona fairlynarrowanimalwelfare perspective. I could find no examples in the bookwhere it was acknowledged that sometimes animal welfaremight not be synonymous with wildfire conservation.The need to control populations of introduced species toconserve native biota is an obvious case in point. Tome, thisis a significant oversight, given that invasive animal andplant species are a key and increasingly important problemthreatening native wildlife, not only globally [2], but also onsome continents (e.g. Australia [3]) and particularly onislands [4]. An additional oversight is the lack of positiveexamples where resource management could be (perhapsarguably) considered to be ecologically sustainable or atleast be a reasonable facsimile of it. There are cases wherethis has occurred [5] and I believe that it is essential toprovide some examples as models for others to follow or atleast generate hope that much improved management canoccur and is worth striving for. Of course, striving to attainthe goal of ecological sustainability requires some kind ofdefinition of that goal. Ecological sustainability is rarelydefined in the book and the term is used loosely and inter-changeably with sustainability (which typically alsoremains defined); the two concepts might not necessarilybe synonymous. A final criticism is the title of the book. It is,unfortunately,misleading relative to its content;most chap-ters argue that we have not been gaining, but rather, losingground in the pursuit of ecological sustainability.

These criticisms do not detract from the overallimportance of Gaining Ground. Indeed, this book isboth valuable and very provocative and makes an import-ant addition to the rapidly increasing literature on eco-logical sustainability, in particular, and sustainability, ingeneral. In particular,Gaining Ground provides a valuableintroduction to many topics, such as ecological economics,

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value sets and philosophy, and harvesting theory, whichare pivotal to understanding how real on-ground wildfireconservation might occur and how natural resourcesmight be managed in ways that are truly ecologicallysustainable.

References1 Czech, B. (2000) Shoveling Fuel for a Runaway Train, University of

California Press

Corresponding author: Barnard, P. (barnard@sanbi.org).Available online 9 February 2007.

www.sciencedirect.com

2 Primack, R. (2001) Causes of extinction. In Encyclopedia of Biodiversity(Vol. 2) (Levin, S.A., ed.), pp. 697–713, Academic Press

3 Lindenmayer, D.B. and Burgman, M.A. (2005) Practical ConservationBiology, CSIRO Publishing

4 Simberloff, D. (1995) Why do introduced species appear to devastateislands more than mainland species? Pacific Sci. 49, 87–97

5 Lindenmayer, D.B. and Franklin, J.F. (2002) Conserving ForestBiodiversity: A Comprehensive Multiscaled Approach, Island Press

0169-5347/$ – see front matter � 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

doi:10.1016/j.tree.2006.12.006

Putting it on the lineThe Atlas of Climate Change: Mapping the World’s Greatest Challenge by Kirstin Dow and Thomas Downing, Earthscan, 2006.

£12.99, pbk (128 pages) ISBN 1844073769

Phoebe Barnard and Guy Midgley

Global Change and Biodiversity Programme, Kirstenbosch Research Centre, South African National Biodiversity Institute, P/Bag

X7, Claremont 7735, South Africa

For many people, maps are an endlesssource of fascination, evoking a sense of

to summarize climate change and its dangers and globalimpacts quite so concisely and nit-pickers will have a field

discovery, of floating above colourfullysummarized and abstracted landscapes.From the dawn of exploration, maps havemanifested the power of knowledge. Infacing climate change, the world needsknowledge and power to counteract adebilitating helplessness. Prose can beineffectual at communicating climate

change, when the task is so daunting and the issues so

multifaceted, so what better way to express this than inmap form? For this reason alone, The Atlas of ClimateChange, fromEarthscan’s State of theWorld atlas series, isa great addition to a burgeoning literature.

The massive increase in public awareness, and in theamount of data on the vulnerability of ecosystems, econ-omies and societies, has made a focus on climate changeboth inevitable and overdue. Vulnerability researchersKirstin Dow and Thomas Downing have stepped up tothe mike with a concise book combining global analysisand summary statistics with spatial prediction. Theirinformation is organized simply, in terms of indicatorsand trends, the reasons for climate change, its drivers,its impacts and solutions as we now perceive them. Theirmaps are sometimes uncontroversial, sometimes provok-ing, but, without exception, informative.

Mapping summary overviews of the present andprojections of the future is a tricky business. Summariesinvolve averaging out, combining different sources of infor-mation, sacrificing detail and outliers to communicate inbroad-brush. From the mortality risk maps produced byactuaries to the desertification hazard maps of develop-ment agencies, future scenarios can be powerfully, butriskily, writ large across landscapes. It is a brave thing

day finding fault. The complexities and subtleties of cli-mate systems and the many physical and societal factorsthat determine impacts are, of course, the problem Butwhat we know now is usually more certain, and often moreserious, than what we knew at the time of the 2001 Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) ThirdAssessment Report (http://www.ipcc.ch/pub/reports.htm).

Dow and Downing have taken IPCC and primary dataup to the first quarter of 2006 and present it in a systematicframework: what we know, why it is happening, what islikely to happen around the corner, and what we are doingabout it. There are two types of risk involved: (i) that weunderestimate the starkness of the future by usingscenarios that project trends as we currently understandthem. For example, current global CO2 emissions arealready on the very upper limit of IPCC worst-casescenarios of the late 1990s; and (ii) that we overestimatethe starkness of the future through poor understanding ofimpacts. As the authors realize, both risks are hugelyconflated by uncertainties in how societies, governments,institutions, individuals and ecosystems will behave overthe next century. The book is on firm ground where it mapsessentially physical processes, such as sea-level rises, butis inevitably shakier when it tries to map variations incomplex societal issues, such as national food security.Food security depends not only on reduced rainfall, soilmoisture or altered CO2, but also on economic growth,political stability, land-use change, subsidies, populationgrowth, national distribution and storage infrastructure,and international trade regimes. Given the work of bothauthors on societal impacts, they are well aware of suchissues, so is it helpful to map future food security as thoughthey do not exist? Whereas Australia is projected by Dowand Downing to increase its cereal output, the recentdrought there has crimped its winter season grain outputby more than 50%, and droughts are more likely there in