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account of general strategies, emphasising the principles, of the main techniques, but also explaining the practical limitations. The contribution of Glidewell and Goodman focuses on spectroscopic, or 'direct', methods for metal speciation, which provide information principally on the structure of complexes, although, it has to be said, rarely at environmental concentrations. Greenaway's chapter deals with 'hybrid' methods of speciation, in which a chromatographic technique is linked to a specific means of detection (e.g. GC-MS, HPLC-ICP). Lumsden and Evans provide an enthusiastic descrip- tion of computational speciation methods, but they would have made a stronger case by quoting examples of correct prediction for environmental systems.

Part II is concerned with speciation in compartments of the environment, and includes chapters on the atmo- sphere, fresh waters, soils, sediments and combustion waste, and biological systems. Spokes and Jickells emphasise the importance of particle size in the atmospheric behaviour of metals, and show how information on this leads to understanding of metal deposition to the oceans. The chapter of Filella, Town and Buffle on freshwaters is mainly on methodology, with a helping of philosophy, and is somewhat of a distillation of Buffle's comprehensive book (Buffle, 1988). Ritchie and Sposito consider chemical speciation in soils, but they devote quite a lot of space to more general principles, covered in Part I of the book. Welcome aspects of this chapter are the discussion of kinetics, and the section on implications of speciation for agriculture and soil pollution. Kersten and Frrstner write about trace metal speciation in sediments and combustion waste; this is a thorough account of chemical extraction methods and the interpretation of results. Harvey's chapter on radionuclides is written from the standpoint of an experienced practitioner in marine aspects of the subject, and attention is drawn to the complex and difficult chemistry of many key radioelements. The chapter on metal speciation in biological systems by Deighton and Goodman is rather brief, and the contents are not all relevant to the natural environment, for example the illustration of speciation principles by reference to mammalian cellular systems. The book closes with 'Trends and Develop- ments', by Van Loon and Barefoot, which is a rather uncritical review of some recent literaure, not the synthesis and prognosis promised by its title.

The emphasis is very much on how to determine or describe speciation, and this is, for the most part, done well. I would have liked more examples demonstrating how speciation results have helped to interpret environ- mental observations; only the chapters on atmospheric metals and soils seemed to consider this aspect. I also found the focus on metals to be too strong; there is little or no discussion of several other important topics, including phosphorus, nitrogen and sulphur specia- tion, and interactions involving anthropogenic organic chemicals. The absences of marine and groundwater systems from the 'compartments' of the environment in Part II came as something of a surprise. In the first

case this is rather ironic, in view of the enormous impetus given to environmental chemistry by Sillrn's work on speciation in seawater, while groundwaters surely deserved coverage because of the current interest in the effects of speciation on the migration behaviour of radionuclides should they escape from deep waste repositories.

These criticisms aside, the book is definitely worth reading, or even owning, and I feel sure that it will be a valuable reference source in years to come.

Edward Tipping

Buffle, J. (1988). Complexation Reactions in Aquatic Systems: An Analytical Approach, Ellis-Horwood, Chichester, UK.

The Environment as Hazard. (2nd edn). By I. Burton, R. W. Kates & G. F. White. Guildford Press, New York, 1993, ISBN 0-89862-159-3, 290 pp. Price: £16.99.

This is the second edition of a book that was initially published in 1978. After an initial chapter posing the question 'Is the environment becoming more hazardous?', it briefly exemplifies a few important types of hazard (drought, floods, tropical cyclones, air pollution) in a catalogue that is far from exhaustive. The large bulk of the text then describes human perception of, and response to, large-scale hazards at the individual, collective, national and international levels. This, indeed, is the book's central theme. In this, it contains some well organised and clearly presented information which has contributed widely to established concepts about responses to hazards. This alone is a good reason to buy the volume at this price. Yet, I couldn't help noticing that the book showed its real age. As the authors freely admit in their preface, there are only two chapters to this book that weren't in the first edition, and much of the remaining text has not been revised. The authors suggest that exhaustive revision would have been too large an undertaking, and so around half the reference list involves material published prior to 1980. I found this to be a problem, and certainly areas of review that were familiar to me were distinctly dated.

A second problem--at least to readers of this journal--might be that direct consideration of phenomena related to pollution is relatively scarce. Firstly, there is a part-chapter on air pollution which is extremely dated; it considers Mexico and London smogs from a perspective that might have been modern in the 1970s. Much, of course, has changed since then, in London for the better, but in many other parts of the world for the worse; more relevant case studies in a modern context might have been from Delhi, Bangkok or Kathmandu. Secondly, one of the two new sections contains a consideration of the effects of global warming, and human responses to it, as an example of global change. This is both an interesting choice of subject and a perplexing one--how can human responses to such a phenomenon be addressed easily where

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change is so imperceptible, often incremental, and so difficult to distinguish from stochastic patterns? Action (or rather inertia) is being held in the grip of uncertainty. Yet, if real changes meet predictions there will be a need for organised responses at regional, national and international levels. At the end, I was unconvinced that any of the analysis here did anything more than state this difficulty.

Despite this weak emphasis on pollution, I found that, conceptually, there was something to be gained

from considering how human responses, mostly to natural hazards, might also tell us something about responses to perceptible pollution. But in a world where risk assessment, cost benefit analysis, environmental economics, precautionary principles and environmental politics have all matured hugely since this book was conceived, I have to question if this was of anything more than historical value.

Steve Ormerod