Volume 44, Number 3 · February 20, 1997
Endangered Environmentalists
By Daniel J. Kevles
The Last Harvest: The Genetic Gamble That Threatens to Destroy American Agriculture
by Paul Raeburn
University of Nebraska Press, 269 pp., $12.00 (paper)
Our Children's Toxic Legacy: How Science and Law Fail to Protect Us from Pesticides
by Wargo John
Yale University Press, 380 pp., $30.00
Noah's Choice: The Future of Endangered Species
by Charles C. Mann, by Mark L. Plummer
Knopf, 302 pp., $24.00
Losing Ground: American Environmentalism at the Close of the Twentieth Century
by Mark Dowie
MIT Press, 317 pp., $12.50 (paper)
In 1864, in his remarkable book Man and Nature, George Perkins Marsh contended that man's small disturbances of the equilibrium of the natural world could transform and harm the land and its creatures, leading to disaster. Marsh was not a scientist but, by turns, a congressman, businessman, diplomat, and polymathic scholar. His idea ran contrary to the scientific thinking of the day, which held that man was puny and nature formidable; but in both his native Vermont and regions abroad, he had seen with his own eyes evidence of the human impact on nature, including the alterations of landscape, the flooding, and the disruption of natural cycles that came with the destruction of forests and damming of streams. He noted that once-fertile lands in the Middle East had been turned into deserts. He warned that man in the era of rapid urbanization and industrialization was fast making the earth 'an unfit home for its noblest inhabitant.'[1]
Review, 6019 words
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