Although edited, this is a much more integrated volume than normal. There are two good reasons for this. First, the contributors are all faculty and sta of the University of East Anglia, most working in its School of Development Studies, and particularly in its Overseas Development Group. There is thus some shared philosophy and purpose, as well as teaching experience, primarily at the Masters level. Secondly, the editors have genuinely worked to link and to summarize the disparate chapters, both through their own Foreword' and by providing an extremely valuable Editors' introduction' to each individual chapter. This latter is a practice which should be commended to many future editors of symposia and other collected ephemera. The unifying theme of these little introductions is Agenda 21, possibly the most tangible of the outputs from the `Earth Summit' held at Rio de Janeiro in 1992. Unfortunately, the editors then fail in two minor respects, there being no integrated bibliography, only separate reference lists at the end of each chapter, and the Subject Index, unlike the Index of Persons Named, is somewhat thin.
The fundamental aim of the book is to provide a concise overview of key topics relating to people and the environment from the `Earth Summit' at Rio for undergraduate students in development studies, environmental studies, agriculture, geography, and other related disciplines. The prime themes include human perceptions of the environment (Blaikie), the concept of sustainability (Gibbon, Lake and Stocking), global warming (Kelly and Granich), gender dierentiation (Jackson), biotechnology (Morse), the trade-o between development and conservation, mainly in Africa (Stocking, Perkin and Brown), and the links with human population growth (Thomas). There is no concluding chapter, although Thomas rounds things o quite nicely. Each chapter is divided into clear sections and the material is undoubtedly accessible to most undergraduates. The few ®gures are clearly presented.
Unfortunately, the volume only goes so far and it is imbued with and written under, like so many current textbooks, edited or straight-authored, the dominant green' development paradigm. The agenda of the book is indeed set. Throughout, I was desperate to ®nd a more critical and challenging approach. How can the authors simply talk of the threat of climate change'; how about the opportunities of change and the normality' of change? How can they state that Global warming is . . . an example of a scienti®c ``fact'' that is played out in the arena of political ecology', when that fact' itself is a political construct? Why do they not contrast the essentially equilibrium' concept of `sustainability' with the more telling concepts of persistence and resistance related to a non-equilibrium world? Moreover, what about the autecological alternatives to the now increasingly outdated approaches of systems thinking? And always, of course, population growth is a problem or a challenge, not a resource.
In conclusion, therefore, although I welcome this book as a fairly clear statement of a certain well-de®ned and well-known `environment and development' paradigm Ð and I shall certainly recommend it to my own students in these terms Ð I am sad that the book does not go on to the new, to the beyond-Rio, paradigms now arising often in and from the South itself, where change is the norm and multi-directional, where non-equilibrium concepts probably hold sway, and where the political ecological agenda is not mainly set by the North. But is it possible to write this in East Anglia or London?
The world has always changed, both constantly and episodically; stasis and sustainability are not options. There is no real `feel' for this here.