NEW PUBLICATIONS: CLASSICS IN ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES: AN OVERVIEW OF CLASSIC TEXTS IN ENVIRONMENT STUDIES by Nico Nelissen, Jan Van Der Straaten and Leon Klinkers (Eds). International Books, Utrecht, 1997. 423 pp, £18.99 (pbk). ISBN 90 6224 973 6.
✍ Scribed by Horner, Jonathan
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1997
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 82 KB
- Volume
- 7
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0961-0405
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
The sub-title of this textbook might usefully have been modified to make its contents more apparent -replacing 'an overview of' by 'excerpts from'. Existing publications in this field tend to build historical accounts of environmental studies integrating references to, or short statements from, significant environmental texts. The authors of this book have instead selected thirty-three seminal publications in this field, ranging from academic papers to NGO manifestos and governmental policy documents. From them they have compiled relatively large extracts, averaging about ten pages each, which provide a reasonable representation of the basic theme of the text. As the authors state, they try to 'let the classics speak for themselves'.
The book is chronologically divided into six distinct parts: 'The Beginning' including for example Darwin's 'On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection'; 'The Revival' covering the 1950s and 1960s and including Hardin's 'Tragedy of the Commons'; 'The Bestsellers' covering the 1970s and including Goldsmith's manifesto 'A Blueprint for Survival'; 'The Eighties' including IUCNs 'World Conservation Strategy'; 'The Current State of Affairs' including the Commission of the European Community's 'Fifth Action Programme on the Environment'; and finally 'The Future' including U.S. Vice-President Al Gore's 'Earth in the Balance'. The authors provide a brief introduction to each part including a summary of the contents of each classic text. Combined with a 'General Introduction' and 'Conclusions and Perspective' this represents about twenty per cent of the text -the remaining eighty per cent comprising the classic text extracts themselves. It is a little disappointing that no index has been provided; this would have been helpful -as might have been a glossary of specialist terms.
One of the challenges in producing a text of this type is deciding which classics should be included. Ask any two workers in the environmental field to list their selection of thirty-three classic environmental studies texts and the probability of them choosing exactly the same ones would be very low. However, some texts, for example Darwin's classic 'Origin of Species', Carson's 'Silent Spring' and Lovelock's 'Gaia' would probably appear on nearly everyone's list. The authors made their selection based on consultation with other colleagues in the Netherlands. Had consultation in other countries taken place, it would no doubt have led to minor changes in the thirty-three texts included. For example, the final chapter