PLANTS IN DANGER

Ricciuti begins with a catchy image, of one saguaro cactus growing from a seed to a ten-ton, 50-foot giant while Tucson develops from an adobe frontier town to a modern city. The rest is more prosaic, with Ricciuti explaining first the importance of plants--they make our atmosphere breathable, supply moisture to the forest floor, provide food and medicine, and serve as a habitat for wild animals--and then cataloging the ways in which man is speeding the demise of many: through air pollution, housing development, farmland expansion, livestock grazing, and collecting (especially ""orchid looting"" and ""cactus rustling""). An earnest and reasonable, if less than sparkling, companion to the author's wild animal alert, To the Brink of Extinction (1974).