MAN IN THE ENVIRONMENT

This book deserves wide attention, which may be enhanced by a tie-in with an ecological exhibition at Chicago's Field Museum. Ruth Moore, well known for The Earth We Live On (1956) and other works of popular science, patiently and skillfully outlines the major ecological issues confronting the next decades. In half a dozen short chapters she manages to synthesize a remarkable amount of fact and opinion about ecosystems, food chains, the chemistry of life, population densities, atmospheric pollution and photosynthesis, the impact of technology. Her repeated message is very simple: the ecological diversity toward which nature tends (when not fooled around with) is inevitably more stable than the simplified systems which man has introduced in the name of productivity. An object lesson in how to handle a scientific can of worms.