The World According To Pimm: A Scientist Audits the Earth

Ever since the publication of Rachel Carson'sSilent Springin the '60s, we've known that human activity has had detrimental effects on the environment. Yet after four decades of growing awareness of environmental problems, we still see passionate disagreement between activists and business interests over what should be done. Much of the impasse stems from the fact that the problems are difficult to quantify. How do we assess the impact of habitat loss on species, when we haven't even counted them all, and we are just beginning to understand how they interact? How do we determine how great a population the ecosystem can bear, when we have yet to quantify the depletion of resources? How do we know if current extinction rates are excessive if we don't know what "normal" extinction rates are? Without scientific, numerical information we cannot make headway on these issues. Working on the front lines of conservation biology since the early '70s, Stuart Pimm is one of the pioneers whose work has put the "science" in environmental science. His research covers the reasons why species become extinct, how fast they do so, the global patterns of habitat loss and species extinction, the role of introduced species in causing extinction and, importantly, the management consequences of this research. InThe World According to Pimm, he leads us on a tour of the world and shows us how science can take us deeper into these issues. We see how humans impact has affected Hawaii since its first colonization by the Polynesians; how centuries of persistent agriculture have affected drylands; how forests have feared and how they are likely to fare in the near future; how future population pressures will affect our freshwater supply, of which we already use 50%. We journey across the oceans and discover where their resources lie, and we take a look inside the endangered species ledger, which conservationists are reluctantly filling with "EX"ex, for extinct. Though he never preaches or scolds, Pimm is keeping careful accounts, with hard numbers, of what we are taking from the earth. He is also wonderfully descriptive, full of appreciation for the riches of the planet and the excitement that increasing scientific knowledge always brings, but also urgently hopeful that our growing understanding of our world will enable us to save it.

Stuart Pimm, Ph.D., is a professor of conservation biology at the Center for Environmental Research and Conservation at Columbia University in New York. He has been the recipient of a Pew Scholarship for Conservation and the Environment (in 1993) and an Aldo Leopold Leadership Fellowship (in 1999). Very active at the interface between conservation and policy, Pimm has been called upon to testify before both the House and Senate Committees on the re-authorization of the Endangered Species Act, and has been instrumental in the recent major initiative to restore the Florida Everglades. Pimm is the author of more than 150 scientific papers, as well as three books, and numerous popular articles and book reviews in such publications as New Scientist, The Sciences, Nature, and Science. He maintains a very active international lecturing schedule, and appears on television regularly, recently on such shows as ABC News with Peter Jennings, CNN, the Discover Channel, two program on PBS, TV Asahi (Japan), ABC (Australia), and elsewhere. Ed Wilson (of Harvard) and Pimm were the subjects of a BBC Horizon (appears in the USA as PBS's Nova) in 1996 entitled Nature's Numbers. Pimm's activities are routinely reported in the national press (twice on the front page of the New York Times in the last year) and throughout the world. On average, he is interviewed by the press several times each week.