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lined is a rather provocative one. For example, I get a sense that physical force becomes a necessary ingredient in order to implement part of the four principles brought forward in this chapter. I also find the argument of removing local people from protected areas unethical. That such a strategy can be justified on grounds that future generations have the right to enjoy protected areas is a rather strange argument. I doubt whether the intensification of agriculture, improvement of urban infrastructure, and industrial development, as suggested by the authors, will provide previous park residents with alternative ways of income. We have witnessed the outcome of such strategies before.
Considering that tropical forests harbor more than one-half of all known species on a surface area less than 7% of the Earth’s land surface, it is indeed important to protect tropical forests. Ecologists and nature conservationists all agree on this. How-ever, readingLast Standhas not convinced me that the sustainable use approach has failed. It is simply too early to rule it out. The book also lacks sufficient empirical arguments and data to be convincing of this failure. This is not to say that I do not appreciate this book. On the contrary, I find it provocative enough to stimulate an intellectual discourse on this important subject.
References
Bale´e, W., 1992. People of the fallow: a historical ecology of foraging in lowland South America. In: Redford, K.H., Padoch, C. (Eds.), Conservation of Neotropical Forests. Working from Traditional Resource Use. Columbia Uni-versity Press, New York, pp. 35 – 57.
Gadgil, M., Guha, R., 1993. This Fissured Land: An Ecologi-cal History of India. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Go´mes-Pompa, A., Kaus, A., 1992. Taming the wilderness
myth. Environmental policy and education are currently based on Western beliefs about nature rather than on reality. Bioscience 42, 271 – 279.
Lindbladh, M., Bradshaw, R., 1998. The origin of present forest composition and pattern in southern Sweden. Jour-nal of Biogeography 25, 463 – 477.
Posey, D.A., 1992. Interpreting and applying the ‘reality’ of indigenous concepts: what is necessary to learn from the natives? In: Redford, K.H., Padoch, C. (Eds.), Conserva-tion of Neotropical Forests. Working from TradiConserva-tional Resource Use. Columbia University Press, New York, pp. 21 – 34.
Primack, R.B., 1993. Essentials of Conservation Biology. Sin-auer, Sunderland, MA.
Johan Colding Beijer International Institute of Ecological Economics, Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Stockholm, Sweden PII: S 0 9 2 1 - 8 0 0 9 ( 0 0 ) 0 0 1 2 7 - 0
Ecological Scale: Theory and Applications, Edited by D.L. Peterson and V.T. Parker, Columbia Uni-versity Press, 1998. ISBN 0-231-10503-7
This book is difficult reading. And reviewing. It is about one of the more difficult problems in ecology — that of scale — and in addition, it attempts to incorporate scaling issues in manage-ment, which is even more daunting given the difficulties that ecology has with scales in the first place.
So what is scale, and why should we care? The term ‘scale’ has, as the editors emphasise, been used with multiple meanings. It usually refers to mea-surements and dimensions in space and time (i.e. extent, grain, size and resolution), but has also referred to the level of organisation of a system. In addition, scaling problems with respect to resolu-tion may arise in other contexts than space and time. Given the multitude of meanings, a book with as many authors as chapters is bound to provide quite a diverse overview of different ways to examine scale problems within ecology.
The importance of scaling considerations is im-mense. One of the major problems in ecology is how we can use information from easily studied experimental systems, which usually have small spatial extent (usually less than some square me-tres) and short duration (most experiments have a duration of one to a few years), to examine and manage larger spatial units (from agricultural farms, forest landscapes and seascapes to the whole earth). Also, the central issues on the linkages between individual behaviour and population dy-namics, and between population and community dynamics and ecosystem dynamics, involves
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many difficult problems associated with scales and resolution. In addition, many management prob-lems arise because the spatial and temporal scales of management units and decision-making too often do not match the spatio-temporal scales of ecological processes.
In the sense of covering the state of the art, the editors have been quite successful, although the coverage is somewhat patchy. The chapters are of uneven quality. Some are provocative (e.g. Allen’s chapter titled ‘The Landscape Level is Dead’). Some are wordy and could have been summarised in a few sentences. Some are very insightful (e.g. several chapters dealing with scaling concepts and management of ecosystems), and some are cer-tainly informative but a bit too technical for the general reader (e.g. Dutilleul’s cookbook chapters on incorporating scale in experimental studies). Overall, the book will provide a valuable source of information for the increasing number of ecol-ogists working on scaling problems.
Reading the book, I found myself having strong difficulties with the view of ecosystems as ‘adaptive systems’, which is implicit or explicit in several chapters. For most ecologists, ‘adaptive’ implies selective units that evolve by natural selec-tion. Ecosystems may, of course, be adaptive units in this sense, but most ecosystem ecologists using this term have something else, much more vague, in mind. Evolution at the ecosystem level is a highly controversial issue. It would be appropriate if those ecosystem ecologists who use the term ‘adaptive’ changed their terminology, at least to simplify cross-disciplinary discussions with biolo-gists with a more evolutionary background. The resolution of this problem is, of course, related to
scales and the hierarchical levels in nature, so I feel my suggestion is central to the contents of the book.
Some chapters stand out as especially informa-tive, also for ecological economists. Hobbs’ chap-ter on how to match management to appropriate natural scales should be read by anyone interested in sustainability and the relation between science and management. Hobbs discusses the frequent mismatches between ecological and management units, and that humans often impose a non-natu-ral geometry to landscapes has no relation to the scales at which populations and ecosystems oper-ate. These are questions that soon will come into the forefront in natural resource management.
All in all, the book is quite a mixed bag. It is very useful for ecologists who do work of rele-vance for larger-scale processes and management, and it should be a good book for a seminar series; for example, for graduate students. Those from other disciplines may do better in getting the book from the library and reading the chapters on scaling issues in management, and perhaps some other chapters they may find interesting. We are still eagerly waiting for a book that introduces and synthesises scaling problems in an accessible and comprehensive way.
Jan Bengtsson Department of Ecology and Crop Production Science, SLU, Box7063,
750 07 Uppsala,
Sweden PII: S 0 9 2 1 - 8 0 0 9 ( 0 0 ) 0 0 1 2 8 - 2
