Agricultural and Forest Meteorology 102 (2000) 69
Book review
Temperate Agroforestry Systems
A.M. Gordon, S.M. Newman (Eds.); CAB Inter-national, 1997
The editors of this book have been major contribu-tors to the recent promotion of agroforestry as a land use suitable to temperate North America, and for that they rightly deserve credit. This book is their effort to globalize this process by expanding their focus to other temperate regions, and includes chapters on Eu-rope, Asia (China), Australia, New Zealand and South America (Patagonia), in addition to one on North America. An introductory and a conclusion/synthesis chapter round out the total to eight. The chapters are all reviews in nature, with the exception of Chapter 7 (Patagonia), which is a case study.
Simply put, covering the entire Temperate Zone is hard to do in six substantive chapters. It is hardly surprising then that most of the chapters are primar-ily descriptive in the broadest sense, and generally provide nothing new to the science of agroforestry. Unfortunately, Chapters 2, 3 and 4 all spend a high proportion of space describing variations on what is essentially the same type of silvopastoral system, cattle/sheep grazed with pine. As pointed out by the authors of Chapter 4, basic research information is not the limiting factor to the expansion of this type of sys-tem in Australia, which is essentially also true for the southeastern US and New Zealand. It might have been more efficient, at least in this case, to focus on the system and not the continent or country. The same can be said for windbreaks, a subject that arises in several chapters. A chapter dedicated to the construction and management of windbreaks, including a theoretical treatment of wind dynamics, in addition to fewer highly documented case studies, would have reduced redundancies and increased the information content and usefulness of the book. As it is in these and other
cases (e.g., pest management), readers must search through several chapters to themselves synthesize in-formation on specific systems that may have broader application.
Chapters 5 (China) and 7 provide the greatest amount of information that will likely be new to most readers, although at least in the case of China, many agroforestry practices are ancient. In fact, an emergent general theme in the field of agroforestry is that many, if not most, practices are revivals (or variations) of practices used in the past. Interestingly, an unstated secondary theme that emerges from this book is that agroforestry in the temperate zone is now often being used primarily as a strategy for re-habilitating highly degraded ecosystems (e.g., China, Patagonia, Australia). An analysis of why existing information regarding agroforestry is not being more widely applied in the Temperate Zone might also have been a worthy addition.
I was surprised to see so few US participants, al-though this may in fact reflect a relatively low level of US commitment to agroforestry research. I initially assumed that the book had arisen from a recent bien-nial N.A. Temperate Agroforestry Workshops, as there are seven ‘contributors’ listed who are not among the 18 authors, but there is little obvious connection.
This book will be most useful as a general reference to information on selected topics in Temperate Zone agroforestry. Its usefulness as a course-level textbook may be limited by its lack of analytical rigor, but it would be useful as an overview for those new to the field.
Henry L. Gholz
School of Forest Resources and Conservation University of Florida Gainesville, FL 32611, USA
Accepted 5 January 2000 0168-1923/00/$ – see front matter © 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
