1 comments about Travel Medicine: Tales Behind the Science (Advances in Tourism Research).

1. This book is a fascinating way to show the differents problems in the practice of travel medicine and the important personal experience to face with.
   It's useful to people want to know how to practice this unique specialty well

No comments about Cultivating Biodiversity.

No comments about The Economics of Climate Change Policies: Macroeconomic Effects, Structural Adjustments and Technological Change (Sustainability and Innovation).

3 comments about The Growth Illu$ion: How Economic Growth Has Enriched the Few, Impoverished the Many and Endangered the Planet.

1. Richard Douthwaite has written an important book. In this updated version of his 1992 classic of the same name, he brings the evidence he has amassed of growth's downside up to the present. If anyone reading the book does not come to question the unexamined assumption most of us hold that growth is a good thing, then he is indeed delusional. Though other growth heretics, such as Herman Daly, have made many of the same arguments as Douthwaite, I know of no book which covers so many of growth's unfortunate side effects or documents them so well, from the inadequacy of GNP as a measure of well-being through the decline in public health in recent decades to the slap in the face of our growth-oriented society administered by the refugees from Tristan da Cunha. Douthwaite uses the history of Britain over the last 200 years to document growth's ambivalent contribution to human betterment, finding it as instructive a guide as Marx found it to be for analyzing capitalism 150 years earlier. Included in the book are chapters on the consequences of growth in his native Ireland and in contemporary Holland and India, chapters enlivened by his direct personal involvement in these countries. It is regrettable that more of his insights do not come from the American experience, both because of the United States' remarkable history of growth and because of its premiere position in the world today as the foremost proponent and most dogmatic practitioner of the growth doctrine. Apparently, this is not where Douthwaite's life experience led him to direct his attentions. Hopefully, in a future book he will.



2. This marvellous book should be compulsory reading for every government leader and every economics student, since we seem to have already exceeded the guidelines established in Kyoto for global warming . The phrase "grow or die" will take some time to fade. Douthwaite's book could help to achieve this paradigm shift.



3. Would like to express that this book should not only be compulsory reading for every government leader but for every citizen in the developed world, particularly the United States. Excellent book and very well supported by data. A thriller with no foreseeable end!

No comments about Economic Valuation of River Systems (New Horizons in Environmental Economics Series).

No comments about Acequia Culture: Water, Land, and Community in the Southwest.

No comments about The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination.

5 comments about In a Dark Wood: The Fight over Forests and the New Tyranny of Ecology.

1. My review below had some words excised by some unknown computer demon. Here are the last two paragraphs in their entirety.

   These errors, perhaps indicative of a need for greater skill among Houghton Mifflin's editing staff, would be excusable were it not that Chase seems to extend the same careless lackadaisy to allegations more serious than the spelling of a name. He asserts as fact the idea that Earth Firsters called the family of a logger killed on the job to say "he had it coming." What's his source for this allegation? Interviews with two unrelated timber industry advocates. Maybe such a hideously insensitive call happened and maybe it didn't, but Chase couldn't be bothered to corroborate the assertion - by asking the family, for instance - before stating it as bald fact. At another point, Chase castigates environmentalists who sabotage logging equipment as "destroying property of people who make far less money than they do." Oh, really? Did Chase survey those green miscreants and obtain their W-2s for the year? Or is the assertion like so many others in the book: unsupported assertions that bolster his prejudices?

   I'm all for criticism of the environmental movement, and I almost always enjoy reading books by people I disagree with. But it's one thing to have an ideological axe to grind: it's another to slam that axe so carelessly to the grindstone that it won't cut fog. The two or three good points Chase makes about modern environmentalism are lost in that fog. Chase should have known better.




2. While I do think there is a bit of a right slant to this work, some of the factual information given did seem to make sense, and was information I was not aware of before.

   This book lost me on some section, and others had me riveted. Over all I did enjoy my experience and felt I learned alot.




3. I found this book to be fraught with factual errors, and was most notable for the omissions of inconvenient facts. This book is intended to give us the picture of a gentleman who is a moderate, and a voice of reason against eco-terror, but instead what I found was a thinly disguised argument in favor of clear cutting - but the author cannot even remain consistent with that argument, as most of his examples of sustainable systems are drawn from areas where selective cutting has been practiced. Many of the misrepresentations that are evident here are easy to spot if you are willing to research the vast array of literature available on this subject, but the majority of his audience is not going to be able to take the sort of time to thoroughly research both sides of the question. Don't waste your time.



4. While the author does an admirable job of thoroughly outlining one particular version of the history of the ecological/conservancy movement and of the fallacious assumptions in the popular spiritually-overtoned meanings of "ecology" and "ecosystem" within the USA, obvious flaws in this book include the lack: of evidence for his own assertions, of positive elements in the history, of any alternative suggestions to the efforts he critiques, and of any acknowledged culpability for man due to man's science-enhanced unnatural fecundity and destructiveness or man's innate avarice.



5. Other reviewers have noted Alston Chase's biases, though it took my wife the zoologist to point out just how dishonestly he supports them. He claims that nature is subject to drastic change without human intervention and that simple ecosystems are no more unstable than complex ones. He gives as examples (on page 108):

   - The elephants in Tsavo National Park, whose population exploded when it was established, so much so that the elephants ate almost all the vegetation. He doesn't mention that vast habitat destruction took place outside the park, as well as uncontrolled poaching.

   - Moose and wolf populations on Isle Royale, which do indeed very wildly. But that's as simple an ecosystem as you can get short of ferns in the sunlight: one predator, one prey.

   - Peruvian anchovies and Maine menhaden, whose populations crashed in the 1970s and 1960s. He doesn't mention that they were being fished unrestrainedly.

   So all his examples show either the effects of human intervention or of a simple ecosystem, proving just the opposite of his claims.

   Additionally, he claims that only six bird species have gone extinct in North America and Europe since 1600. My wife can name five that have gone extinct in North America just since 1914. And that's not even counting the passenger pigeon, which was once the most populous bird in the world, now extinct thanks solely to human activity.

   After that, it's impossible to believe anything Alston Chase says, which means there's not much point in reading this book.

No comments about Cutting Green Tape: Toxic Pollutants, Environmental Regulation, and the Law.

No comments about Water For Food, Water For Life: A Comprehensive Assessment of Water Management in Agriculture.