Ecological Economics 39 (2001) 163–166

Book Reviews

www.elsevier.com/locate/ecolecon

Hunting for Sustainability in Tropical Forests. Ed-ited by John G. Robinson and Elizabeth L. Bennett,Columbia University Press, New York, 2000, pp.xxi, 1–592. ISBN 0-231-10976-8 (alk. paper); 0-231-10977-6 (pbk.: alk. paper); (www.columbia.edu/cu/cup)

‘‘A goal of many studies in this volume was tomeasure whether wildlife was being killed sus-tainably, and a main conclusion was that the‘hunting of many species important to localinhabitants of tropical forests is not presentlysustainable’.’’ (p. xvi).

This substantial book is the eleventh of Colum-bia University Press’ series, Biology and ResourceManagement, edited by Michael J. Balick, An-thony B. Anderson and Kent H. Redford. Itrepresents research contributions of over 40 au-thors, including conservation biologists and socialscientists. It is an impressive academic presenta-tion with dozens of graphs and tables of measure-ments of biomass, harvest frequencies, and ratiosof species harvested. The cumulated years ofmeticulous research it represents is truly stunning.

The Preface provides a very helpful organiza-tional framework for the book, and an introduc-tory chapter outlines some of the fundamentalissues presented in the book, including a broaddefinition of hunting. The remainder of the bookis organized into four major parts, and a conclud-ing chapter. The main sections are: Part I: Biolog-ical Limits to Sustainability (Ch. 2–10); Part II:

Sociocultural Context Influencing Sustainability(Ch. 11–16); Part III: Institutional Capacity forManagement (Ch. 17–20); and Part IV: EconomicInfluences on Sustainability (Ch. 21–24). Tropicalforest regions covered in the book range fromSulawesi, Indonesia, to Central Brazil, the Philip-pines, and Congo-Zaire, Africa and many otherregions. The last chapter (Ch. 25), written by theco-editors and entitled ‘Hunting for Sustainabil-ity: The Start of a Synthesis,’ provides a compre-hensive overview.

The world’s forests and their species are threat-ened by humans today as never before. There aremany factors involved, including population en-croachment, climate change, pollution, habitat de-struction, collapse of food webs, and impacts ofintroduced species. Forest animals and birds —especially the larger species — have been particu-larly vulnerable. Although humans have beenhunting for thousands of years — at least 40 000years in tropical forests of Southeast Asia (p. 15),in many cases in the past they have been able todo so sustainably. However, the current cumula-tive effects of human population growth, habitatdestruction, technological innovations, and over-hunting, often at a commercial scale, havechanged this situation. At the same time, manyindigenous cultures have disappeared or arethreatened with extinction, or with absorbtion bythe dominant industrial western ‘mainstream’ so-ciety. Small-scale traditional resource manage-ment systems have been replaced with commercialhunting for the market economy, along with con-comitant changes in worldview and the removalof some of the culturally prescribed constraintsagainst over-exploitation.

0921-8009/01/$ - see front matter © 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

Book re�iews164

This book tells the story, sadly repeated inregion after region, for species after species, ofdegradation, depletion and extinction of wildlifepopulations by humans. There are some excep-tions, but virtually everywhere in the world, inevery tropical forest, large mammals and game-birds are losing ground, and at least part of theirloss is attributable to exploitation by hunters.Modern, more lethal and effective weapons andtechnologies, population pressure, and demandsof a seemingly insatiable commercial marketeconomy have magnified the impacts of even localindigenous communities.

Not surprisingly, the book concludes that thereis no one solution or no one group which has allthe answers and remedies against overexploitationof animals and forest resources. All of us —academics, government workers, conservationists,urban dwellers and consumers, and those of localand indigenous communities — need to work inpartnership if we are to help save many of thespecies sharing the planet with us.

As a personal preference, I find this book some-what big and difficult to handle as a softcovervolume; its too big to hold up and read, and thereader is obliged to place it on a desk. In all,Hunting for Sustainability in Tropical Forests isan excellent compendium, rich in important de-tails, and as essential reference for conversationbiologists and policy-makers alike.

Nancy TurnerSchool of En�ironmental Studies,

Uni�ersity of Victoria,Office Sedgewick C 135,

P.O. Box 1700 STN CSC,Victoria, BC,

Canada V8W 2Y2E-mail: nturner@uvic.ca

PII: S 0921 -8009 (01 )00188 -4

Agriculture, Trade, and The En�ironment: The Im-pact of Liberalization on Sustainable De�elopmentEdited by John M. Antle, Joseph N. Lekakis, andGeorge P. Zanias, Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc.,Cheltenham, UK, 1998, 272 pp. ISBN 1-85898-783-0; £59.95

Agriculture, Trade, and the En�ironment is anambitious book, whose origins trace to a 1996conference on ‘‘European Agriculture at theCrossroads: Competition and Sustainability’’ heldat the University of Crete. The resulting volume,however, is much more than a conference pro-ceedings. Thirteen chapters that comprise thebook have been reworked considerably and theresult is a wide-ranging compendium on agricul-turally related environmental issues. Sixteen of the23 contributors are from Europe and, notwith-standing the book’s more general title, the variouschapters are directed almost entirely toward theEuropean Union (EU) or individual Europeancountries.

The book’s breadth is both its strength and itsweakness. The four main sections in the volumeare devoted, respectively, to the theory of sustain-ability, environmental implications of EU agricul-tural policy, environmental case studies ofparticular EU member countries, and environ-mental issues arising from an enlarged EU. Cov-erage ranges from the very theoretical essay byPanos Fousekis on a two-country, one-commod-ity, two-factor model with process-generated pol-lution, to Consuelo Varela-Ortega’s appliedprogramming model designed to analyze environ-mental effects of the Common Agricultural Policyon representative farms in Spain.

It would be difficult for anyone interested inEuropean environmental issues not to find severalchapters of interest. At the same time, most read-ers will have difficulty in discovering the linkagesamong the contributions. The focus of the existingvolume changes—sometimes awkwardly— fromagriculture to the environment to domestic policyto international trade, and from theory to casestudies. Readers expecting a ‘linear’ volume deal-ing systematically with agriculture, trade, and theenvironment will be disappointed; they will alsofind that the essays collectively do not add up toa comprehensive treatise on sustainable develop-ment.

Preferences among chapters are likely to varyamong readers, depending mainly on their pro-clivities for theory or application. Mine lean to-ward the applied side, and I found three essays ofparticular interest.