Book reviews / Environmental Science & Policy 6 (2003) 547–550 549

At present few laws within the US or in other countriestreat riparian areas as unique physical and natural ecosys-tems in their own right. Rather, what protection they re-ceive is an indirect consequence of water-quality protectionor habitat management. This book argues compellingly thatthey need specific regulatory protection and much better andmore informed management.

This is a comprehensive book on riparian ecology, withnumerous case studies and references. It would have beenuseful if there was an index of subjects and taxa and the ref-erences had been gathered at the end. Even so, it will makean excellent textbook and reference book, and hopefully willelevate riparian areas to the protected status that wetlandsnow have in the US. Since all the same problems and oppor-tunities are present internationally, this book should appealacross borders to all those interested in the functioning andecological status of our world’s rivers.

Edward P. GlennDepartment of Soil, Water and Environmental Science

University of Arizona, 2601 East Airport DriveTucson, AZ 85706, USA

Tel.: +1-520-626-2664; fax:+1-520-573-0852E-mail address: eglenn@ag.arizona.edu (E.P. Glenn)

doi:10.1016/j.envsci.2003.08.003

Life Support: The Environment and Human HealthMichael McCalley, MIT Press, Boston, 2002, US$ 19.95/GBP 11.96, ISBN: 0-262-63257-8

This edited volume builds upon an earlier textCriticalCondition Human Health and the Environment, with the re-vision of existing chapters and the addition of 10 chapters.Each chapter offers a state of the art review and detailedbibliography of the impact of 11 classes of environmentalrisk on human health. The chapters cover an ambitiousarray of environmental risks; including urban and trans-boundary air pollution, heavy metals, endocrine disruptors,carcinogens and electromagnetic radiation. Other chaptersin the volume address issues of vulnerability, the impactsof war on the environment and the relevance of regulatoryconcepts such as the precautionary principle.

The book is accessible and whilst it is not an introductorytext, the authors are careful to explain both the methodolo-gies used in risk assessment and the limits of scientific re-search as applied to each issue. It provides the same kindof high-level snapshot as various atlases of human and eco-nomic development and is also extremely well referenced.It is likely to appeal both to policy makers who need arapid but credible introduction to issues in a particular fieldand to social scientists who need higher-level summaries ofscience issues. It will also serve as a useful reference textfor environmental science students at the undergraduate andgraduate levels.

The chapters are all consistently biased towards the badnews in a particular field. For instance, there is scant atten-tion to some of the inevitable benefits of climate change onhuman health. Since the majority of the text is devoted tothe natural sciences, there is little analysis of the underly-ing institutional causes of environmental contamination andpollution. As a result, issues related to the political geog-raphy of vulnerability are not addressed and far more con-cern is expressed about the raw impact of population growththan of the impact of changing consumption patterns. Noneof these concerns should detract from what is an accessibleand useful reference text.

James TanseySustainable Development Research Institute

University of British Columbia, 1924 West MallVancouver, Canada V6T 1Z2

Tel.: +1-604-822-0400; fax:+1-604-822-9191E-mail address: jtansey@sdri.ubc.ca (J. Tansey)

doi:10.1016/j.envsci.2003.07.006

The Earth’s Biosphere: Evolution, Dynamics andChangeVaclav Smil, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2002, 346 pp.,$32.95, ISBN 0262194724

In 1980, I was trying to understand how the Chinesemeet their energy needs. I was advised to read Smil asthe authority on the subject (Smil, 1976, 1984; Smil andKnowland, 1980). Since then, I have come to find that whereI hope to begin learning Smil has already identified key ques-tions and applied a systematic approach to the synthesis ofwhat is known. He has done this in biospheric cycles of car-bon, nitrogen, and sulfur (Smil, 1985), energy (Smil, 1991,1999), food (Smil, 2000), and the impacts of humans on thebiosphere (Smil, 1993, 1994, 1997). This volume draws onmany of these remarkable books and much more.

I find three aspects of Smil’s scholarship very endearing:(a) systematic integration of many fields, (b) appreciationof the primacy of accuracy over precision, and (c) respectfor the history of science. The disciplines in this book rangefrom genetics to geology. The scales span a range from thesub-molecular to the inter-stellar. Smil’s attention to orderof magnitude accuracy dispels the false precision so oftenfound in other books. The focus here is on reasoned quan-tifications based on what is known and what remains to beunderstood and quantified. Finally, the author retells the his-tory of our understanding of the biosphere—starting withwhen the term “biosphere” was coined by Eduard Suess in1875, to the systematic study of life on earth articulatedby Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky in 1928 (Vernadskiæi andMcMenamin, 1998), to the latest scientific publications onthe many different aspects of the biosphere.