In the latest of a long list of thoughtful books written by Paul and Anne Ehrlich, they have again come out swinging against the behavioural excesses of our species. Following a line of argument Paul Ehrlich launched back in 1968 with The Population Bomb and quickly followed by Population, Resources, Environment in 1970, they have substantially broadened their critique of modern society and brought it up to date. Heaven knows, they have plenty to complain about, and they do an excellent job of mobilizing the case for the prosecution.
They are convinced that science ‘can help us better understand the predicament we have created for ourselves and thereby avoid its worst consequences'. Yet, despite substantial increases in science since the late 1960s (computers, DNA, remote sensing, proliferation of high-quality field research, and so forth), the evidence they cite in this book gives scant reassurance on this point, perhaps because avoiding the worst consequences of our behaviour has much to do with politics and economics, and relatively little to do with science. Science may well provide convincing evidence about the dangers of ‘fishing down the food chain' but this has done remarkably little to change the political economy of fisheries.
They consider the lack of knowledge about our relationship with the natural world to be a ‘major contributing factor' to the deepening predicament of our species, despite dozens of scientific journals and hundreds of outstanding books on the subject. They end their prologue on an optimistic note: ‘By knowing our evolutionary past and understanding the forces that have shaped our present, we will be better positioned to fashion a more sustainable future'.
Yet the remainder of the book essentially refutes this hypothesis, drawing especially on examples in the USA. Their outstanding chapters addressing evolutionary elements of many aspects of society demonstrate that the knowledge of evolution among the scientific community, at least in the USA, is substantial. Yet the country is also a centre of debate over the non-scientific idea of ‘intelligent design', a social challenge to Darwinian evolution.
The Ehrlichs help address this seeming paradox by a stimulating discussion of religion, pointing out that even scientists need to accept some things on faith, such as that the physical laws that operated a million years ago still operate and will operate into the future indefinitely. They also suggest that religion persists at least partly because of the ‘inability of science to provide a clear basis for ethics'. They call for paying careful attention to the difficulties of perceiving deleterious gradual change and how the various belief systems in the world can help cultures evolve to meet environmental challenges. But they perhaps could also have highlighted what Stephen J. Gould called ‘punctuated equilibrium', where the gradual changes are interrupted by extreme events—in social terms, these are often considered revolutions.
The Ehrlichs have brought together a wide range of research, containing some surprising findings. One example is the sudden substantial decline in the crime rate in the USA, appearing around 1990. The Ehrlichs attribute this to the legalization of abortion in the 1970s and the resulting (hypothesized) fewer unwanted children, who often grow up to be socially handicapped adults.
They also refer back to the concern they helped raise about rapid population growth in the 1960s, based on doubts about the capacity to feed an expanding population. But the result has been a growth in food production that has significantly outstripped the growth in human population. Of course, the world still has 800 million undernourished people, yet has substantial food surpluses as well. But this good news gives them little comfort. ‘So, on average and with a given set of technologies, the addition now of each person to the population has a disproportionately negative effect on the environment as poor soils are cultivated to feed her, water is brought from more distant, more polluted sources to supply her, coal mines are dug deeper (and made more dangerous as a result) to generate electricity for her, and oil is transported further to power her car, should she have one'. While it seems a bit unfair to blame all of this on women, the general point is well taken: the easiest resources have already been tapped, and the future will be increasingly challenging. Disappointingly, the chapter on human population says nothing about its potential evolutionary impacts, given the book's overall evolutionary theme.
The Ehrlichs usefully highlight the impacts of pollutants, highlighting the decline in the ratio of male births to half the number of female births in heavily polluted Arctic and Sub-Arctic locations. But the impacts of pollution on human population growth are belied by the continuing expansion of human population in heavily polluted countries such as India and China.
Recalling their work of the 1960s the Ehrlichs rekindle the discussion of a nuclear winter, certainly with some justification. They do not reach the conclusion that a nuclear war would take care of both the population problem and global climate warming, although the alert reader will undoubtedly pose the question, at least subconsciously. Heaven forbid of course.
The justifications they give for preserving biodiversity are fairly standard rhetoric for the readers of this journal, as are the strategies to protect biodiversity. Even so, the packaging of the arguments is useful and helps to provide solid background to our standard arguments.
The Ehrlichs do not always get their geography exactly correct, for example referring to ‘Malaysia and Borneo' (the latter contains Sabah and Sarawak, significant proportions of Malaysia), and contend that the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve on the Yucatan Peninsula protects 1.8 million acres of ‘virtually untouched tropical forest', even though it is well known that the Maya civilizations a thousand years ago had cleared virtually all of the forests of the Peninsula. It is also a little odd that they make no mention of the World Heritage Convention, even though they mention that sites such as Yellowstone ‘have status as great heritage sites'. It would have been a simple matter to underline the importance of international conservation conventions in this context. Strangely, the Ehrlichs highlight the UN Conference on Environment and Development and its Agenda 21 but forget to mention the Convention on Biological Diversity (perhaps because the USA is one of the tiny handful of non-members of the Convention).
In their epilogue the Ehrlichs emphasize the importance of trade in food and essential resources in fostering a significant interdependence among countries, concluding that self-sufficiency ‘in this day and age is a myth'. But in the next paragraph, they advocate rationalizing ‘the food system to encourage consumption of foods grown locally and thereby reduce the energy-consuming process of long-distance and international transport of foods'. They offer no reconciliation of these seemingly conflicting perspectives.
Written for a semi-popular audience, The Dominant Animal is a useful compilation of some of the latest thinking on the woeful relationship between humans and the rest of nature. But ignoring the main international conservation legislation (if only to highlight its shortcomings) limits the book's utility.
