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Sustainable development of the biosphere
292 certainly not alone with difficulties arising from the paucity of information and the natural randomness of airshed behaviour.
Brdtigny-sur-Orge (France)
Michel Benarie
Physico-Chemical Behaviour of Atmospheric Pollutants, edited by G. Angeletti and G. Restelli, D. Reidel, Dordrecht, The Netherlands, 1987, 809 pp. Price: Dfl. 320.00 (US$149.00). This volume contains all the papers (i.e. oral + poster) presented at the Fourth European Symposium on Physico-Chemical Behaviour of Atmospheric Pollutants organized at Stresa, Italy, within the framework of the Concerted Action COST 611 of the R&D Programme on Environmental Research of the Commission of the European Communities. (The Volume of the Third Symposium held at Varese, Italy in 1984 has been reviewed in The Science of the Total Environment, 46 (1985) 286.) The 82 papers are organized according to the five sectors into which the scientific content of the Concerted Action is divided: Analysis of pollutants Chemical and photochemical reactions, mechanisms and rates Aerosol characterization and particle formation - Pollutant cycles Transport and modelling. The leitmotiv through these five main headings is the physico-chemistry of acid deposition and the formation of photochemical oxidants in the troposphere. For a rapid overview, each section is preceded by a two to five page summary by the session Chairperson representing the critical summary of the research exposed in more detail in the subsequent group of papers. The volume represents a valuable and up-to-date compendium of the ongoing research in Europe in the whole field of physico-chemistry of the atmosphere. -
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Brdtigny-sur-Orge (France)
Michel Benarie
Sustainable Development of the Biosphere, edited by W.C. Clark and R.E. Munn, published on behalf of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis by Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, U.K., 1986, 491 pp. Price: £25.00.
-
There is a strong anthropomorphic bias in these "sustainability" discussions people worry about nature primarily in terms of what nature means for people's own welfare. The Austrian-born American biophysicist Alfred J. Lotka wrote in 1924: "Whatever may be the ultimate course of events, the present is an eminently -
293 atypical epoch. Economically, we are living on our capital; biologically we are changing radically the complexion of our share in the carbon cycle by throwing into the a t m o s p h e r e . . , ten times as much carbon dioxide as in the natural biological process of b r e a t h i n g . . . ". In the meantime, energy (= carbon dioxide) production increased about five-fold. What were once straightforward questions of ecological preservation versus economic growth now reflect complex linkages - - witness the feedbacks among energy and crop production, deforestation and climatic change and so on. This book is the outcome of the first phase of the international programme Ecologically Sustainable Development of the Biosphere of the IIASA, Laxenburg, Austria. It involves a collaborative network of historians, engineers, geographers, environmental scientists, economists, managers and policy people from around the world. The scope of the programme is to emphasize a synoptic perspective, a long-term time horizon, a regional to global scale, and a management orientation. Concerns about possible environmental limits to human development extend back to Plato's Critias. The terms of the modern debate were defined by Malthus. Events proved Malthus wrong, at least for the most of the world over most of the last two hundred years. But, as Williams and Timmermann point out in their contributions to this volume, the Malthusian (determinist) vision has nonetheless persisted, shaping the thinking of subsequent generations. The opposite pole is possibilist in its attitude towards nature, optimistic in its view of technological advance and the sufficiency of resources and generally concerned with technical and managerial problems of development. This volume attempts neither to eliminate, nor even to balance the biases these different perspectives entail. Rather, as urged by Thompson (Chapter 16 of this volume), the tendency is for pluralism t h a t keeps biases explicit while benefitting from the multiple perspectives they generate. After a lucid and legible (also for non-specialists) overview by W.C. Clark, Part Two discusses h u m a n development. Part Three is about the world environment and Part Four relates to social response. Part Five contains the methods for synthesis of usable knowledge. A special merit of the discussion is to go beyond the evolutionary paradigm and the surprise-free linear or exponential extrapolations and to discuss how far methods, concepts and models can be developed towards a more realistic behaviour likely to be encountered in atmosphere-biosphere, resource management or technology-economy interactions. The volume is splendidly produced, with clear tables, graphs, charts and flowsheets in colour and well indexed. A fountainhead for the specialist and also very interesting reading for many scientists from other fields, more or less concerned with the impact of Man on the biosphere, the past and future of intelligent and social life on this globe.
Brdtigny°sur-Orge (France)
Michel Benarie
Brdtigny-sur-Orge (France)
Michel Benarie
Physico-Chemical Behaviour of Atmospheric Pollutants, edited by G. Angeletti and G. Restelli, D. Reidel, Dordrecht, The Netherlands, 1987, 809 pp. Price: Dfl. 320.00 (US$149.00). This volume contains all the papers (i.e. oral + poster) presented at the Fourth European Symposium on Physico-Chemical Behaviour of Atmospheric Pollutants organized at Stresa, Italy, within the framework of the Concerted Action COST 611 of the R&D Programme on Environmental Research of the Commission of the European Communities. (The Volume of the Third Symposium held at Varese, Italy in 1984 has been reviewed in The Science of the Total Environment, 46 (1985) 286.) The 82 papers are organized according to the five sectors into which the scientific content of the Concerted Action is divided: Analysis of pollutants Chemical and photochemical reactions, mechanisms and rates Aerosol characterization and particle formation - Pollutant cycles Transport and modelling. The leitmotiv through these five main headings is the physico-chemistry of acid deposition and the formation of photochemical oxidants in the troposphere. For a rapid overview, each section is preceded by a two to five page summary by the session Chairperson representing the critical summary of the research exposed in more detail in the subsequent group of papers. The volume represents a valuable and up-to-date compendium of the ongoing research in Europe in the whole field of physico-chemistry of the atmosphere. -
-
-
-
Brdtigny-sur-Orge (France)
Michel Benarie
Sustainable Development of the Biosphere, edited by W.C. Clark and R.E. Munn, published on behalf of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis by Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, U.K., 1986, 491 pp. Price: £25.00.
-
There is a strong anthropomorphic bias in these "sustainability" discussions people worry about nature primarily in terms of what nature means for people's own welfare. The Austrian-born American biophysicist Alfred J. Lotka wrote in 1924: "Whatever may be the ultimate course of events, the present is an eminently -
293 atypical epoch. Economically, we are living on our capital; biologically we are changing radically the complexion of our share in the carbon cycle by throwing into the a t m o s p h e r e . . , ten times as much carbon dioxide as in the natural biological process of b r e a t h i n g . . . ". In the meantime, energy (= carbon dioxide) production increased about five-fold. What were once straightforward questions of ecological preservation versus economic growth now reflect complex linkages - - witness the feedbacks among energy and crop production, deforestation and climatic change and so on. This book is the outcome of the first phase of the international programme Ecologically Sustainable Development of the Biosphere of the IIASA, Laxenburg, Austria. It involves a collaborative network of historians, engineers, geographers, environmental scientists, economists, managers and policy people from around the world. The scope of the programme is to emphasize a synoptic perspective, a long-term time horizon, a regional to global scale, and a management orientation. Concerns about possible environmental limits to human development extend back to Plato's Critias. The terms of the modern debate were defined by Malthus. Events proved Malthus wrong, at least for the most of the world over most of the last two hundred years. But, as Williams and Timmermann point out in their contributions to this volume, the Malthusian (determinist) vision has nonetheless persisted, shaping the thinking of subsequent generations. The opposite pole is possibilist in its attitude towards nature, optimistic in its view of technological advance and the sufficiency of resources and generally concerned with technical and managerial problems of development. This volume attempts neither to eliminate, nor even to balance the biases these different perspectives entail. Rather, as urged by Thompson (Chapter 16 of this volume), the tendency is for pluralism t h a t keeps biases explicit while benefitting from the multiple perspectives they generate. After a lucid and legible (also for non-specialists) overview by W.C. Clark, Part Two discusses h u m a n development. Part Three is about the world environment and Part Four relates to social response. Part Five contains the methods for synthesis of usable knowledge. A special merit of the discussion is to go beyond the evolutionary paradigm and the surprise-free linear or exponential extrapolations and to discuss how far methods, concepts and models can be developed towards a more realistic behaviour likely to be encountered in atmosphere-biosphere, resource management or technology-economy interactions. The volume is splendidly produced, with clear tables, graphs, charts and flowsheets in colour and well indexed. A fountainhead for the specialist and also very interesting reading for many scientists from other fields, more or less concerned with the impact of Man on the biosphere, the past and future of intelligent and social life on this globe.
Brdtigny°sur-Orge (France)
Michel Benarie