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Target Readership	Sen. Secondary					For help with criteria, click here
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Contents:

1 - The environment and the history of environmental concerns; 2 - The physical environment; 3 - The biosphere: the living environment; 4 - Demography and world population growth; 5 - Society, resources, technology and the environment; 6 - Human use of the land and its environment; 7 - Threats to wildlife and plants; 8 - Threats to the availability and quality of water; 9 - Drought, famine and desertification; 10 - Air pollution and acid rain; 11 - Ozone depletion and global warming; 12- Problems. prospects and solutions.

Review:

The sophistication of environmental and ecological ideas today is such that there is a wide range of specialist texts dealing with almost every notion from beginner to advanced. Despite this there's always going to be a need for a text with tries to encompass a wide range of ideas: to get people started at the most basic level and encourage them to go further. Although this idea is simple in theory it requires considerable skills in balancing the right amount of each element to produce a coherent whole that is reasonably accurate.

Here, we have one of the recent attempts at this difficult field. The opening chapter deals with an overview of the concept 'environment' but continues with a brief review of key ideas in the environmental movement. The aim is to locate current concerns in a historical context and although there might be arguments over detail the basic elements are there. Chapter two looks at the abiotic environment with studies of the lithosphere (where examples of issues in certain landscapes are given), hydrosphere and atmosphere. In addition to key ideas, there's a series of boxes linking issues with the physical features to give a connection between theory and practice. This theme continues into chapter three where the biosphere is the focus. There are three main areas here: soils, basic ecology and biomes. There's not the detail of chapter two nor are the ecological aspects given prominence but a good range of terms is covered. Chapter four turns to human population with a good standard treatment of growth, location and change. By this stage the reader has a good overview of the main elements of the planet: subsequent chapters look more at certain issues. We start with chapter five and resources. As in previous chapters there's a good basic introduction of the topic and then some discussion about more prudent resource use such as recycling. The next topic is land use where we have a very good overview of key land uses and the environmental impacts they have. The issues chosen e.g. nuclear waste, airports, are few in number but very topical. Chapter 7 examines issues facing wildlife. Here, there is an excellent overview of the situation covering both a wide range of ecosystems and species alongside the main wildlife issues we're currently facing. A similarly good section on water follows. There's the usual freshwater issues of pollution and scarcity and also a good recap of marine problems which have fallen out of favour recently. Given the current situation in Africa, chapter 10s look at drought and famine is useful. Although relatively brief it does cover the main aspects of global drought and the resulting issues of famine and desertification. Interestingly, chapter 10 looks at both air pollution and acid rain although one could argue that the latter is very much part of the former! Semantics aside this area seen less work of late with publicity going to global warming instead so it's useful to see a roundup of some of the issues we still face. The global warming debate gets an airing in chapter 11 along with ozone depletion which seems increasingly to be linked in so many texts. Finally, there's a very brief foray into where we might be heading.

This is a fair attempt at a notoriously difficult area to deal with. Chapters have a range of useful learning ideas such as an initial set of terms, boxes for examples, further reading suggestions and questions. On the plus side there's a very wide range of issues covered and the basic description of the key elements of the 'four spheres' is to be commended as theory is often neglected in the rush for current examples. The text is definitely global in extent with a huge range of cases spanning all continents usually from a number of perspectives. A slight downside is the fact that chapters tend to be uneven with the physical side getting a greater treatment than the biological aspects. However, with any number of good ecology texts to fill in the gaps this can be remedied easily. What would draw in readers is the range of ideas, the clarity of expression and the fairly upbeat tone where problems are teamed with solutions.