Fragile Dominion: Complexity and the Commons

Levin, an internationally renowned mathematical ecologist at Princeton University, believes that the earth is under severe environmental assault. His basic premise for coping with this problem is perfectly clear: ""to have any hope of dealing with such a complex combination of threats to our survival, we must study the Earth as an integrated physical and biological system."" To this end, he provides a lucid introduction to ecological thought, focusing on how ecosystems and ecological communities are structured, with an emphasis on biodiversity. By answering a series of questions (""How has biodiversity arisen? What maintains it? And how fragile is it and the services it provides?""), Levin introduces readers to current ecological theories, summarizing the primary literature in a form accessible even to scientific neophytes. Through these ideas, he discusses how ecosystems achieve stability and how resistant they may or may not be to human interference. Unfortunately, Levin's final chapter on the ""eight commandments of environmental management"" is too short to be useful. The commandments (reduce uncertainty, expect surprise, maintain heterogeneity, sustain modularity, preserve redundancy, tighten feedback loops, build trust and do unto others...), while interesting, are presented so generally that it is unclear how they can be used to formulate tangible policy. Nevertheless, Levin ably illustrates how the evolving science of complexity can shed light on the earth's ecology. (May)