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The World According to Pimm: A Scientist Audits the Earth. STUART PIMM. McGraw-Hill, New York. 296 pp.
Catastrophic change in earth systems is a fascinating topic. What could be more captivating in earth history than episodic ocean anoxia that snuffs out marine life, pseudo chaotic climate cycles that melt our polar ice caps, or asteroid impacts that exterminate vast portions of earth's biodiversity? Unlike these historic, fantastic catastrophes, however, pondering contemporary catastrophic change is no fun at all. The litany of contemporary change includes global warming, ozone loss, soil erosion, deforestation, desertification, collapsing fisheries, and disappearing aquifers. These are scientifically complex, politically charged and contentious topics. This is the stuff of the prophesies of environmental doom and the subject of numerous books. Stuart Pimm's, The World According to Pimm, is one such book, but with a unique approach that makes it a valuable addition to global change literature.
The most challenging aspect of writing about contemporary earth-system change is its numbers and it is here that Pimm succeeds where others fail. Analyzing earth systems involves constructing and reviewing spreadsheets of technical quantities that are incomprehensible in their magnitude. Numbers like 160,000 km2 of rain forest destroyed per year, 6 billion people need 6 trillion tons of water per year to survive, people consume one billion tons of plant biomass annually, 15,000 km2 of irrigated cropland are destroyed by salination each year, and so on, quickly sap our mental facilities. Pimm, a leading environmental scientist at Columbia University, takes an entirely different approach to the problem. The World According to Pimm, in spite of its title, has no relationship to John Irving's, The World According to Garp, the latter being an exploration of sexuality and mortality in modern Western culture. Rather, it is more like Jack Kerouac's On the Road in which a "beat" generation explores existence by a frenetic trip back and forth across America. Pimm explores environmental change by taking us back and forth across the globe in an exhilarating journey that zigzags from Pimm's kitchen to an Amazonian rainforest in Manaus, Brazil to the deck of the David Starr Jordan, an ocean-going research vessel, and many other places. It strings together numbers from an eclectic array of sources ranging from Irma Rombauer's Joy of Cooking and United Nation's Food and Agriculture Organization reports, to primary scientific literature. Its metaphors come from Monty Python's Life of Brian, Richard Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung, and everything in between. It draws from Pimm's personal experiences, his extensive travels, his encounters with people on airplanes, on the street, students, colleagues, and many of the world's leading scientists. While the journey seems a whirlwind tour, the frenetic pace serves primarily to keep us reading while the nature of environmental problems and the urgency with which they must be addressed unfold in a logical order.
While The World According to Pimm succeeds in transforming the mind-numbing numbers of catastrophic environmental change into palatable figures, the reader is nevertheless likely to be left wondering what it is we are supposed to do. Pimm breathes life into the numbers, making them comprehensible and forcing us to understand, to borrow McMichael's (1993)
terminology, anthropogenic "planetary overload." Pimm uses these numbers to support the conclusion that the preservation of nature and building a sustainable world must take the highest priority in our global agenda. Like the cold-war prophecies of nuclear holocaust, however, numbers in and of themselves, no matter how palatable, may not sway the day. The accounting of nuclear catastrophe, such as the millions who would die horrible deaths, the multiply armed missiles and their kill zones, and the unimaginable megatons of TNT each warhead could unleash, were as incomprehensible as catastrophic environmental change is today. Yet, in spite of the sheer madness of it all, nuclear arms proliferated until détente halted the buildup. Richard Wilbur, in his poem entitled, "Advice to a Prophet," offered the following:
... Spare us all word of the weapons, their force and range,The long numbers that rocket the mind;
Our slow, unreckoning hearts will be left behind,
Unable to fear what is too strange.
... We could believe,
If you told us so, that the white-tailed deer will slipInto perfect shade, grown perfectly shy,
The lark avoid the reaches of our eye,
The jack-pine lose its knuckled grip
On the cold ledge, and every torrent burnAs Xanthus once, its gliding trout
Stunned in a twinkling. What should we be without
The dolphin's arc, the dove's return,
These things in which we have seen ourselves and spoken?...Influential and lyrical accounts of environmental change, such as Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac and Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, derive their power from the connections they make for us to our natural world within which we can see ourselves. The strength of The World According to Pimm is its passion for the numbers, the logic, and the science behind the issues. In concert with earlier lyrical accounts, Pimm's contribution compels us to look anew at the world around us.
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McMichael, A. J. 1993. Planetary overload: Global environmental change and the health of the human species. Cambridge University Press, New York.
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