Ecosystem Health: New Goals for Environmental Management

This book provides a nice collection of essays on ecosystem health from philosophical, scientific, ethical, and practical viewpoints. A nice, focused discussion of Aldo Leopold's land ethic is given by his most famous advocate, J. Baird Callicot. Eugene Hargrove also offers a succinct but cogent analysis of using economics to "solve" environmental problems and offers up the idea of using existentialism as a pragmatic way to give meaning and value to seemingly intractable environmental issues. The second half of the book gets more technical in attempting to measure ecosystem health, but for the professional or academic ecologist, this should be insightful. Being over 10 years old, of course, some of the ideas and approaches, especially in the second half of the book, may seem slightly out-of-date, but that does not detract from the value of the book as a good collection of essays centered around a very important and persistent issue facing us at multiple spatial and temporal scales.