Stuart Pimm
Ever since the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring in the '60s, we've known that human activity has had detrimental effects on the environment. Yet after four decades of growing awareness of environmental problems, we still see passionate disagreement between activists and business interests over what should be done. Much of the impasse stems from the fact that the problems are difficult to quantify. How do we assess the impact of habitat loss on species, when we haven't even counted them all, and we are just beginning to understand how they interact? How do we determine how great a population the ecosystem can bear, when we have yet to quantify the depletion of resources? How do we know if current extinction rates are excessive if we don't know what normal extinction rates are? Without scientific, numerical information we cannot make headway on these issues. Working on the front lines of conservation biology since the early '70s, Stuart Pimm is one of the pioneers whose work has put the science in environmental science. His research covers the reasons why species become exinct, how fast they do so, the global patterns of habitat loss and species extinction, the role o
Environment
The World According to Pimm: A Scientist Audits the Earth