Dictionary of Environment and Conservation
By Clark, George E
DICTIONARY OF ENVIRONMENT AND CONSERVATION by Chris Park; Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK, 2007; 522 pp., $40.00 hardcover (ISBN: 978-0-198-60995- 7), $18.95 paper (ISBN: 978-0-198- 60996-4) This dictionary is a remarkably interdisciplinary work to have been created by a single individual. Geographer Chris Park of Lancaster University briefly defines close to 9,000 environmental terms from the physical, social, historical, and policy realms. A single dictionary in which the entries “sheep dip,”"shopping center,”"shortwave radiation,” and “Silent Spring” appear on facing pages is a delight for those interested in both nature and society. Biographical entries, including Maurice Strong, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, and George Perkins Marsh, strengthen the book’s human component.
Twenty-eight longer entries of a few hundred words each are interspersed throughout the book. Unfortunately main text articles do not point to these longer entries, causing readers to easily miss one if it is pushed to the next page. It is difficult for a dictionary of this scope to be comprehensive in 500 pages, and there are rare omissions of terms one might expect to find, including “bush meat,”"flux tower,” and “slow food.” These faults are tiny, however, compared with the overall accomplishment of the work.
The dictionary includes 21 figures, mostly of natural systems, such as the jet stream and water cycle. There are 10 appendices, including a list of international environmental treaties and their signatory nations, five hazard severity scales (including the Torino asteroid and comet impact hazard scale), the periodic table of chemical elements, and a list of unit conversion factors.
This book is an excellent selection for academic libraries, consulting firms, nonprofits, government agencies, personal collections, and the readyreference shelf in a university environmental studies department office.
George E. Clark
Harvard University
Harvard College Library
Cambridge, MA
Copyright Heldref Publications Jul/Aug 2008
(c) 2008 Environment. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.