Nature Wars

摘要

Duncan Stone, Forestry Policy Adviser with Scottish Natural Heritage, left Scotland in late September 2012 to take up a 9 months Charles Bullard Fellowship at Harvard Forest, the forest ecology Research Institute of Harvard University. Harvard Forestis some 70 miles west of Boston, in the heart of the great eastern forests of New England.We're used to news of the natural world being dominated by stories of decline, loss and extinction, and those trends are undoubtedly very real. But we also have problems of super-abundance, and those are all the more difficult when they stem from perfectly valid programmes to save rare species. Jim Sterba, from the Wall Street Journal came to the Research Institute a few weeks back to give a talk on this topic through his new book 'Nature Wars - The Incredible Story of how wildlife comebacks turned backyards into battlegrounds' (Crown Publishing Group, 2013). It's a great read, and I recommend it - full of eye-watering facts and appalled realisation of the size of unanticipated problems.