World Atlas of Biodiversity: Earth’s Living Resources in the 21st Century
Brian Groombridge and Martin D. Jenkins
Clothbound, lap-sized and hefty, its thick pages packed with sherbet-colored graphs and maps, the World Atlas of Biodiversity: Earth’s Living Resources in the 21st Century (University of California Press, $54.95) is as handsome as a coffee-table book but smarter by factors of 10. Building on analyses carried out by the United Nations Environment Programme, the authors, Brian Groombridge and Martin D. Jenkins, look at the variety of life on Earth, taking the long view back through geologic time and forward into simulations of possible futures. In discussions of matters such as taxonomy, climate change and Homo sapiens’ short but influential tenure on the planet, they consider biodiversity as an arbiter of the quality of human life. Sometimes harrowing but never polemical, the book allows readers to draw their own conclusions. It’s an impressive sourcebook that deserves a prominent place on the shelves (or coffee tables) of policy-makers the world over.
—Katherine Sharpe
