E-Book Overview
It is unclear how to count out the right number of stars when a book is, to oversimplify, stimulating but wrong. This is especially the case since this book will strike different readers quite differently. Sort of ironically, these considerations I find important are (sort of) the motivation to Marshall's book. Marshall argues strenuously against trying to summarize biota into a quantitative measure, and he argues strenuously in favor of consideration for the wide variety of points of view in the world. But, while I think these are central guiding considerations when describing a book, I don't think they should guide a description of nature. Marshall is a committed postmodernist and reads everything (all things) as a "text." In the introduction he specifies that he has "sympathies" for and is "more allied to" the constructionist notion of nature than to realism. In other words, he tends to see nature as something the seer makes, rather than as something the seer discovers objectively. The author's keen postmodern approach is the strongest feature of the book, though it doesn't really shine until ~150 pages into the book, when Marshall commences the final of the book's three sections. In Section A, the author briefly sketches the book's overarching concept: the unity of nature. (I'll type this as "UN.") This is the idea that all living things are connected. Readers may be familiar with this idea being called the circle of life, the food web, or Gaia. Section B is meaty and interesting. In four chapters Marshall argues that UN is allied with four (apparently) undesirable other ideas: fascism, technocentrism, social stability (of a conservative flavor), and liberal capitalism. It may strike the reader that these four ideas are not notoriously compatible, but this is not addressed in the book. I cannot take the time to address all four of these topics individually, so I will generalize on the second, th