In a Dark Wood

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

The fight to save old-growth forests and threatened species in the Pacific Northwest has been the biggest environmental conflict in U.S.history in terms of area size, economic cost and the number of human beings affected. Chase (Playing God in Yellowstone) has written a well-documented account of the conflict and a provocative, penetrating analysis of the environmental movement. In the last two decades, he argues, radical activists moved from fact to value judgments, from science to politics. In the Northwest, the locale of the struggle became the media; journalists saturated public consciousness with the message of biocentrism, a philosophy that stresses humans are no more important than any other creatures. Chase argues this is bad science. He states that biocentrists can't distinguish fact from value and that random disturbance, not permanence or order, governs nature. Chase points out that the Endangered Species Act did not reflect scientific opinion but a confluence of ancient religious and philosophical thought. He views the fight over old-growth forests and owls as a kind of class war, a conflict among competing regional, vocational, recreational, aesthetic and economic interests. At present, the Clinton administration has adopted biocentrism as the guiding philosophy of all federal land management. Environmentalism, cautions the author, has taken a wrong turn. (Oct.)

Library Journal

Chase (Playing God in Yellowstone, LJ 4/15/86) questions the foundation of most ecological policy: if left alone, ecosystems tend toward stability; therefore, human intervention should be nonexistent. Focusing on the battle over the old-growth forests in the Northwest, he asserts that this notion has driven the environmental movement to an antihuman extreme that not only fails to protect nature but actually contributes to its destruction. Chase sees the Endangered Species Act as symptomatic of this failure, and he decries the lack of scientific evidence for environmentalists' claims about species extinction. Forthright and tightly argued, this book deserves a wide audience. Highly recommended for most libraries.Randy Dykhuis, OHIONET, Columbus, Ohio

Brenda Grazis

Chase begins by tracing the swath of logging from east to west, the efforts of silviculturists to achieve timber sustainability, and the evolution of ideas that have led to the "teleological myth" of ecology. Next he recounts the attempts by ecologists, principally "Earth First!ers, to block logging in the Northwest, initially to preserve old-growth forests. In addition to finding biocentric beliefs offensive, Chase also appears to find the Earth First!ers' lifestyles as nasty as their terrorist tactics, and the narrative devolves into irrelevant tattle and ridicule. Perhaps because of this antipathy, he is persuasive in his sympathetic depiction of the plight of the logging community. Chase's pro-forestry contribution to the ongoing controversy of whether habitat preservation is essential, nonessential, or detrimental to species survival is also effective, and examples are provided of some deleterious consequences of preservation, such as the nationwide overabundance of deer.