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Book Review CDs and the
WEB:
As an environmental science educator, you understand the challenge of teaching a topic that is local in nature but global in extent, demands disciplinary rigor but is inherently interdisciplinary, and that is constantly changing in response to ongoing changes in human knowledge and development. For your students to understand the complex issue of the loss of and preservation of biodiversity, they must know something of many disciplines: demography to understand human population growth; ecology to understand predation, competition, habitat requirements, and exotic species; genetics to understand the problems of inbreeding; government policy to understand the implementation of the Endangered Species Act and international laws; sociology to understand how human societies interact with and value different species; economics to understand the costs of preserving a species, and the list goes on. Conserving Earth’s Biodiversity uses the power of CDs and the World Wide Web to bridge these many disciplines, provide access to up-to-date and reliable data, and provide examples from around the globe. Like a textbook, Conserving Earth’s Biodiversity has eight "chapters": Introduction, Global Biodiversity, Diversity of Life, Biodiversity Over Time, Threats to Biodiversity, Conservation Practice, Social Issues, and Learning More. This chapter organization is about all that this CD shares with a textbook. Textbooks are visual while this CD provides video and audio, such as the videotaped introductions to each chapter by world-renowned biologist and conservationist, E. O. Wilson. Textbooks are static while this CD has animated illustrations to show the dynamics of such things as the spread of fire ants in the southern United States from 1918 to 1997 or the spread of continents by plate tectonic movement from the Cambrian to the Pleistocene. Textbooks are linear while this CD allows a user to move between chapters within the CD or to web sites around the world at the click of the mouse. Textbooks become outdated fast, while this CD has linkages to selected web sites that remain current through continual updates. Textbooks are pedagogical, but this CD is exploratory and interactive with simulation models that allow students to manipulate variables, such as the initial population size in the model of genetic stochasticity, or to design their own comparisons by choosing which of the dozens of available maps to display simultaneously. The instructor’s CD even allows users to suggest web sites to be included in future versions, and a forum for users to discuss how to best use the CD with other instructors. Let me take you on a tour to illustrate the power of Conserving Earth’s Biodiversity. I start my classes with human population growth as a root cause of biodiversity loss, so in the Social Issues chapter I click on "Population and Resources" and watch Wilson introduce the topic by pointing out the importance to biodiversity of both human population growth and consumption of resources. From there, I click on "Population Growth" and I am presented with a global map that shows the population growth rates for different regions of the world and see that growth rates are low in Europe but high in Africa. "How fast will the human population grow in Africa?" I wonder. I click on the "Interactive Population Growth Model" and watch as Africa’s population grows from 778 million in 1998 to 3 billion by 2050 at the current growth rate of 2.6 percent per year. These next 50 years, I realize, will comprise the adult lives of my current students. By changing the rate of growth variable, I learn that even if family planning programs had successfully reduced the population growth rate to 1 percent per year by 1998, Africa would still grow to 1.3 billion by 2050, nearly double it’s current population. I return to the population growth map wondering how this population growth will affect the continent’s biodiversity, and select the "Population Density Map" where I see a global map showing the human population density of the world’s regions. Wondering how population density varies with economic activity, I choose to compare the African regional maps for population density, per capita GDP and conservation hot spots (from a total of 15 possible maps I could have chosen). Guess what, several of the conservation hotspots lie in the same geographic location as the highest human population densities and some of the lowest GDPs in Africa. I listen to Wilson again as he poses some provocative questions about how the information in these maps relates to the quality of our future lives. Conservation, I learn, is not just about fencing off parks for lions, but about finding ways for human development to occur in regions where biodiversity is high and threatened by growing and very poor human populations. From related topics, I pick "Habitat Loss" and take a quick look at the deforestation rate map, but I want more, so I click on the web links and go to a Woods Hole web site (one of 5 web sites offered at this juncture) where I read that Surinam had recently put up for sale 25 to 40 percent of their entire land surface area for logging. Depressed, I decide to watch a movie, so I choose to watch an animated clip that shows how Ecuador lost 90 percent of its forest during the 50 years from 1938 to 1988. "But what is a rainforest?", I ask. So I click on related topics and read about rainforests, where I learn what an epiphyte is. Intrigued, I choose to look at a slide show of a rainforest in Costa Rica... No, this is not your parent’s, or even your own, freshman textbook. This CD really does use technology to bring together expertise and data that in an earlier world one might only have accessed through great labor and expense. The biggest danger with such a tool is that the user can become unfocused, skipping from topic to topic without really understanding the underlying principles first; more entertaining than educative. However, with guidance, such problems can be avoided, and the instructor’s CD provides such guidance in a series of suggested paths for educators to use when using this CD in a classroom. Of course, the CD has limits, the population model is a simplistic exponential growth model; you may have wanted more information on deforestation rates in Madagascar rather than Ecuador and so on, but Conserving Earth’s Biodiversity is a valiant effort to bring a huge amount of information into a coherent and useable educational tool. The CD can be used on both Macintosh and PC platforms, costs $39.95, and a demonstration version is available at the Island Press web site (http://www.islandpress.org/wilsoncd/index.ssi). Peter W. Vaughan |
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