Anne Becher

This is a good book even if it is over a decade old. It gives a good overview of what biodiversity is. I liked the analysis of the different ways of defining biodiversity and what the threats are to biodiversity, even though it's less than 50 pages. The rest of the book is a chronology of important events -- remember, biodiversity as a concept is quite recent, the term was first coined in the 1980's -- biographical sketches of prominent people (e. g. Aldo Leopold, Wangari Maathai, Vandana Shiva), statistics and documents, a directory of organizations, and print and non-print resources. I suspect the organizations list may be dated. Unfortunately, the print and non-print resources is probably less dated than we wish it was; my cursory investigations of this subject indicate that there hasn't been a lot of "new" research that has made it into the arena accessible to informed laypeople (that's me, I hope).… (més)