272 BOOK REVIEWS

HUMAN ACTIVITY AND ENVIRONMENTAL PRO- CESSES, K. J. Gregory and D. E. Walling, John Wiley and Sons, 1987.

There was a time, not so very long ago, when the reader and reviewer of multi-authored books had to struggle to find structure to the book and relationships between the chapters. It seemed that such books were a simple device for providing a text for the editors’ prestige and that publishers, possibly recognizing this, used the cheapest paper and apprentice type-setters, or ‘not quite camera ready copy’. In most respects this volume is poles apart from the admittedly biased view of multi-author texts held by this reviewer. The text is clear, well sub- divided, and is full of a wealth of tables, diagrams, and illustration that will make this an extremely valuable teaching text. I have no doubt that it will sell well and I hope that this does not mean the end of the editors for such mundane and underpaid tasks as doctoral examiners.

The book is structured into six sections. Five are environmental subdivisions concerning the atmosphere, hydrosphere, geosphere, pedosphere and biosphere, whilst the sixth draws conclusions. At the start of each section the editors have provided an introduction and they have also included a substantial introductory chap- ter prior to section 1. I found this introduction extremely interesting and I would have valued further and deeper comment on the theme of the early and growing recog- nition of the interactions between people and their en- vironment. Gregory and Walling both provide individual chapters in the book and jointly contribute to one of the two concluding chapters. In this concluding chapter, entitled ‘A Perspective’, the editors seem to be flagging slightly, a condition with which one can sympathize since by this time they have contributed ten items to the book and edited the offerings of 14 contributors.

Almost all of the individually authored chapters are of good quality. In the space of a chapter omissions have to be made and these can be seen in most topics. Nonethe- less, most of the contributors seem to have thought very carefully about the chapter contents and I would be happy to use most as an introduction to

people+nvironment issues. Ocean Processes was a very necessary and valuable chapter but there was clearly need for some further contributions on this topic, a fact conceded by the editors. Perhaps a chapter on ocean ecosystems might have helped.

This was really a book about geomorphology and physical systems. It was much weaker on the biological aspects of environmental processes. In fairness to the contributors of the biological chapters, they were uni- versally stimulating and authoritative. Probably the ‘Gold Medal’ goes to Sly, from the Canada Centre for Inland Waters, for his excellent chapter on lakes. In this the author recognized and discussed issues of time, space, scale, physics, development, and biology in the context of lacustrine systems.

No book is perfect. Some of the updating mentionFd by the editors in the preface seems to have been rather superficial. In one chapter, there are only a couple of references from the late 1970s and one, the authors’ own, from the 1980s. It seems barely credible that there has only been one addition to the literature in the last ten years. In many of the chapters there seems to have been a rather uncritical acceptance of projected trend figures. This is a topic I would have wished the editors to pick up in the concluding chapter. Finally one must consider in any review of the merit of this book: What happened to chapter 12, soil processes? It seems to have become a space filling exercise with many large simplistic diagrams. A rough estimate suggests that of the first twelve pages, eight are devoted to relatively simple diagrams. Nor did the author support the limited text with a vigorous and recent bibliography, it was brief and fairly dated-but let us draw a veil over this section.

Overall Ken Gregory and Des Walling are to be congratulated on bringing together a number of contri- butions that form a cohesive and valuable addition to the literature. Their task was a complex one and although it is possible to make criticisms these can in no way detract from the conclusion that this is a first rate text.

ADRIAN MCDONALD Leeds University