Laura's Reviews > Noah's Choice: The Future of Endangered Species

"'The perfect society to which we aspire in theory may become a powerful enemy of the good society we can become in fact.'" -- Mark Sagoff, philosopher, quoted in Noah's Choice.

I'm a little outside my knowledge field with this one, so it's hard to rank it in terms of validity. Despite my work with captive exotics, I have limited background in wildlife management while they're still, well, in the wild. I hadn't encountered many of the concepts in this book before, such as the species-area curve for relating habitat loss to biodiversity loss (even if the authors go on to point out this is a poor method of such calculations). Most interesting to me was the history of the Endangered Species Act and how had come to exist in its current form, and how it has been applied. It was also interesting to see a whole history of the Karner Blue butterfly conservation projects nationwide, having spent a cold, rainy day planting lupine in NH as a part of this program myself. The authors choose a few species which they use as representations of what is wrong with the Endangered Species Act and how it is being enforced. I found the amount of detail given for these species a little too heavy (skimming large sections of dollar amounts and regional details was not uncommon) and this made it hard to follow their ideas at times. They end the book by outlining changes that must occur in biodiversity management if any practicable solutions are going to be found -- basically we have to get away from the idealistic "Noah Principle" of trying save everything and make the hard chocies to save what we can. I don't know how viable their suggestions are, but they do an excellent job of identifying problems and making an argument for their variations.