Sustaining Life

Sustaining Life: How Human Health Depends on Biodiversity is a landmark book that lays out the case for the conservation of biodiversity and the multiple benefits it provides. The book is well organized, with beautiful supporting imagery. It is a much needed resource and a call to appreciate and take action to conserve our biological diversity at this critical time. Integrative and Comparative Biology ...fabulous book...lavishly illustrated...both fascinating and frightening Peter Elson Liverpool Daily Post This book...reminds us of just how much we have to lose. Geographical This book represents a landmark addition to our understanding of our ecological heritage, and the importance of preserving it. Publishers Weekly A Powerhouse of information on a topic that concerns us all. Highly recommended. Irwin weintraub, Library Journal It is a new and comprehensive review of the latest tally of planetary profit and loss... EducationGuardian.co.uk Sustaining Life is the most complete and powerful argument I have seen for the importance of preserving biodiversity. Al Gore, former Vice President, 2007 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate It was an exhilarating moment when scientists broke the genome code and showed us the basic building blocks of the human being. Now scientists are showing us how biodiversity works and why it is crucial to saving our planet for our children's children and beyond. This important and compelling book is a blueprint for acting wisely and urgently. Bill Moyers, former White House Press Secretary, There is probably no better way to convince anyone still uncertain about the urgent need to preserve biodiversity, which is rapidly diminishing as a result of human activities, than to document its importance to human health and medicine. The authors have done this with great thoroughness and from every possible angle, producing a volume that pairs authority with anecdote and scholarship with passion. --Harold Varmus, President, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, 1989 Nobel Prize Laureate, former Director of the National Institutes of Health As a public health physician, I have been deeply involved for decades in helping political leaders, policy-makers, and the general public understand the relationship between human beings and the environment. Sustaining Life is the best and most comprehensive resource available demonstrating how human health depends on the health of the natural world. --Gro Brundtland, former Director-General of the World Health Organization, former Prime Minister of Norway One of the main reasons the world faces a global environmental crisis is the belief that we human beings are somehow separate from the natural world in which we live, and that we can therefore alter its physical, chemical, and biological systems without these alterations having any effect on humanity. Sustaining Life challenges this widely held misconception by demonstrating definitively, with the best and most current scientific information available, that human health depends, to a larger extent than we might imagine, on the health of other species and on the healthy functioning of natural ecosystems. --Kofi Annan, former Secretary-General of the United Nations, 2001 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, from the Prologue A powerhouse of information on a topic that concerns of us all. Highly recommended. --Irwin Weintraub, Library Journal Reviews