Chance and Change: Ecology for Conservationists

by William Holland Drury

The result of a lifetime in the field and in the classroom, Chance and Change challenges many of the tenets of establishment ecology. Charging that most of the environmental movement has ignored or rejected the changes in thinking that have infiltrated ecological theory since the mid 70s, William Drury presents a convincing case that disorder is what makes the natural world work, and that clinging to romantic notions of nature's grand design only saps the strength of the conservation movement. Drury's training in botany, geology, and zoology as well as his life-long devotion to work in the field gave him a depth and range of knowledge that few ecologists possess. This book opens our eyes to a new way of looking at the environment and forces us to think more deeply about nature and our role in it.

Chance and Change is intended for the serious amateur naturalist or professional conservationist. Drury argues that chance and change are the rule, that the future is as unpredictable to other organisms as it is to us, and that natural disturbance is too frequent for equilibrium models to be useful. He stresses the centrality of natural selection in explaining the meaning of biology and insists the book and the laboratory must be checked at all times against the real world. Written in an easy, personal style, Drury's narrative comes alive with the landscape―the salt marshes, dunes, seashores, and forests―that he believed served as the best classroom. His novel approach of correlating landscape evolution with ecological principles offers a welcome corrective to discordance between what we observe in nature and what theory tells us we should see.

Genres: Science

Hardcover

First published May 22, 1998

Reviews

[Kathy · Rating 5 out of 5]

A professor at ASU gave this to me and said he keeps extra copies on hand to give to students as a "must read." If you are interested in understanding the science of ecology, this is an accessible and well written prose version of how a professional ecologist sees the world. The book was published post-humously from a nearly complete manuscript that had been in progress for decades.

[Lauren · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful and intricate view of ecology from the perspective of a lifelong field ecologist. Drury takes you out of the classroom and away from theory into real life to observe how things actually appear. His discussion of old ecology theories in comparison to new theory and his personal observations give a lot of insight into the complex field. This is a great read for anyone, but I especially recommend this to ecology students; I think it does wonders to expand perspective.