What worms?

One more blandly and grandly titled green book – Beginning Again: People and Nature in the New Millennum (Oxford University Press, £9.95/$10.95, ISBN 019 509 637 1). Biologist David Ehrenfeld’s series of discursive, erudite lectures predicts a civil as well as an ecological apocalypse. But for a book about the planet, it has a resolutely North American frame of reference. There are treasures, however, such as the chapter titled “Forgetting” which shows how some science disciplines simply vanish. Earthworm taxonomy is his example.