GREEN INHERITANCE: The World Wildlife Fund Book...

GREEN INHERITANCE: The World Wildlife Fund Book of Plants by Anthony Huxley (Four Walls Eight Windows: $26.95). Although most of this information on humanity’s relationship with the increasingly threatened botanical realm has been available before, it has rarely been presented in such an attractive format. The news is not comforting: Mankind is becoming more and more dependent on an increasingly limited food supply--”less than 20 crops supply more than 90% of the world’s needs.” The tendency toward monoculture, with huge fields of genetically identical plants, means an already precarious food supply is concomitantly more vulnerable to disease, parasites and insects. The simultaneous destruction of the rain forests and other natural habitats is eliminating the wild relatives of domesticated plants that can supply vital traits through hybridization. Huxley shows how much of this destruction is unnecessary and even irrational, but his timely warning may leave the reader feeling impotent to halt the ongoing orgy of extinctions.