NONFICTION - April 7, 1996

THE VALUE OF LIFE: Biological Diversity and Human Society by Stephen Kellert (Island Press: $23.95; 263 pp.). Yale environmental studies professor Stephen Kellert believes in the interconnectedness of life, that man’s often cavalier eradication of various species and their habitats is “a little like randomly destroying pieces of an extremely complex mechanism while blindly hoping not to damage some vital element or process.” One picks up a volume like “The Value of Life” in order to encounter that sort of assertion and its scientific elaboration, but the book unfortunately proves to be more of an academic treatise than an inspiring argument. Based on decades of research into human attitudes toward nature, it contains some interesting facts, but Kellert is unable to give the volume much life. Now and then, though, he cites or turns a phrase that nicely captures his overall point, my favorite being one sometimes heard in Yellowstone. “Wolves do not kill people,” the bumper-sticker sentiment goes. “Fatty beef does.”