The AAG Review of Books just published a lively book review symposium on Biologists Unite, commissioned following our “Author Meets Critics” session at the AAG Annual Meeting in San Fransisco. You can read our published exchange here.
It includes commentaries from Paul Robbins, Catherine Corson, Robert Fletcher, Audrey Irvine-Broque, and Rebecca Lave, with author response from yours truly. I was grateful for these inspired readings of the book and to have such an energizing dialogue about the big questions, key findings, and larger lessons it explored.
The central focus of the book — understanding the predicaments of those given the daunting, arguably impossible task of using ecosystem services to resolve the immense conjunctural crises of global biodiversity conservation — received insightful elaboration from each contributor. They raised constructive questions regarding several crucial aspects of the book and offered some generative provocations, looking back and looking forward, about what it was fundamentally narrating.
Where does the fateful story of ecosystem services, from its meteoric rise to its disillusioning fall, now leave us? And what further lessons can be gleaned from its coming and going?
