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BOOK REVIEWS

Environmental Pollution, Vol. 89, No. 2, pp. 215-218, 1995 Copyright © 1995 Elsevier Science Limited

Printed in Great Britain. All rights reserved

Scope 51. Biogeochemistry of Small Catchments: A Tool for Environmental Research. Edited by Bedrich Moldan & Jiri Cerny. John Wiley & Sons, Chichester, UK, 1994, ISBN 0-471-93723-1,419 pp. Price: £80.00.

On picking up this volume for the first time, I was at once jarred by three negative feelings. The first came from what I believed was a misnomer in the title: how could a discipline, that of biogeochemistry, represent a 'tool' for research? Isn't research also a tool--an instrument for achieving a task, or tasks? The biogeo- chemistry of small catchments was thus a tool for a t o o l . . . ? And isn't biogeochemistry a set of paradigms through which research towards some end is achieved? In that case, biogeochemistry might also be a tool. A tool for a tool for a tool? But hang on: weren't the small catchments also tools? A tool for a tool for . . . .

I guessed that biogeochemists must be used to thinking cyclically, and was prepared to forgive it, until I looked at the contents list. There was my second problem. There were collectively authored (and sometimes over- lapping) chapters on hydrology, atmospheric chemical input, weathering and erosion, soil solution chemistry, biological processes (within catchments), elemental budgets, sulphur flux, nitrogen cycling, hydrochemical studies, trace metal speciation, anthropogenic influences on chemical weathering, small catchment studies in tropical zones, agicultural impacts in the northern temperate zone. But what was the focus of all these areas of work? Were they just being pursued as ends in themselves? In almost every case, with the strong exception of one chapter by Wayne Swank and Chris Johnson, who were concerned about the ramifications of forest management practices for water resources, the reasons for biogeochemical study were left at best as implicit, and at the worst they were completely hidden•

From my own perspective as an ecologist concerned with the effects of catchment-scale phenomena on aquatic ecosystems, I realise beyond all doubt that sound biogeochemical knowledge is vital• I 'm ready to accept that probably all the yields and resources that we derive from rivers and wetlands are influenced by biogeochemical features. But at the same time, I have seen so often an endemic train of thought among bio- geochemists that catchment budgets, fluxes and cycles operate in isolation from the rest of environmental science• Or maybe they think these links are just so obvious that they no longer need to state them. In my view, they aren't. (I now accept responsibility for the immediate clamour and clangour that will be brewing in biogeochemical laboratories all around the world!)

My third problem was more an administrative one than a scientific one. This volume represents the report

of a workshop held initially in November 1990, so that the science was already four years out of date by the time it was published• This is not acceptable in fields moving as quickly, for example, as our understanding of nitrogen dynamics•

Yet, much if not all of this book is of very high quality• The reviews are clear, the questions pertinent, the summaries helpful, the recommendations valuable, the themes still current• I would have liked to see some- one grasp the thorny questions of how small catchment studies suffer from, or resolve, the problems of replica- tion in what is essentially a stochastic environment• Or how findings at this scale have relevance to bigger geographical units• Or how catchments are chosen representatively to reflect someting approaching 'typical' conditions• But these are problems as much for this whole discipline as they are for this one volume•

Steve Ormerod

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Clean Technology and the Environment. Edited by R. C. Kirkwood & A. J. Longley. Blackie Academic & Pro- fessional, Glasgow, UK, 1995, ISBN 0 7514 0037 8, 350 pp. Price: £75•00 (hardback)•

The idea of 'clean technology' is highly seductive. An early head of the Environmental Directorate of the EEC once described clean technology as that produc- tion technology that produced least waste, used least raw materials and least energy and had the lowest cost. When the implication was that this technology was being ignored by a recalcitrant industry, members of the chemical industry reacted by asking 'What fools do they think we are?'. Irrespective of the environ- mental consequences who would not jump at such processes?

Virtually all processes produce waste because raw materials are seldom perfectly pure, because chemical reactions never go to 100% completion and because there is seldom a stoichiometric balance between the elements in the raw material and those in the products of a chemical complex• Of course, the more one spends on refining the process and the treatment of its waste the cleaner is the result; and so a familiar, and wholly hypothetical, graph is drawn showing how, as environ- mental impact is reduced, cost rises• It is inescapable that, other things being equal, cleaner means dearer.

Even where cleaner technology is available it is not immediately applicable• One cannot throw away expensive assets every time a 'better' technology appears. Even if the infinite choice implied by the hypothetical curve were available, the balance between cost and