Pesticides and Pollution. Kenneth Mellanby

      The New Naturalist series, now some way beyond its half century of volumes and its quarter century of years, has had much cause for gratitude to the senior officers of our kingdom’s Nature Conservancy who have so valuably contributed to its books and its task.

      It could be expected that a servant of a statutory body, when discussing problems of conservation and ecology of political, economic and social moment (as nearly all such problems are) might adopt a somewhat statutory tone of voice. None of our Natural Conservancy authors has yet done so; nor has Dr. Mellanby, who handles in this book what can be vulgarly described (if it is not mixing a biological metaphor) as the hottest potato in the nature business. The impact of modern industry’s chemical products (themselves the products of vastly expensive and brilliant research) upon our environment—the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat, and the animals and plants with which we try peacefully to coexist—is a subject so vast, so emotion-rousing, so socially provoking that almost anybody could be forgiven for approaching it with fearful frenzy on the one hand, or with careful dissemblance or even dissimulation on the other. Not so Mellanby: this is a calm book, and a deeply thought-out book, and patently a balanced book: the kind of book we expected from the leader of one of the finest teams of ecological analysts in the country. Of course we knew it would be so, when we persuaded the Director of the Monks Wood Experimenal Station to write it.

      Kenneth Mellanby’s approach is magnificently lucid, the more so because of his deft use of illuminative detail, alternating with wise generalisations that show the deepest understanding of the history of pollution and the eternal struggle of man against predators and pests. He has had to specialise in being general: be not only historian but geographer, physiographer, chemist and physicist as well as biologist to arrive at a sense of proportion and balance, and a true evaluation of the present tides and streams of wastes and poisons, their natural history, control, cause, cure and care.

      This book has been written without fear or favour, and with the fairest analyses of mistakes and successes. It persuades us of the need for everybody’s deeper understanding of the problems involved, and that our human stock, with the increase of its population and its civilised wants, has courted risks, certainly invited disasters and suffered a few—and yet may have succeeded in arriving at a point of common-sense confidence in a clean (or cleanish) planet in the predictable future. The planet is presently a pretty dirty one: but some clever ecologists and conservationists have voices that are now being heard, and may be heeded before it is too late.

      All books on pesticides and pollution must be compared with the late Rachel Carson’s classic Silent Spring of 1963, which started the general public of all the educated world wondering. Kenneth Mellanby’s book is not of the same genre, and it would have been most inappropriate if it had been. Miss Carson’s book was a chamber of horrors, and, as regards the insecticidal events of its time, as every responsible naturalist (including Dr. Mellanby) would agree, accurate. It did a power of good. This book, we predict, will do further good; for it does the next thing. It does not say how awful! for this has already been said, and in Rachel Carson’s context justifiably. It says how does the business really work, and what next? and proceeds to spell it out, in a masterly style and depth that we are proud to be associated with.

       THE EDITORS

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