Stuart L. Pimm
Contributor
Connect with Stuart L. Pimm
Websites : Stuart L. Pimm at Duke University, The Pimm Group
Doris Duke Professor of Conservation Ecology, Nicholas School of the Environment, Duke University, Durham, N.C., and Extraordinary Professor, Conservation Ecology Research Unit, University of Pretoria, South Africa. Author of The World According to Pimm: A Scientist Audits the Earth and others.
Primary Contributions (5)
Biodiversity, the variety of life found in a place on Earth or, often, the total variety of life on Earth. A common measure of this variety, called species richness, is the count of species in an area. Colombia and Kenya, for example, each have more than 1,000 breeding species of birds, whereas the…
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Publications (3)
A Scientist Audits the Earth (September 2004)
Humans use 50 percent of the world’s freshwater supply and consume 42 percent of its plant growth. We are liquidating animals and plants one hundred times faster than the natural rate of extinction. Such numbers should make it clear that our impact on the planet has been, and continues to be, extreme and detrimental. Yet even after decades of awareness of our environmental peril, there remains passionate disagreement over what the problems are and how they should be remedied.Much of the...
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The Balance of Nature?: Ecological Issues in the Conservation of Species and Communities (February 1992)
Ecologists, although they acknowledge the problems involved, generally conduct their research on too few species, in too small an area, over too short a period of time. In The Balance of Nature?, a work sure to stir controversy, the distinguished theoretical ecologist Stuart L. Pimm argues that ecology therefore fails in many ways to address the enormous ecological problems now facing our planet. Ecologists describing phenomena on larger scales often use terms like "stability,"...
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