through a globe-spanning multilateral body so much like the International Whaling Commission (IWC) that governments should avoid its destruction. The economic aspect, less clearly put, is a judgment that there are good substitutes for all whale products. Committed preservationists will not be persuaded. They would agree that there is no significant difference between "aboriginal" and "small-scale coastal" whaling (145), but resolve the matter by banning both. They would not agree that a species preservation approach is a particularly great obstacle to holistic environmental thinking (132, 146-47). Social scientists, particularly of a materialist persuasion, will desire a clearer exposition of the reasons for Stoett's confidence that whale taking would not get out of hand. He stresses the impact of changed beliefs; yet the record of fisheries management suggests that this conceptual change has not yet acquired sufficient depth to prevent overexploitation whenever there is clear consumer demand and sunk investments to recoup. A more careful elaboration of how market incentives are now aligned with the emerging conceptual changes would increase these readers' confidence in the near-term viability of his approach. Though the 150 pages of text provide a compact overview of the major topics in the whaling issue, it is not for an uninitiated reader. Certain portions of the presentation are quite good. Chapter 2 contains succinct explanations of the frequency of overfishing (66) and the limitations to whale sightings as a source of population estimates (33). Table 2 (67) gives a nice overview of the changes in composition of and quotas set by the IWC. Contradictions in policy positions are clearly identified (and provide US readers an outside perspective yielding a useful political reality check on their country's position). Yet the parts do not cohere. Stoett says so little about the Revised Management Procedures that few readers can assess the strength of his claim that they will provide adequate policy guidance. The discussion of holism at the end (143-46) is particularly confusing. Thus the full potential of an approach explicitly connecting political controversies to their material and conceptual contexts is not attained here.
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