Book Reviews

THE DYNAMICS OF THE WESTERN NEW GUINEA (IRIAN BARAT) PROBLEM. Robert C. Bone, Jr. Cornell University, Modern Indonesia Project, Interim Reports Series, 1958, $1.50.

THE WEST NEW GUINEA DISPUTE. J. M. van der Kroef. Institute of Pacific Relations, New York, 1958, $1.50.

THE ECONOMY OP PAKISTAN. J. Russell Andrws and Azizali F. Mohammed. Oxford University Press, 1958. Pp. xviii + 517. Australian price 64/9.

AN ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY OF EAST PAKISTAN. Nafia Ahmad. Oxford University Press, 1958. Pp. xiv + 361. U.K. price 50/‐.     

A map of karst cave areas in Australia

A dot map of karst cave areas in Australia is presented together with a similar one redrawn from the National Atlas of the United States of America. The limitations of the map are described. The geographical circumstances behind Australia's poverty in these resources and the risks to which they are exposed are outlined.     

Wilderness,Nature and Society: contributions to the history of an environmental attitude

The depth of feeling now seen in the struggle over environmental conservation can, with the aid of scholars in other disciplines, be traced to the central importance of Nature in the ideology of Western Society. The late seventeenth century is seen as the period of an ideological transformation in which Nature, at first under the tutelage of God, came to set the terms for social definition and debate. As a flexible metaconcept, Nature became a weapon of social control for a hegemonic centre and, at the same time, a vehicle of protest for the social periphery. Further ambiguity arises from the intersection of this development with the devaluation of Nature as a commodity within the capitalist system, which intensifies the element of protest in the use of Nature as a social category.