In this penetrating study, Alston Chase invites us to examine our basic assumptions about the environment - about the way we manage and protect resources, about the way we manage and protect resources, about the rights of animals and their habitat and the rights of human beings. What is the "balance of nature"? Is ecology a science or a philosophy? What is an ecosystem?

Though the saga of the old-growth forests includes plenty of outright bad behavior, the reader will find surprisingly few villains: Chase demonstrates that most of those involved are driven by ideas whose import they do not fully understand.

Chase provides the most thoughtful account yet written of radical environmentalism. Its proponents, the members of Earth First!, lost the battle of the north-western forests, but, Chase argues persuasively, they may have won the war. The philosophy of "biocentrism," which holds that human beings are no more important than other living things, has become a significant doctrine of many mainstream environmental groups and even some government agencies.

Chase's analysis of the origins and implications of this concept will startle many readers. In a Dark Wood is a book destined to change our intellectual landscape.