Three years ago Yann Arthus-Bertrand's Earth From Above-the result of a five-year airborne odyssey across five continents-was published around the world to critical and popular acclaim. Now, Arthus-Bertrand's monumental achievement is available in a revised and expanded edition: Here are all the astonishing original photographs together with 17 new images and authoritative new texts by world-renowned environmentalist Lester Brown and other well-known ecologists-all at the new low price of $45.00! Arthus-Bertrand's remarkable aerial photographs offer the most revealing and spectacular portrait of our world ever created. Produced under the sponsorship of UNESCO, the book is also a unique documentary record of the state of the world's fragile environment. Ecology, a science scarcely a century old, aims to give its practitioners an approach to understanding how whole natural systems--for example, watersheds, deserts, and estuaries--work. Few books translate this aim as well as Earth from Above , a stunning collection of photographs that affords its viewers a window into the world's workings. It is something of a commonplace, for instance, that the large-scale logging now being visited on the world's rainforests is causing untold damage to tropical ecosystems. In French photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand's hands, this problem is translated from arid fact to alarming image, giving immediate meaning to the statistics that underlie today's environmental headlines; his photographs of the ruins of rural Madagascar, where forests are being cleared at a rate of 1,500 square kilometers (580 square miles) annually, are a sad case in point. Arthus-Bertrand, working with the support of UNESCO, has wandered the globe to gather this collection of more than 200 photographs, presented in a folio format. The images are uniformly striking, whether of stalagmite-like fans of algae spreading into the Mediterranean Sea, farmers working their fields in northern India, or destroyed Iraqi tanks littering the deserts of Kuwait. The accompanying text, captions, and short essays by some of France's leading scientists and social critics lend specific depth to the images, which will cheer few readers--but that will shock, and educate, and, with luck, inspire closer attention to the world around us. --Gregory McNamee To many people over the past five years, preparing for the millennium meant surveying restaurants, hotels, parties, then trying to get a reservation and (more challenging) maybe a baby-sitter. To Yann Arthus-Bertrand it meant surveying the entire world and trying to get a sense of it. During the five years, he overflew and photographed 75 countries, shooting out the open door of a helicopter. The result is Earth from Above (Terre Vue du Ciel in the original French edition), at 424 pages and 11 by 15 inches almost more of a coffee table than a coffee-table book. It is weighty with thoughts and concerns about the millennium, with insightful observations about far-flung places and above all with 170 large color photographs, many of them stunning. The book is divided into 11 sections, each anchored by a thematic essay. In each essay two foldouts contain thumbnail-size reproductions of the preceding and following images, so the reader can locate the image on a map and read the detailed captions without having to flip back and forth to an index. This is a clever way to inform about an image without distracting from it. The most consistently recurring topic in the essays and images is our troubled and in many ways dysfunctional relationship with nature. Several images are of natural disasters, not just aftermaths of tornadoes and floods but also those waiting to happen. The view along a stretch of the San Andreas Fault is chilling. Most unsettling are the disastrous conditions of our own making. The text tells us that 19 countries suffer from serious drought and that between 1.6 billion and 1.8 billion people do not have access to potable water. A photograph shows us the perfect, white, prostrate "silhouette" of a tree that has been felled and burned to ash in northern Ivory Coast. The distinction between natural spectacles and man-made landscapes is a relatively recent one that arose with the burgeoning scale of our manipulation of the environment. In one of the best essays, French geographer and archaeologist Pierre Gentelle writes, "We take comfort in nature, forgetting that at one time we feared it." Humans were cowed by nature in earlier times, but now it is almost an object of pity. The urbanized majority doesn't really want to live in nature or by any means to be affected by it; we simply want it to be there for aesthetics, or for visits. Gentelle takes the view that nature roped off in reserves is no longer authentic or untamed but rather more of a stage set. The natural spectacles that Arthus-Bertrand sought and selected take implicit exception to Gentelle's rule. There is nothing either comforting or false about t