This volume sports a beguiling title in a time where, rightly, a deal of public angst is directed towards the uncertain future of environmental conservation in the face of projected climate change and the remorseless growth of the human population. The case needs hardly to be made that our existence has always been, and will no doubt continue to remain into the future, reliant on the plant kingdom's provision of much of what we eat, clothe ourselves with, use to protect ourselves from the vicissitudes of the weather and exploit to maintain our health. This reviewer understood from the title that the intent was to project an informed view of the possible changing, but no doubt enhanced role of plant resources in sustaining our quality of life, but was disappointed to find that much of the book's content is trite, superficial and repetitive. The role of DNA technologies in plant genetics and breeding is repeatedly, if rather uncritically, referred to, but oddly, in a book which purports to have a prospective, rather than a retrospective focus, there is not a single mention of genetic modification, either in a positive or in a negative light. Genetic modification may be controversial in some circles (which perhaps includes the publishers of this volume), but it is hard to imagine that attempts will not be made (as indeed has already been pioneered by the modification of poplar lignin) to exploit it to achieve the sort of re-engineering of plants into second-generation sources of biofuels, as covered at some length in the book.

What struck this reviewer was a lack of clarity as to the nature of the audience that the author believed he was addressing – at times, he seems to assume that the readers have at best only a rudimentary knowledge of biology, in producing statements such as ‘plants store carbon mainly as carbohydrates’, and at others, he seems to assume that rather they enjoy quite a specialized knowledge ‘the burning of plant residues may generate biochar…’ This lack of focus is uncomfortable throughout; but on top of this, the text is littered with simple errors, such as the suggestion that 10 kcal is equivalent to 42 GJ (a few orders of magnitude wrong!), or that the form of Asian rice known as javanica (i.e. from Java) can be variously called – within a few lines! – either javonica or jarvonica. With a mountain of syntactical errors and omissions of relevant facts too numerous to recount, the text has the distinct air of having been hurriedly cobbled together from other bits of writing. Most curiously of all, the author – by his own admission – has chosen to be selective of the burgeoning relevant literature, both scientific and quasi-scientific, in preferring to draw on his ‘personal experience … and … examples of research in which [he] has been involved’. The inference of such a preference in a volume which projects itself as a global overview of the future role of plant resources is that the author hardly trusts what others in the field have achieved, researched or explained. As a result of this unexpected parochialism, in combination with the manifest carelessness which infects the text, this reviewer was led to increasingly question how well-founded many of the author's views really are.

In the end, the volume may find a market amongst a lay or politically committed readership (perhaps this was the idea?), but is unlikely to create much of a ripple amongst the scientific community of practitioners of plant genetic resources.