Industrial ecology is a comphrensive response to industrial systems damaging the environment. This damage has been amply demonstrated by numerous examples, usually involving specific industrial or consumer activities, specific pollutants, and localized ecosystems or groups of people. It is, however, much more difficult to make an integrated assessment of environmental damage, especially at a regional or global scale. Yet to understand the ‘industrial ecology’ of our current industrial system, and especially to design an ‘eco-restructured’ industrial system, integrated assessments are essential.

Part Three contains seven chapters on the environmental and human health consequences of pollutants emitted into the environment by industrialized societies. The emphasis is less on localized, intensely polluted sites, and more on the consequences of diffuse sources of widely dispersed pollutants.

There are two starting points from which the environmental effects of human activity can be approached. One is to focus on ecosystems, or other environmental entities such as ‘soils’ or ‘biodiversity’ and ask how they are being threatened by human activity. The first three chapters in this section take this approach in addressing global threats to ecosystems. Agriculture, while for the most part excluded from consideration in this volume, is nevertheless part of the industrial system, both as feed stocks for other industries and as an industrial activity itself, and it has become a significant cause of environmental damage. Agriculture is explicitly addressed in the chapter by Schnoor and Thomas, ‘Soils as a Vulnerable Environmental System.’ Major effects include not only habitat destruction from the clearing of land, but also erosion due to tillage, and environmental damage from the use of pesticides.