Argues against presenting a grand design for the natural world and by extension ecology as a science. Instead conservationists and naturalists should see chance and change as the rule, the future as unpredictable to other organisms as it is to us. Central to Drury's arguments are that natural disturbances occur too frequently to make equilibrium models useful. A challenge to the tenets of traditional ecology and to romantic notions of nature's grand design which only sap the conservation movement. With a foreword by Ernst Mayr.