Author: Paul F Steinberg (no website found)
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Rating: WORTHY!
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new book is often enough reward aplenty!
Erratum
Page 202 "...must make due..." should be "...must make do..."
Now here's a book that dispenses with forewords and introductions and gets right down to it. Kudos to author Paul Steinberg for showing that it can be done, even in a book of this nature! There was a problem with the Adobe Digital Editions version of this novel. This seems to occur a lot with PDF format ADE copies - whereby pairs of letters are blanked out for reasons which escape me. The letters are still there - for example, if I go to page 149 and search for the words 'stiff fines' the document search finds them immediately. It's just that I cannot see the entire words. Instead, what I see on that line is: "...are hit with sti__ _ines. __e..." Which, had the letters (marked by underscores here) been visible, I would have seen: "...are hit with stiff fines. The..."
The letter combinations affected here seem to be 'ffi', 'fi', 'ft', and 'Th' (note that lower case 'th' was not so affected!). Also, all numbers, including dates, years, and monetary amounts are banished to invisibility, too, making dates look really weird, like "May _, ____," (Note that I've added underscores because HTML annoyingly removes what it deems to be extra spaces). I assume that these issues will be fixed in the final version. The version I read was an advance review copy.
There was also a problem with the page selector at the bottom of the screen - it didn't recognize the pages - not even page 202 when it was on page 202!
The book opens with a story of a doctor's efforts to ban non-essential pesticides from use in the small town of Hudson, in Quebec, Canada. The effort is documented in a film; A Chemical Reaction, which I have not seen, but which looks, from the film poster on that page, to be one which plays to emotions (as judged by the prominent placing of the baby) rather than to cold, hard fact, but as I said, I haven't yet seen this documentary, so I can judge it only from the poster - maybe it plays to emotions and cold hard fact!
June Irwin, the doctor, prevailed, despite strong challenges from pesticide companies, one of which included the apparent intent of one of the prosecution to drink pesticide in the courtroom (talking of appeals to emotion instead of to rationality and science!). Fortunately, this wasn't allowed. A domino effect then went into play, with other communities, including the entire province of Ontario, seeking to regulate pesticides in the same way. A year after the rules went into effect in Ontario, concentrations of common pesticides in the waterways dropped by half.
The book mentions nothing of health issues here, unfortunately. Yes, pesticides were in use, yes concentrations fell, but what of the health issues? Where there pesticide-related health issues? Where these resolved or alleviated after the pesticide levels dropped? The book is disturbingly silent on this important aspect.
Almost needless to say, this kind of change couldn't happen here - here being the good ol' USA, where corporate lobbies are all-powerful and politicians kow-tow to them pathetically. Even if there are direct correlations between health and pesticide use, the lobbies are too powerful, and power and money speak a lot louder than children's health. The most powerful country in the world has clearly demonstrated this time and time again.
In the US, the pesticide-supporters (that is, industry and lobbyists) rallied and made an assault on the state legislatures, asking them to pass legislation preempting local communities. Is there anything less democratic than this? The number of such states went up by about six-fold. Of course, it's still in each individual householder's hands to choose not to spray pesticides on their own property.
But this book isn't merely a list of anecdotes, fascinating as such things can be. The opening chapter is merely a lead-in to explore how we came to have the rules we do have, and whether or not it's feasible to effect change. Should we give up on a good idea, because we think it's so good that someone, somewhere, must already have thought of it? Why is it that organizations are frequently ill-suited to the tasks they seem to have taken upon themselves?
I must confess that I largely skimmed chapter four, which was thirty pages of intense focus on the threatened Cerulean Warbler and its migration. Important as this knowledge is, it was a bit too much information for me! A shorter summary would have done it nicely. This felt like the author was painting a mural where a small line diagram would have served adequately, but better things were to come.
The very next chapter explores a variety of topics, from the initiation and final defeat of leaded gasoline to McDonald's fries (which have to be 9/32nds of an inch thick, don't you know?!), to Peruvian business laws, to the true cost of coal-derived energy, to Dutch tulips and cleaning circuit boards!
Whereas one chapter (such as chapter seven) takes a big picture - via a detailed history of the unprecedented international cooperation required to form the European economic community came together for example, another (such as chapter eight) takes a much more local view of how things get done - or fail to. That's where we learn this astounding fact, which is obvious in a background sort of way, but which is quite startling when it's stated quite baldly like this: "Forests absorb an astounding one third of all fossil fuel emissions each year; the destruction of forests today, primarily in the tropics, releases more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than is produced by the entire transportation sector." Sobering, huh? We desperately need the very trees that we're so gleefully slaughtering en masse
This book is associated with a video game called "Law of the Jungle" which I haven't played, but it's available at the link.
I recommend this book as a very worthy read.
