America's Environmental Report Card, 2nd Edition: Assessing Our Progress - Perfect for Educators, Students & Environmental Activists
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Product Description
An accessible overview of the most important environmental issues facing the United States, with new and updated material.Americans are concerned about the state of the environment, and yet polls show that many have lost faith in both scientists' and politicians' ability to solve environmental problems. In America's Environmental Report Card, Harvey Blatt sorts through the deluge of conflicting information about the environment and offers an accessible overview of the environmental issues that are most important to Americans today. Blatt has thoroughly updated this second edition, revising and adding new material. He looks at water supplies and new concerns about water purity; the dangers of floods (increased by widespread logging and abetted by glacial melting); infrastructure problems (in a new chapter devoted entirely to this subject); the leaching of garbage buried in landfills; soil, contaminated crops, and organic food; fossil fuels; alternative energy sources (in another new chapter); controversies over nuclear energy; the increasing pace of climate change; and air pollution. Along the way, he outlines ways to deal with these problems—workable and reasonable solutions that map the course to a sustainable future. America can lead the way to a better environment, Blatt argues. We are the richest nation in the world, and we can afford it—in fact, we can't afford not to.
Customer Reviews
Kristine Hale, in her review of another book by Mr. Blatt, "America's Food," says it reads like a long book report chock-full of numbers without as much a focus on narrative as a book by, say, Marion Nestle, Michael Pollan, or Eric Schlosser. Similarly, Mr. Blatt's "America's Environmental Report Card" is very much an info dump book, appropriate for someone wanting an all-encompassing introduction/starting point to the state of environment and environmental policy in America. As pointed out by other reviewers, too, despite being a run-down, it is far from being a dry text, rather a highly accessible breeze through of a book without skimping on the scholarly. That said, there are moments in the book where the author does express an unusual degree of passion, so that some pages of the book do not feel as dispassionate. I do not mean to suggest that Mr. Blatt is weak at those points, but he certainly reads as more argumentative rather than simply giving an issue report. For example, in the chapter on "Soils, Crops, and Food," he goes into a lengthy discussion about the environmental costs of meat and dairy, crafting a detailed argument for abolishing the production of both, which struck me as an unusual position certainly worthy of the attention given it. Relatedly, it is one of the two times Mr. Blatt actually uses the term immoral, the other being in his discussion of how states handle trash disposal (i.e., exporting the issue instead of handling it responsibly and sustainably).In short, expect an info dump, but not a so-uncompromisingly-dull-and-dispassionate-even-a-scholar-will-yawn slog through.
