ENVIRONMENTAL AMERICA

One of six glossy, readable titles, each focusing on environmental issues and concerns in one US region. Each discusses air quality, water pollution, land use, habitat destruction, polluters, and both public and private efforts to clean up the environment. While the whole is an impressive effort to make regional issues accessible, the series suffers from sloppy editing, including factual errors and quoting out of context, possibly introducing bias. Here, for example, Herda says that increased acidity in fresh-water supplies releases numerous heavy metals into the water and adds that ``these heavy metals are known to cause a wide variety of serious diseases—from kidney damage and cancer to Alzheimer's....'' No cause has yet been definitively established for Alzheimer's. Since most of the footnotes in all six titles come from just five sources, their biases and authority might usefully have been suggested: When a company chemist sounding off during the battle between Oregon's timber industry and conservationists is quoted as saying, ``Babies are replaceable!'' (see The Northwestern States), it would be good to be able to evaluate the veracity of the source. Still, a valuable introduction to environmental problems. ``Things You Can Do''; ``Hotline Numbers''; list of organizations; brief notes; bibliography; glossary; index. (Nonfiction. 10-14)l