An able exposition of many of the ugly realities behind the global marketplace’s attractive exterior.
New Scientist environment and development consultant Pearce (With Speed and Violence: Why Scientists Fear Tipping Points in Climate Change, 2007, etc.) looks at the stuff our consumer dreams are made of, drawing dire conclusions about globalization along the way.
The author is interested in our personal footprints, the amount of materials, labor and fuel that supplies us with luxuries. “The people and the pollution that sustain us are invisible to us,” he writes. He sets off on a globetrotting tour to find out where “the coffee in my mug and the shrimp in my curry, the computer on my desk and the phone in my hand” come from. Pearce takes a populist perspective, spotlighting the humanity of both consumers and often-impoverished producers, but the book is nonetheless a disturbing indictment. Nearly every chapter suggests that key resources are becoming scarcer and more sought after, resulting in a deepening inequity even as vaunted “fair trade” practices in industries like coffee purportedly lift some boats. The voracious tastes of Westerners for inexpensive fashions and cell phones have damaged places like Bangladesh and rural China, causing both environmental despoliation and unexpected social gains for women, who are preferred in many factories for their perceived nimbleness. Pearce illustrates the slippery nature of these transformations with observations such as, “child labor is largely banished now from the factories that Western buyers know about.” He argues that we can barely conceive of how the elaborate supply chains of global trade are transforming many far-flung societies. Our love of jeans is apparently destroying Uzbekistan, where much cotton is now grown with ruinous ecological effects, and we may have but a few decades left of many of the metals and resources necessary for our beloved high-tech lifestyle. Pearce delivers this news in an incongruously sunny tone and ends with several optimistic chapters arguing that we can still control population growth and climate change, but his underlying thesis remains grim.
An able exposition of many of the ugly realities behind the global marketplace’s attractive exterior.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8070-8588-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2008
Poignant memories from an animal savior (with co-author Glen, an animal-rights activist). Since 1983, Crisp has devoted herself to saving animals during natural and man-made disasters. From her early volunteer work with the Humane Society of Santa Clara Valley, helping stranded pets during local San Francisco Bay area floods and fires, to her recent full-time job as director of Emergency Animal Rescue Services (a nationwide Red Crosstype program for animals), Crisp's dedication and determination are undaunted. During her first rescue mission, Crisp learned first-hand how to aid animals during a flood. Among the 100 animals she helped save were a drowning puppy she clutched from the floodwater, a stranded 300-pound hog, and a cat locked inside a washing machine in a house with the water waist-high. The experience changed her life forever, and she vowed not only to make herself available to help whenever needed but to create something she discovered was sorely lacking—a nationwide animal rescue plan that could be followed during any catastrophe. Over the years, Crisp's work has expanded from local emergencies to national ones. She spent six months organizing clean-up efforts for seabirds and otters after the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska, helped place innumerable homeless animals after Florida's Hurricane Andrew, and set up animal relief services during the devastating St. Charles flood in Missouri. An appendix lists invaluable tips for safeguarding your own dogs, cats, birds, and horses during a disaster. Crisp's highly personalized accounts of daring rescues, incredible volunteer efforts, and the bonds of tenderness that form between humans and animals are quite touching—though at times she can go on about the wonder of it all. (16 b&w photos, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: April 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-671-52277-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1996
Joining the recent stream of books on the Columbia River is this hard-hitting report on the policies that have governed this most engineered of all American rivers. As the son of a worker who helped build the Grand Coulee Dam and later worked at the Hanford nuclear site, Washington Post correspondent Harden (Africa, 1990) easily elicits candid opinions from the bargemen, farmers, and nuclear engineers who owe their prosperity to the federal government for erecting dams and supplying cheap, subsidized irrigation water and electricity. The ``managed oasis life'' came at great cost to the wild salmon of the river and to the Native Americans who based their culture on the Chinook and other species that were all but eradicated by the behemoth dams along the Columbia-Snake river system. Harden's informants on the dry, eastern side of Washington's Cascade Range invariably castigate environmentalists and city dwellers on the western side for their support of reservoir ``drawdowns,'' which would help speed migrating salmon to the ocean but bring seasonal halts to navigation and lowered electrical generation. Harden talks to former engineers who worked at Hanford building the atomic bomb, now consultants in a massive, costly clean-up effort at the plant, who minimize the consequences to the land and its residents who lived downwind. While respectful of the hardworking farmers he interviews, Harden lacks sympathy with their complaints against impending government policies that would alter their subsidized lifestyle. He labels their faith in the Columbia River Project ``irrigation theology'': ``The orthodoxy of the Project teaches that subsidies are freedom, salmon are frivolous, Indians are suspect, and rivers are fuel for sprinklers.'' Until the ascendancy of the Republican Congress, the river seemed about to benefit from Clinton administration policies that would once more permit an annual salmon migration. Although much of the story has already been written elsewhere, Harden's bold and well-supported commentary is a welcome addition to the literature of this majestic river. (maps, not seen)
Pub Date: May 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-393-03936-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1996
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