Essential reading for anyone with a stake in the environmental debate.
A corporate lawyer and conservation leader argues that only a new bipartisan coalition can end the legislative logjam facing the American environmental movement.
Rich (Christian Nation, 2013)—a former partner at Sullivan & Cromwell, where he represented many oil and other multinational corporations as well as leaders in the national Land Trust Alliance—brings an understanding of both the corporate and environmental worlds to this fresh and welcome analysis of a green movement that “has lost its way.” In a powerful opening, he notes that the last major environmental bill passed in the United States, the Clean Air Act of 1990, was a compromise based on a market approach, the kind of legislation not possible in today’s polarized politics. The bipartisan consensus of the 1960s and 1970s (President Richard Nixon called environmentalism “a cause beyond party and beyond factions”) fell apart with the Ronald Reagan revolution of the 1980s, leading to the present “Great Estrangement,” with conservatives drifting rightward and environmentalists leftward. To repair the breach, conservatives must reassert their traditional leadership of conservation causes (à la Theodore Roosevelt) and temper their market fundamentalism. Greens have to learn to compromise, to tone down alarmist demands and offer a more hopeful vision, and to reform their mostly aging, white movement to win national support. Rich’s call for change is sometimes wildly ambitious and seems especially unobtainable in light of current left-right debates, but his experience is unquestionably relevant. His frank views will leave both sides somewhat offended but will hopefully prove useful in teasing out the best impulses of both corporate and environmental leaders in the service of nature. All will certainly appreciate the author’s thoughtful, sharp examination of issues that have prevented legislative action on climate change for two decades. As Rich notes, mobilizing even a “sufficient number” of moderates and conservatives can make a significant difference.
Essential reading for anyone with a stake in the environmental debate.Pub Date: April 18, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-393-29247-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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