NOT IN OUR BACKYARD

A collage of verbal snapshots of environmental disasters, battles, activists, and trends—from the 1969 Santa Barbara offshore oil-drilling explosion to the 1992 celebration in Wallace, Louisiana, of victory over an environmentally threatening chemical company. Redmond (an editor at the San Francisco Bay Guardian) and Mowrey (a Bay area journalist) touch on matters ranging from the growing hole in the ozone layer to the inadequate response of the Reagan/Bush Administrations to the bombing of the Greenpeace ship The Russian Warrior in a New Zealand harbor. Environmentalist actions detailed here are as diverse as the harmless ``ecotage'' committed by one anonymous ``Fox'' who inspired the Earth First!- ers' monkey-wrenching campaigns to the famous battles to kill the SST; to save the dolphins from the tuna-fishers; to stop the TVA's proposed Tellico Dam. Some of these stories are told in stand-alone two-to-five-page bits, others in a few or several bits; and the installments of any one story might be consecutive or scattered throughout. Rather than concisely summarizing facts, issues, and arguments, the authors tend to focus on individual players and to present the stories in semidramatized scenes (``as the packed gallery watched...''), all of which makes for patchy coverage and jerky reading. Some of the material—Lois Gibbs's organizing at Love Canal; the Exxon Valdez episode—has also been told in more detail elsewhere. But Mowrey and Redmond spice the Seabrook story with reports of questionable behavior on the part of David Souter, now on the Supreme Court, and they offer an interesting sketch of Vice-President Gore, who has been dubbed the ``ozone man'' for his expressed concern but whose Congressional record on environmental issues was only average: He comes off here as a calculating opportunist. A wide-ranging sampling of cases and actors, though the bits and pieces don't add up to any coherent overview of the environmental movement. (Photographs)