A fun introduction to a serious topic that should serve as a starting point for further study and action.
Why hasn’t the environmental movement made a more significant impact on the health of our planet?
In this brief, energetic book, Price pleads for a more comprehensive environmentalism, which she defines as “in here” rather than “out there.” The rapidly paced, conversational narrative, loaded with bullet points, sidebars, pull quotes, and “Scribble Zone[s] (“write, draw, ponder…”), will catch the attention of some readers but annoy others. In addition to rhetorical swipes at “the Kochs and ultraright politicians,” the author advances some important, if familiar, arguments about the state of environmentalism. For decades, many major corporations have claimed “green” credentials that have been superficial at best. Coca Cola has pushed “Keep America Beautiful” since the 1950s, but the trash that used to litter sidewalks now just ends up in landfills. Nestlé, the world’s largest food and beverage company, introduced water bottles with less plastic but still “aggressively drains and privatizes public water sources to fill” those bottles. Apple’s headquarters is LEED certified, but what about its suppliers in China? In other words, notes Price, the “green efforts” of large corporations are mainly for show. While Barack Obama’s “Cash for Clunkers” campaign seemed like a good idea, it required the trashing of working cars, at great environmental cost. The author focuses on discerning actual impact, including the “ultra-toxic industrial practices” needed to create such ostensibly environmentally friendly products as electric cars. We have “greenwashed” the economy to justify buying more and more “green” products while the root problem, rampant consumerism, goes unaddressed. The author’s criticisms about the destructive nature of capitalism are well taken yet require further development. Her more practical, real-world examples, most of which derive from European nations—“only glass beverage bottles allowed (Denmark, with a near 100% return rate”)—are the most effective parts of the book, which should not be viewed as a comprehensive resource.
A fun introduction to a serious topic that should serve as a starting point for further study and action.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-393-54087-1
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
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
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