Customer Reviews

Pandora's Poison: Chlorine, Health, and a New Environmental Strategy

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(0)
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2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

This is the best of the several environmentally-oriented books I have reviewed recently, and it offers a double value: not only does it lay out a persuasive social, economic, and political case for abandoning the Risk Paradigm of permissive pollution in favor of an Environmental Paradigm of zero pollution; but it also provides a very fine--really excellent--case for why the current government and industry approaches to information about the environment and threats to the environment are severely flawed. In a nutshell, the current approach divorces "good science" (code for permitting what you can't prove will kill the planet today) from social consciousness and good policy; and the current approach insists on studying risk one contaminant at a time, rather than as a whole.

This book is persuasive; I believe author has the right stuff and should be consulted on major policy issues. I believe the underlying moral values and intellectual arguments that this book makes, about both science and social policy, should be adopted by the Cultural Creatives and the independent voters of America, and that the recommendations of this book are so serious as to warrant country by country translations and promulgation.

This book is exceptional in that is combines a readable policy essay for the non-technical citizen, with deeply documented technical appendices and notes that support a middle ground series of chapters relating scientific findings to long-term policy issues.

From many small actions come revolutionary change--this book is a necessary brick in the road to environmental reform. The bottom line is clear: every year more and more toxins are building up in our blood streams, and this is going to have an overwhelmingly negative impact on the humanity, capability, and survivability of our great grandchildren three generations down--we have not have grandchildren seven generations down if the insights from this book fail to reach the people, and through the people, the policy makers and legislators.

This extremely well-written book makes a powerful argument for a fundamental but practical change in the way government and the chemical industry do business. It is amazingly well referenced and makes a powerful case that synthetic chemicals based on chlorine are harming everyone's health -- not just people who live in polluted areas but the general public, because hundreds of these chemicals can now be found all across the planet. And the book shows in a very fresh and convincing way that this problem has occurred not because we have no regulations but because we have the wrong kind. The new strategy the author discusses is a big change from the current system of bureaucratized pollution, but its strength is that it is based on principles that, after reading the book, seem like just common sense. A secondary theme is a very interesting discussion of how corporate power shapes environmental science in both subtle and obvious ways, and the implications of this for our assumptions about science and democracy. Well worth reading.

Reading Pandora's Poison, I couldn't help thinking of Dante's Inferno. Thornton takes the reader on a tour of the modern-day inferno of chemicals we've created since the rise of chlorine chemistry in the early 20th century. Of course, we've known all along that these poisons were out there (and in here, and everywhere) and we knew they were troublesome, even deadly. But reading this book was the first time I took the full tour. Thornton hands the reader big pieces of technical information, but he walks you through them thoroughly, in language the literate adult can understand. I found myself reading passages over and over again, not because their meaning was unclear, but because, for the first time, the meaning of corporate chemistry and its effects was all too clear. It's obvious that while we have long known how to manipulate industrial chemicals to make our gewgaws, it is only recently researchers and writers, like Thornton have taken the time to assemble evidence of what we have done by releasing these compounds into the environment.

If that isn't enough to convince you of human crassness and myopia, Thornton then takes us on a tour of the convoluted regulatory system that allows these pollutants into our air water and food, and shows us how our civil servants, who are supposed to protect us, instead give protective cover to the miserable merchants of industrial poison.

Finally, he provides a solution, which isn't perfect, but would be a significant step in a positive direction and leaves me thinking the needed answers can be found if we devote half as much cleverness to fixing this problem as we did to causing it.

I bought myself a copy of this book as a birthday present. It has served me well, giving me well-research information that is presented in a useful way. As an environmental activist who is constantly told by chemical industry representatives that my work is not based on "sound science," I know that I can turn to Joe Thornton's book to prove them wrong.

Mr. Thornton has an eagle-eye view of the problem and presents it in layman's terms. This is a book that is well-written, factual, and presents actual solutions instead of just ringing the alarm bell.

The current industry-driven approach which assumes chemicals "innocent until proven guilty" has clearly failed us. It is based on a microscopic and simple linear chemical-by-chemical rating system. This approach does not take into account accumulation of pollutants nor does it address the myriad and exponential effects of the chemicals in all the complex systems in the biosphere whose dynamics are still only dimly understood. This approach is heavily tilted towards the polluters as Mr. Thornton so skillfully shows.

Mr. Thornton presents a solution that includes a much more prudent "guilty until proven innocent" approach that puts the rights of human beings and the planet first. He proposes viable alternatives for chlorine-based products and proposes a new paradigm for rating chemicals and classes of chemicals that takes into account all the "unknowns" and accumulation problems that the pro-industry (and one currently used by our own EPA)...does not.

Mr. Thornton advocates true science be applied to the problem instead of the "good science" that industry always touts. Unfortunately the term [servant]whore to corporate interests.

A call to arms has been rasied and champion has arisen. Mr. Thornton, on behalf of all humans, plants, and animals....thank you. An excellent job and stunningly good book.

Just finished reading this amazing book, the most through and comprehensive on the subject ever written. The approach to this complex subject is unusually fair & balanced. It's highly readable, and filled with positive suggestions on how to resolve a dangerous environmental health challange.

Pandora's Poison is a vividly written, deftly argued, and extensively documented account drawing on a wide range of disciplines: biology, toxicology, epidemiology, environmental chemistry, industrial chemistry, industrial history, economics, environmental policy, science and technology policy, political theory, sociology of science. Thornton's accomplishment is turning these disparate strands into a rich, cohesive, highly readable account of chlorine chemistry and the dilemmas its widespread use poses for individual organisms, for ecosystems, and for democratic societies. In recent decades vast quantities of paper have been devoted to the problems associated with PCBs, dioxin, and other individual chlorinated substances. Thornton demonstrates that within the white noise of this enormous literature lies a unifying signal - the element chlorine; that this signal immediately raises serious concerns about thousands of lesser known chemicals whose effects have received little or no attention; and that it points toward a straightforward, if politically challenging, public remedy.

Pandora's Poison sets a new standard for science and politics. It not only exposes the politics of big business that dominates so much of US evironmental policy. It's also full of amazing, well documented scientific facts that everyone from environmentalists to academics and maybe even enlightened corporations and politicians can put to good use.

In addition, Mr. Thornton's engaging style of writing makes technical issues come alive in easy to understand lay language. He also gets high marks for objectivity by presenting the chemical industry's views in a fair and thorough way before making a powerful refutation of their arguments.

However, the real gift of this book is the compelling but common sense case that Thronton makes for a new policy paradigm to eliminate pollution. Posterity will not look kindly on us if we ignore the wisdom of these pages.

The best environmental book I've read in years! It is clearly organized, accessible to read, but incredibly thorough in the case it makes. The most compelling argument I've ever read that chemicals are damaging the health of the general public. The best thing about the book -- in contrast to many other environmental exposes -- is its treatment of just how to solve the problem. Pandora's Poison explains why the current system for regulating chemicals has allowed this horrible problem to develop, and it lays out a program for how we need to change industrial technologies and environmental policies to fix it. The solution is ambitious, but after reading this book it seems like just common sense!

This book, like Silent Spring, should and does scare the hell out of the chemical industry. I suspect that anyone who disses the book as badly as the first reviewer probably works for the industry, who really don't want you to read this masterpiece.

Why should it scare them? Because 1) it's loaded with clear, well-referenced arguments on why and how to phase out the most dangerous group of chemicals invented (organochlorines); and 2) it challenges the silly (corporatist) notion of "objective" policy-making, without giving up on the facts.

If you like science writers (Barry Commoner, Carl Sagan, Norman Myers) who drop the insider-jargon in order to make a sophisticated argument about environmental science accessible to all, read this book.