From Booklist
Bailey, the noted (or notorious, to some ecologists) author of Eco-Scam! (1993), here enlists a dozen scientists to explain what is and isn't known about the changing environment. Contrary to this year's silver jubilee of Earth Day sloganeering, the atmosphere is cooling, not warming; world population is not outstripping food production or most material resources; however, the activists are correct about tropical deforestation and overfished oceans. The question is how to ameliorate problems. The prominent green organizations adhere to regulatory and prohibitionist principles; whereas this set of writers favor the private management of resources, believing that to be the path to green benefits and material wealth. Prescriptions aside, this info-rich work is crammed with tabular data about biodiversity, pesticides, and air quality and is supported by a guarded, footnoted text. As its views compete with those published by the Sierra Club and Worldwatch Institute, among others, libraries may want to include this book in their acquisition plans, which BKL's Earth Day feature [Ap 1 95] might guide. Gilbert Taylor
Product Description
In the 25 years since the first Earth Day in 1970, the environmental movement has spawned a new generation of scientists asking vital questions about the true state and fate of the planet. But, surprisingly, some of their answers -- and even the questions themselves -- contradict the movement's deepest beliefs. Why are reserves of oil, precious metals, and other natural resources more plentiful than ever before? Why has the population growth of the twentieth century brought rising standards of living for nearly all? In The True State of the Planet ten premier scholars shatter the myths of overpopulation, food, global warming, and pesticides, while redirecting environmentalists' concerns to the far more urgent problems of fisheries, fresh water, and third-world pollution -- and the political causes behind them.
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