Rating: 
Summary: who are the supposed experts?
Review: This book is only good for those interested at how anti-environmentalists like to market their "ideas." Unfortunately, it completely miscasts scientific data and debate, and shapes it to suit their needs. I was suspicious when I saw that Dan Quayle's wife wrote the foreword to the book. My suspicions were confirmed after reading it. This book is only useful for one thing: picking apart with reasoned science. There are 15 factual errors on the first 2 pages of the book! How do they defend this? They don't. This is the kind of mindless, trival, volume that is of no use and of no consequence. Look elsewhere to educate your children. Not all environmental and ecology education books are about "gloom 'n' doom" as the authors of this volume put it. But hiding things from your children will only hurt/disable them for the future, when they encounter serious environmental degradation and changes, and are not equipped to understand what they are seeing.
Rating:
Summary: Undertand thine Enemy
Review: This book is only good for those interested at how anti-environmentalists like to market their "ideas." Unfortunately, it completely miscasts scientific data and debate, and shapes it to suit their needs. I was suspicious when I saw that Dan Quayle's wife wrote the foreword to the book. My suspicions were confirmed after reading it. This book is only useful for one thing: picking apart with reasoned science. There are 15 factual errors on the first 2 pages of the book! How do they defend this? They don't. This is the kind of mindless, trival, volume that is of no use and of no consequence. Look elsewhere to educate your children. Not all environmental and ecology education books are about "gloom 'n' doom" as the authors of this volume put it. But hiding things from your children will only hurt/disable them for the future, when they encounter serious environmental degradation and changes, and are not equipped to understand what they are seeing.
Rating: 
Summary: Accessible and well-written survey of environmental issues
Review: This book is the most accessible of the free-market environmentalist works. It is sad that many people will write it off out of closed-mindedness and intellectual intolerance. That we ought to consider the costs as well as the benefits of slowing economic growth to benefit the environment, or that some well-intentioned environmental policies have disastrous unintended consequences -- these and other ideas in the book cut against the dogma accepted by the popular press and the education establishment. Contrary to what some of the other reviews tell us, the logic and scientific authority in this book is impeccable, and the benefits of sound environmental policy do not go unremarked. (If you want poor logic and duplicitous omission of facts, go to Zero Population Growth -- I had the pleasure of attending one of their high-school workshops, and it was frightening indeed.) Highly recommended. If you want your child to receive a more balanced view of enviromental iss! ues than he or she may be getting in school, or if you want a quick survey of those issues for yourself, look no further.
Rating:
Summary: The Ignorant Attempt a Rebuttal
Review: This book started out with good intentions. Environmentalists often sensationalize points to increase concern for a particular aspect of environmental policy. They often blow things out of proportion in order to make people believe and act on their particular crusade. However, this book goes too far. It causes a reader to believe that there isn't an environmental problem in the world today and that we as a people are headed down a bright environmental future. To back up its claims, the book uses questionable "experts" who don't know the complete implications of the problems they review. The book focuses on a very small part of an environmental concern and shows how it is not a problem and doesn't encompass the complete story often giving people false impressions or even incorrect conclusions. This book even tries to use debates about particular actions between scientists as proof that certain environmental problems aren't really occurring. I'm a biologist who believes that environmentalists need to be tempered a little, but this book tries to lead people to believe that the environment is not in trouble and that we are making satisfactory progress towards correcting mistakes; nothing could be farther from the truth.
Rating:
Summary: The Ignorant Attempt a Rebuttal
Review: This book started out with good intentions. Environmentalists often sensationalize points to increase concern for a particular aspect of environmental policy. They often blow things out of proportion in order to make people believe and act on their particular crusade. However, this book goes too far. It causes a reader to believe that there isn't an environmental problem in the world today and that we as a people are headed down a bright environmental future. To back up its claims, the book uses questionable "experts" who don't know the complete implications of the problems they review. The book focuses on a very small part of an environmental concern and shows how it is not a problem and doesn't encompass the complete story often giving people false impressions or even incorrect conclusions. This book even tries to use debates about particular actions between scientists as proof that certain environmental problems aren't really occurring. I'm a biologist who believes that environmentalists need to be tempered a little, but this book tries to lead people to believe that the environment is not in trouble and that we are making satisfactory progress towards correcting mistakes; nothing could be farther from the truth.
Rating:
Summary: Looking for right wing propaganda to placate children?
Review: This summary is quoted from a ZPG memo:
"The current flagship of the crusade against population and environmental education is the ironically titled book "Facts not Fear: A Parent's Guide to Teaching Children About the Environment" by Michael Sanera and Jane J. Shaw. The book, with a foreward by Marilyn Quayle, is filled with half-truths, distortions and outright lies about population and environment. ... This work pretends to be academic, but it is in fact only very slickly done anti-environmental propaganda which right-wing talk show hosts quote with delight."
Here's a quote from the book:
"Will recycling save trees? Unfortunately, no. Much of our paper comes from trees that are planted specifically to grow pulpwood for paper. If the demand for paper declines, some owners will stop growing those trees."
Umm, alrighty then. It's providing an economics education too! Rush Limbaugh fans will eat this book for breakfast.
Rating:
Summary: Outstanding resource!
Review: This text provides a balanced view of what is actually happening in the environment. Despite dealing with technical subjects, the language is easy to understand. Chapters are devoted to common subjects such as acid rain, overpopulation, pesticides, etc. The book provides a very balanced view of the subjects that is missing from everyday media reports. It serves as a tool to help children (and parents) learn more about the environment by challenging commonly held beliefs. Facts Not Fear is an outstanding resource that no parent should be without!
Rating:
Summary: Outstanding resource!
Review: This text provides a balanced view of what is actually happening in the environment. Despite dealing with technical subjects, the language is easy to understand. Chapters are devoted to common subjects such as acid rain, overpopulation, pesticides, etc. The book provides a very balanced view of the subjects that is missing from everyday media reports. It serves as a tool to help children (and parents) learn more about the environment by challenging commonly held beliefs. Facts Not Fear is an outstanding resource that no parent should be without!
Rating:
Summary: a balanced book?
Review: Well researched, according to Sanera and Shaw, now means that you don't have to cite your sources. It means that one sentence claiming schools are creating "environmental crusaders" out of our children can be followed by a sentence outlining that 30 states have mandated environmental education and that means they are obviously enviromental crusaders. While it would be nice to think of this book as balanced, they need to do a lot more to convince anyone that they provide this so called balanced approach. While I agree that the larger processes need to be discussed before the activism or clean-up can start (and they would probably say we in the US don't need either of those two things), they obviously need to go back and do some science research of their own. And yes, they need to do science research. They extoll their book as being enough of a resource to teach parents how to teach their children science, and it hurts me to say this, but if many of the elementary teachers in our country don't think they can teach science well, it is an injustice to our children to have parents with no scientific background teaching our children watered down, mislead ideas. It is good to read something that points out flaws in extreme enviromentalism, but not surprising to see that their text suffers from the same flaws they claim envionmentalists "suffer" from. Exaggeration, taking facts out of context, over simplifiction and appealing to parents as equals in search for a higher truth are only some of the techniques they employ.
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