Eco-Facts & Eco-Fiction: Understanding the Environmental Debate

Rating:
Summary: Apologist in the guise of a rationalist
Review: Eco-facts & Eco-fiction spends 264 pages side-stepping the critical environmental issues of our time in order to denounce environmentalists who have made claims that were too broad and too poorly supported by scientific research. In the process of making his critique, Baarschers becomes an apologist for the petrochemical, nuclear, and agrochemical industries.

Baarschers ignores the global disruption of natural biogeochemical cycles that has occurred in this century and focuses instead on a handful of difficult to prove human toxicological effects from some chemical substances commonly villified in the media. His discussion strongly implies that concern over the potential harmful effects of the vast number of manufactured chemicals is alarmist and misinformed. In addition, by focussing on human toxicology, his discussion masks the ecosystem disruption caused by the flux of chemicals and waste to the environment. Finally, he has the propensity to cast the debate in absolute terms: the halting of chemical use vs. a continuation of the status quo. Overall the discussion is divisive and distorted, skewed by his interest in casting himself as an insightful truthsayer.

Regarding the nuclear power industry, Baarschers blithely dismisses the potential for clean, safe energy sources (solar and wind in particular) and concludes that "The question of sustainability will force us to have a close second look at nuclear energy."

Overall, the book presents a few well-considered points and cautions for those working in environmental fields, but the general tone of the book is likely to make the uninformed reader far too comfortable with the environmental destruction that continues to accelerate during the closing of this century.

Rating:
Summary: Objective review of environmental issues
Review: I use this as one of my texts in E100 Environmenta and People. It presents a balanced approach to show there are problems, but all is not doom and gloom. I hope the author will consider updating frequently to include newer issues as they arise. I developed several questions for each chapter for the students to answer.