ECO-READING
THE E-FACTOR: THE BOTTOM-LINE APPROACH TO ENVIRONMENTALLY RESPONSIBLE BUSINESS, by Joel Makower (Times Books/Random House, 292 pp., $23). It is becoming increasingly clear to many business leaders that "thinking green" can be good for profits as well as the for environment. In this book, the editor of "The Green Business Letter" tells why and lays out strategies for reducing waste and pollution. He also describes many success stories of companies that have included such things as "life-cycle analysis" i n their manufacturing.
A good resource for eco-minded business people.
ECO-HEROES: TWELVE TALES OF ENVIRONMENTAL VICTORY, by Aubrey Wallace (Mercury House: San Francisco, Calif., 232 pp., $12.50 paper). Starting in 1990, the Goldman Environmental Foundation each year has chosen six people to receive an award known unofficially as the "Nobel Prize for environmentalists." The $60,000 prize brings international recognition to grass-roots activists working to preserve a corner of the earth.
Included here are 12 profiles of such people as Wangari Maathai, who founded the Greenbelt Movement in Kenya (where she has been beaten and jailed several times), and Lois Gibbs, the homemaker who fought the toxic wastes buried at Love Canal in upstate New York.
As this book makes clear, many (if not most) of today's "eco-heroes" are women.
ECO-SCAM: THE FALSE PROPHETS OF ECOLOGICAL APOCALYPSE, by Ronald Bailey (St. Martin's Press, 228 pp., $19.95). Environmentalism has steadily grown as a cultural and political force over the years, but along with it has come a counter movement that is growing in size and influence as well. Ronald Bailey, a former science and technology writer for Forbes magazine and producer of public television's weekly series "TechnoPolitics," is one of the most articulate spokesman for this effort to rebut organized en vironmentalism and its most outspoken proponents.
Here, Bailey takes on what he calls "a new generation of doomsters," debunking their predictions on global warming, ozone depletion, population, and depletion of resources, and criticizing "their faulty analyses, their wildly inaccurate predictions, and their heedless politicization of science." One would love to see Bailey debate Vice President Al Gore.
