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Overview
Our planet is desperately ill and must be healed. If the human race does not change its present behavior, the ecosphere may be doomed within the next ten years. A renowned anti-nuclear activist for twenty years, Helen Caldicott here turns from the arms race to the race to save the planet, laying out the grim details of ozone depletion, excess energy consumption, pollution, and global warming. The causes: public apathy, corporate greed, and the cynical manipulation of political leaders.To save the planet we need to change the way we think and behave. Closer contact with, and appropriate reverence for, nature will help to provide simple answers to seemingly complex problems.
If You Love This Planet describes in easy-to-understand language the scientific and medical consequences of the greenhouse effect, ozone depletion, deforestation, species extinction, toxic chemical pollution, nuclear waste, food contamination, and the ever-present threat of nuclear war.
Caldicott, a physician by training, also gives us a prescription for cure—and a cause for hope. We must learn energy efficiency, we must organize politically (voting, she suggests, should be compulsory), and we must hold corporations and governments accountable for their actions. Above all, she says, our fight for the planet will draw its greatest strength from a love for the Earth itself.
Synopsis
"Helen Caldicott has been my inspiration to speak out."—Meryl Streep
Library Journal
Caldicott, an Australian doctor, is a former Harvard Medical School educator, the cofounder of Physicians for Social Responsibility and founder of the Women's Action for Nuclear Disarmament and International Physicans to Save the Environment. She is radical, anticapitalist, and a feminist. She is also clear and persuasive. But her presentation is often slanted--as when she implies that the submersion of 600,000 acres of rainforest would have been a huge loss in an area previously described as ``the size of the United States.'' Her documentation is often suspect: much of it is drawn from general periodicals and portmanteau sources that lead her to state, for example, that 54 percent of the U.S. wetlands are gone when, according to the Waterfowl and Wetlands Research Bureau, the figure, excluding Alaska, is 30 to 50 percent. And she can be strident--as when she writes that we should ``never have more than one light bulb burning . . . unless there are two people . . . in different rooms--then two bulbs.'' Still, her diagnosis of our planetary ills is comprehensive, her etiology fascinating, and her prescription bracing. This book will circulate.-- Linn Prentis, Milford, Pa.