November 16, 2000 | Read Time: 2 minutes
Earth Rising: American Environmentalism in the 21st Century
by Philip Shabecoff
Today’s environmental movement, the author argues, has yet to “meet the current and coming challenges” facing our planet’s ecosystem.
Drawing on more than two decades’ experience reporting on environmental issues for The New York Times and serving as publisher of the daily environmental-news journal Greenwire, Philip Shabecoff offers a critique of the current state of–and future prospects for–environmentalism in America.
Mr. Shabecoff begins his assessment–which he bases on interviews with a variety of scholars, politicians, civil servants, and environmental activists, as well as on his own personal knowledge of environmentalism–with a history of the 100-year-old movement.
He then analyzes the state of the environment at present, which he says has deteriorated because of humans’ “misuse of the material world.”
Subsequent chapters evaluate the extent to which foundations, business, politics, and science and technology have helped or harmed the environmental movement. Mr. Shabecoff allows that some organizations have done good things for the environment, but insists that the human race has yet to successfully “forestall destruction” of the earth.
While his book is primarily a critique of the American environmental movement, Mr. Shabecoff also offers his own recommendations. National environmental groups, he writes, need to establish links with grassroots organizations, to create a new environmentalism that is “more powerful, diverse, sophisticated, visionary, and flexible.”
If they hope to ensure the earth’s survival, he explains, activists at all levels must work to instill environmentalism in the education system, the global economy, the American political process, and the course of scientific enterprise.
Publisher: Island Press, P.O. Box 7, Department 2PR, Covelo, Calif. 95428; (800) 828-1302; http://www.islandpress.org; 224 pages; $24.95; I.S.B.N. 1-55963-583-5.
