As teachers of environmental studies, particularly introductory courses, surely you will be showing your students the path leaving CO2 behind and entering into a new and better reality. Your students will benefit from this book, for reasons including its expansive scope, its arrangement to intersperse “hard” and “soft” topics, and its positive, even joyful attitude even in the face of enormous challenges. These design features will keep students engaged while learning. Addressing environmental problems manifesting locally and around the world, the book is appropriate for students in many nations. For English-speaking students considering study abroad, the book contains an engaging chapter about the author’s several missions to Paris where he lived among students of the Sorbonne, and a chapter about the author’s Fulbright Professorship to the University of North Rhine–Westphalia.
Broader than climate change, this book also covers some of the other environmental threats to life that all require global attention. These are wildlife extinction, pesticides and toxic substances, stratospheric ozone loss, waste management without proper recycling, and of course, climate change. To bring all tools to bear on the array of problems, the book is multi-disciplinary, crossing and combining environmental science, technology, engineering, economics, history, policy, law, and governance both domestic and international. The book contains four or five chapters of the “hard” sciences, but these are not deeply technical or requiring scientific training to understand. And there are several chapters devoted to public policy – these chapters as needed draw upon the social sciences. This expansive scope increases the book’s intellectual appeal, and it is consistent with the reality that environmental problems, being problems both of science and of public policy, must be approached holistically.
The “hard” chapters are interspersed between, or themselves may contain, stories of learning and adventure “in the field.” These lighten the book and will please “green” young people by demonstrating to them the excitement and fulfillment that they can expect if they commit to further, intense, and earnest study that provides professional training in planet protection. A graduate, who has developed a skill that serves his or her passion, in the life to follow the university will be very, very busy – but it will not seem like work. The personal nature of the book shows that environmental protection can be “serious fun.”
To foster a positive and hopeful spirit, the author’s emphasis is on solutions. He relates how during his years of service our EPA took the lead out of gasoline that was damaging young brains, stopped most toxic waste dumping, and cleaned up much dirty water and dirty air, including stopping acid rain. Above all for climate change, starting as soon as our nation finds the political will to reform, the focus is on “how to fix it.” Using effective technologies already invented and proven policies to apply them, the book concludes by showing specifically how we may repurpose and adapt EPA’s trusty tools to create solutions for the frightful deterioration of the planet.