Not in Our Backyard: The People and Events That Shaped America's Modern Environment Movement

A study of America's grass-roots battle to save the country's natural resources traces the history of the environmental movement and profiles such key figures as Lois Gibbs, the Love Canal crusader, and John McPhee's archdruid, David Brower. 20,000 first printing.

April 22, 1970, the first Earth Day, saw the largest demonstration in U.S. history; 20 million people took to the streets. Eight years earlier, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring had alerted Americans to environmental destruction. Here Redmond, managing editor of the San Francisco Bay Guardian , and freelance journalist Mowrey review major events of the environmental movement in the past two decades. These include the nuclear threat of Three Mile Island, the toxic poisoning near the Love Canal and the environmental impact of the West Side Highway in New York City. Also covered are the efforts of ecological saboteurs, outraged housewives tracking toxic dumps and other grassroot activists. Readers may be surprised to learn that in 1991, then-Senator Al Gore cast the deciding vote to block the repeal of the 1872 General Mining Law, and that David Souter, then New Hampshire Attorney General, was accused, though not charged, with improper activities in prosecuting the Clamshell Alliance (1977-78). This is a lively account of struggles to protect and improve the environment since the first Earth Day.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A collage of verbal snapshots of environmental disasters, battles, activists, and trends--from the 1969 Santa Barbara offshore oil-drilling explosion to the 1992 celebration in Wallace, Louisiana, of victory over an environmentally threatening chemical company. Redmond (an editor at the San Francisco Bay Guardian) and Mowrey (a Bay area journalist) touch on matters ranging from the growing hole in the ozone layer to the inadequate response of the Reagan/Bush Administrations to the bombing of the Greenpeace ship The Russian Warrior in a New Zealand harbor. Environmentalist actions detailed here are as diverse as the harmless ``ecotage'' committed by one anonymous ``Fox'' who inspired the Earth First!- ers' monkey-wrenching campaigns to the famous battles to kill the SST; to save the dolphins from the tuna-fishers; to stop the TVA's proposed Tellico Dam. Some of these stories are told in stand-alone two-to-five-page bits, others in a few or several bits; and the installments of any one story might be consecutive or scattered throughout. Rather than concisely summarizing facts, issues, and arguments, the authors tend to focus on individual players and to present the stories in semidramatized scenes (``as the packed gallery watched...''), all of which makes for patchy coverage and jerky reading. Some of the material--Lois Gibbs's organizing at Love Canal; the Exxon Valdez episode--has also been told in more detail elsewhere. But Mowrey and Redmond spice the Seabrook story with reports of questionable behavior on the part of David Souter, now on the Supreme Court, and they offer an interesting sketch of Vice-President Gore, who has been dubbed the ``ozone man'' for his expressed concern but whose Congressional record on environmental issues was only average: He comes off here as a calculating opportunist. A wide-ranging sampling of cases and actors, though the bits and pieces don't add up to any coherent overview of the environmental movement. (Photographs) -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Journalists Mowrey and Redmond offer a chronology of the environmental movement beginning with the Santa Barbara oil spill in 1969 and concluding with the 1992 election of Al Gore, an environmentalist, as U.S. vice president. The 11 chapters are composed of vignettes telling the story of people who took action and consequently made a difference. The famous, the infamous, and the unknown fill the pages of this readable, inspirational addition to the shelf of environmental books. Recommended for public libraries and anyone interested in the Not in My Backyard movement. This one is a winner. For another environmental history, see Kirkpatrick Sale's The Green Revolution: The American Environmental Movement, 1962-1992 , LJ 7/93.--Ed.
- Patricia Owens, Wabash Valley Coll., Mt. Carmel, Ill.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

In their straightforward account of the major events in the environmental movement from 1969 to 1990, Mowrey and Redmond clearly define and present the conflict between America's romance with the environment and its romance with industrial and economic development. Each chapter focuses on an individual who battled with the powers that be over the "right" to a clean environment. This approach personalizes the overall problem while emphasizing the grass-roots nature of its solution so far. Some of those portrayed are politicians and scientists--such as former senator Gaylord Nelson and atmospheric researcher Joe Farman, who discovered the impact of chlorofluorocarbons on the ozone. Some are housewives and concerned neighbors--such as Lois Gibbs of Love Canal and Cecil Garland, who fought against mining in Lincoln, Montana. Despite the differences in their backgrounds and approaches, all these warriors fight the same enemy--the political power of the industries causing pollution. Lindsay Throm