Ecocide in the USSR

A look at the impending health and environmental disasters in the Soviet Union discusses the shortage of appropriate surgical instruments, the dangerous concentration of pollution in some cities, the prevalent use of the banned pesticide DDT, and more. National ad/promo.

Demographer Feshbach and journalist Friendly show how 70 years of unregulated industrial pollution have both devastated the Soviet environment and created a host of medical problems that Russia's primitive health service is inadequate to handle. Having turned a vast proportion of its farmland and forests, lakes, and rivers into toxic waste dumps, Russia now has neither the technology nor the money to clean up Chernobyl and the Aral Sea, not to mention the many less-famous disaster areas documented here. There's a hopeful chapter on new citizen activists, but the authors conclude there will be no real progress short of a total cultural transformation. Well written despite some jarring transitions, this will interest many well-informed readers.
- Robert Decker, Los Angeles
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.