Ecocide in the USSR: Health And Nature Under Siege

A dissection of the Soviet Union's legacy of health and environmental disaster, this book examines a former country of 103 cities - home to 70 million people - where the air is unfit to breathe and pollution fouls 75 percent of the water.

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.