Interior Designer's Portable Handbook: First-Step Rules of Thumb for the Design of Interiors

The journalist who broke the stories on the Dalkon shield and Ford Pinto offers a critique of the mainstream American environmental movement, from its conservationist origins to the advent of the "fourth wave" of today's environmentalists. UP.

In this timely book, award-winning journalist Dowie analyzes why the once-effective environmental movement now appears, even under an ostensibly friendly Democratic administration, increasingly powerless and irrelevant. The bulk of his text details the tendencies and practices that Dowie identifies as leading to the current crisis: dependence for success on mass mailings and professional lobbyists; neglect of grass-roots activism; failure to involve minorities; excessive willingness to compromise; naive belief in the good faith of government agencies and corporate boards; and a general lack of audacity and zeal. The important closing chapters discuss various emerging groups and philosophies that could contribute to a "fourth wave" environmental movement. This thought-provoking book joins Philip Shabecoff's A Fierce Green Fire (Hill & Wang: Farrar, 1993) and Kirkpatrick Sale's The Green Revolution (LJ 7/93) in both interpreting the history of environmentalism and assessing its future. While not one of these books is definitive, each has special strengths. Dowie excels in the treatment of events and trends since 1989. Recommended for academic libraries and environmental collections.
Joan S. Elbers, formerly with Montgomery Coll., Rockville, Md.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Dowie is an award-winning journalist with a penchant for radical inquiry. He has tackled the American environmental movement out of frustration, believing that it should have accomplished much more than it has. Why environmentalism has failed to live up to its potential occupies much of Dowie's rigorous analysis. He begins with a scathing history of the movement's first stirrings, an effort by well-heeled, elitist white men to maintain wilderness areas for recreational purposes. The next phase pitted conservationists interested in "wise use" against the more prescient preservationists. Dowie tracks the rapid devolution of "wise use" into abuse during the Reagan years and the foolish fallback tactics of the green movement, which bureaucratized itself into little more than a direct-mail machine. As critical as Dowie is, he does see hope in the next phase of this phoenixlike movement. He believes that a genuinely democratic form of environmentalism--linked to civil rights, focused on urban as well as rural environmental issues, and involving women and men of all races and cultures--is possible and promising. Let's hope so. Donna Seaman