Science Under Siege : Balancing Technology And The Environment

Science writer Fumento spells out (in alarming terms) how environmentalists and others who take aim at technology are alarming the public for no good reason. We need more rational and penetrating insight into how social and political institutions interact with science and scientific evidence not more rabble rousing on either side. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.

Conservative journalist and science writer Fumento ( The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS ) here examines several public health issues--food additives, dioxins, food irradiation--from a mostly solid scientific base. But he wastes his efforts on a flimsy political thesis; that in these areas, the media promotes sensation and crisis over accurate reporting. Fumento employs his carefully assembled evidence in the service of a sour, sometimes sophomoric kind of sociology that reflects a political stance possibly shared with the conservative foundation sponsors noted in the acknowledgements, among them the Center for Science, Technology and Media. "We are clearly in the midst of an environmental revolution," Fumento observes, adding that its current stage "correlates with the Terror of the French Revolution." His reductive arguments serve public policy no better than those of the "fanatics and faddists" whose influence on environmental and conservation interests he deplores.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Fumento, a conservative journalist, seeks to alert the reading public to what he sees as a misguided skepticism regarding concern about such public health problems as Agent Orange, dioxin, animal research for cancer, and food irradiation. Like his earlier book The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS ( LJ 11/1/89), Fumento is weak in logic and reason. He argues, without careful documenting, that "needless health and safety regulations" hinder U.S. corporations from competing in the global marketplace and that Americans have "an air pollution problem because they are told they do." A more balanced introduction to health and pollution in the environment is Dade W. Moeller's Environmental Health (LJ 2/15/92).
- Christopher R. Jocius, Illinois Mathematics & Science Acad., Aurora
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.