Earth Odyssey
Author: Mark Hertsgaard
List Price: $26.00
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ISBN: 0767900588
Publisher: Broadway (29 December, 1998)
Sales Rank: 45,661
Average Customer Rating: 4.61 out of 5
Customer Reviews
Rating: 5 out of 5
Our environmental crisis
Investigative reporter Mark Hertsgaard spent six years traveling around the world, gathering material for this book. This is not strictly a scientific treatise (although he conducted extensive research into his topics). Rather, he reports through the eyes of the people who live in the environmentally damaged places he visited. The theme of the book is how technology has both benefitted and harmed the planet and its inhabitants, and how greed continues to threaten our existence. His accounts of wanton destruction of nature in the 19th century make the reader gasp with dismay over the short-sightedness of our predecessors: the damming of a mighty river and its magnificent waterfall; the murder of the largest, oldest sequoia on earth. (Two of the examples which brought me to tears.) The horror is: the destruction, the contamination, and waste are still happening. And not only at the hands of totalitarian regimes or ignorant third-world peasants, but due to the callousness of greedy American corporations and government lobbies. The conclusions of Chapter Three, "The Irrisistable Automobile", will come as no surprise to most American readers, although the images of the perpetually gridlocked traffic-jams of fume-choked Asian cities astonished even this rider of Southern California freeways. Statistics of the predicted explosion in automobile sales world wide are especially ominous. This book was published in 1999 and exposes the hypocrisy of the Clinton administration in paying lip service to environmental issues while simultaneously caving to the demands of the powerful fossil fuel lobby. If Chapter Three is gloomy, Chapter Four, "To the Nuclear Lighthouse", is utterly terrifying. The account of Hertsgaard's visits to the most blighted areas of the former USSR is preceeded by a dismal, just recently uncensored history of the Soviets' worst nuclear disasters. While everyone knows about Chernobyl, few people knew about the radiating of the Siberian region of Chelyabinsk. Few, that is, other than the hapless residents who've been suffering its effects for years. With the aid of his translator, Russian author and photographer Vlad Tamarov, Hertsgaard conducted a relentless expose' of the deliberate coverups of "incidents" at nuke plants and shipping lanes, which irreversibly poisoned crops, fisheries, and even the water table. Even more worrisome than the damage already done are Hertsgaard's reports of poorly inventoried and practically unguarded nuclear stockpiles in volatile republics such as Kazakhstan. The American reader who attributes Soviet environmental crimes to Communist cruelty is in for an ugly shock -- Hertsgaard then documents identical coverups by our own government, of similar "incidents" on our own soil! From Russia, the author journeyed to China and Africa to report on overpopulation and its adverse effects on nature, health, and standards of living. The bleak narrative ends on a hopeful note: "Sustainable Development and the Triumph of Capitalism". Since the publication of "Earth Odyssey", the Bush administration has all but declared war on the environment, so even that fleeting hope now appears elusive.
Rating: 5 out of 5
Comprehensive and compelling!
The real story of our global environmental crisis that holds one like a great novel. Bravo! Mark Hertsgaard. For your daring, and your insight, and for taking us all on your travels around the world that we might all see what our consumer oblivion is doing to our precious planet earth. This book is a great read, friends. More than a nudge that it's time to wake up - it inspires one to do so, and to tap our neighbor on the head too.
Rating: 5 out of 5
A Long Night's Journey Into Day
Having just read Mark Hertsgaard's THE EAGLE'S SHADOW I moved on to his much longer and earlier book EARTH ODYSSEY. Though not intending to read all of this important information in one sitting, I found this book so well written as well as informative that it became a page turner that happily usurped an entire evening. Try to bed down after reviewing the state of the world's environmental crises! Yet in the darkness, having finished the book, there was time to reflect on just how important it is to get this information to the entire public. Not just the active Environmentalists, those who know intuitively the dangers we have bred and are still breeding, but the Everyman out there - all of us who glibly fill our multiple cars with gasoline, clog the freeways, allow the government to ignore Global Warming, remain uninformed about the terrifying diasters associated with the world's nuclear energy programs.Hertsgaard is a fine journalist and as such he traveled the globe from 1991 - 1997 observing, breathing the noxious air in China, the extreme poverty in Africa, the filth in Russia, India, among the Third World countries, and reporting the complacency echoing in groups who live in this deteriorating world and do very little about taking action to guard our planet's future. Currently the media (such as it is) is alerting us to the presence of an Asteroid a mile wide apparently headed for the earth from outer space. That incident, devastating though it would be, is only a possibility. The more pertinent devastation ( our clamouring for "the better life" through industry and its concomitant wasting of our natural resources by knowingly turning them into poisonous by-products ) seems to go unnoticed. Hertsgaard intermixes reportage with very readable converstaions with people around the world and the result is a book that feels as though it unites all of us, even though that core of unity may be a shared terror.
Had we more writers like Mark Hertsgaard who are brave enough and concerned as deeply about 'Whither mankind' perhaps our newspapers and magazines and television/radio news shows would feel compelled to report the important issues before us today rather than search for the latest movie star wedding or sex scandal or whatever sells commercial space. Take this journey with Hertsgaard and wake up to a morning of commitment to the guardianship of our fellowmen.
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