If You Love This Planet: A Plan to Save the Earth (Revised and Updated) - Helen Caldicott [epub]

“Helen Caldicott has the rare ability to combine science with passion, logic with love, and urgency with humor.” ―Naomi Klein

From the leader and spokeswoman of the antinuclear movement comes a revised and updated edition of this groundbreaking, widely acclaimed classic. Exploring dangerous global trends such as ozone depletion, global warming, toxic pollution, food contamination, and deforestation, Helen Caldicott presents a picture of our world and the forces that threaten its existence. As always, she gives a prescription for a cure and cause for hope, rallying readers to action with the contention that our fight for the planet will draw its strength from love for the Earth itself.

From Library Journal

Caldicott, an Australian doctor, is a former Harvard Medical School educator, the cofounder of Physicians for Social Responsibility and founder of the Women's Action for Nuclear Disarmament and International Physicans to Save the Environment. She is radical, anticapitalist, and a feminist. She is also clear and persuasive. But her presentation is often slanted--as when she implies that the submersion of 600,000 acres of rainforest would have been a huge loss in an area previously described as "the size of the United States." Her documentation is often suspect: much of it is drawn from general periodicals and portmanteau sources that lead her to state, for example, that 54 percent of the U.S. wetlands are gone when, according to the Waterfowl and Wetlands Research Bureau, the figure, excluding Alaska, is 30 to 50 percent. And she can be strident--as when she writes that we should "never have more than one light bulb burning . . . unless there are two people . . . in different rooms--then two bulbs." Still, her diagnosis of our planetary ills is comprehensive, her etiology fascinating, and her prescription bracing. This book will circulate.
- Linn Prentis, Milford, Pa.