Environmental-Health Books

This book contains infomation which will help you evaluate your chances of getting cancer later in life, from an X-Ray you got yesterday. Yes X-Rays do carry a certain amount of risk, and an intelligent person should weigh the harm X-Rays and other forms of radiation might do, against the benefit one will receive from the prescribed treatment. Your doctor probably will not tell you about this book, its contents, or the dangers of low level radiation.

The book is very well written and can be understood by someone with a good high school education. It was designed for the layman as well as individuals in the medical and legal professions. I recommended it to anyone who is concerned about their long term health and who wishes to understand the risk of getting cancer from any form of ionizing radiation.

Note that the reviewer is an Engineer.

January 2005 is National Radon Action Month!
EPA and organizations nationwide dedicate January as National Radon Action Month to encourage the public to test their homes for radon and get radon problems fixed. Did you know?

Radon comes from the natural (radioactive) breakdown of uranium in soil, rock and water and gets into the air you breathe. Radon can be found all over the U.S. It can get into any type of building - homes, offices, and schools - and result in a high indoor radon level. But you and your family are most likely to get your greatest exposure at home, where you spend most of your time

You can't see radon. And you can't smell it or taste it. But it may be a problem in your home.

-Radon is the second leading cause of lung cancer
-Nearly one in 15 homes in the U.S. has a high level of indoor radon
-The U.S. Surgeon General and EPA recommend all homes be tested for radon.
-Homes with high radon levels can be fixed.

One of my fellow researchers collaborated on this book a few years ago. When he first showed it to me I thought nothing of it, but I hae since grown to find it extremely interesting and a worthwhile addition to any air researcher's book collection. As suggested by the title, there are no in depth studies, but it gives a quick look at nearly every possible air pollutant (except gases, its only flaw).

Please contact me if your family is from Austrian-Hungarian Monarchy.

Szluha Kornelia

This book is a great guide for environmentalists who want to make cost-benefit analysis more fair. The authors get into the nitty-gritty of why cost-benefit analysis tends to favor industry and give a blueprint for how it can be reformed. An important book for anyone working within or with the government to better protect the environment.

I bought this product and received it in a timely manner. No hassles and exactly the product I was looking for!

Dawn Baldwin knows her material and has a real flair with words, something that is a rarity in this field.

SAX's Dangerous Properties of Industrial Materials Ninth Edition-CD-ROM Version

The NST/Engineers, Inc. reviewer, an EPA First Responder, found the Ninth Edition of Sax's Dangerous Properties of Industrial Materials-CD ROM version (SAX CD) to be a powerful database of easily retrievable, detailed, and pertinent information. The reviewer envisions the target users of the SAX CD deriving the most benefit to be: chemical operators, chemical process engineers, chemists, clinical toxicologists, fire companies, first responders, HAZMAT teams, industrial hygienists, plant managers, physicians, police departments, process safety managers, research professionals, risk management planners, safety engineers, transportation officers, and treatment storage and disposal facility (TSDF) personnel.

The 22,380 materials included are categorized at a minimum according to: Listing Name, Hazard Rating, Chemical Name, Molecular Formula, Molecular Weight, Chemical and Physical Properties, Synonyms, Toxicity Data with References, (instantly accessible by screen "pop-ups"), and Safety Profile.

Where available, NIOSH Recommended Exposure Limits, OSHA Permissible Exposure Levels, ACGIH Threshold Limit Values, (all expressed as Time Weighted Averages) and German MAK exposure limits are included. Consensus Reports (Community RTK, EPA TSCA and Genetic Inventory list) along with DOT hazard Classifications and UN/NA 4-digit identifier (for HM-181), CAS Registry number, and Class (carcinogen, mutagen, teratogen, primary irritant, food additive, etc.) are also included.

For forty years, NST/Engineers, Inc. personnel and associates have found editions of SAX to be an invaluable resource. The Ninth Edition on CD ROM provides the instant retrieval capabilities sought by the electronic communication age. The program includes an intelligent default, twelve-characteristic, search engine. It highlights each "hit" in the text and has a "tracking" system that allows the user to look forward or to "backtrack".

In the NST/Engineers, Inc. trials, SAX CD was used in "mock" HAZMAT spills. The reviewer found that the initial assessments of the spills were conducted many times faster by using the SAX CD. Armed with a laptop computer, as are most police and other emergency responders, the addition of this software will greatly decrease response time and reduce the confusion that routinely surrounds hazardous materials incidents. An increase in facility and public safety will be provided by the fingertip access to the knowledge base in the SAX CD .

The SAX CD works on both PC and Macintosh platforms.

This reference book features alphabetically arranged information and charts for residues detected most frequently in fruits and vegetables. It covers the health effects of these chemicals and ways to reduce the hazards. It also contains a lengthy bibliography with sources for more information. A "must-have" for people who care about the health of their family and friends.

Excerpted from Guerrilla News Network
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Stan Cox's Sick Planet: Corporate Food and Medicine will be useful reading for anyone who seeks to grab the ship's wheel and to persuade others to join them. His book is a short, readable activists crib which ranges fluently across the environmental costs of bloated corporate healthcare (and the human costs of overprescription and phoney medicalization), to the problem of industrial agriculture and "better living through chemistry."

On healthcare, Cox is unequivocal. Focusing on the U.S., he argues that the healthcare "industry" is hopelessly bloated, noting that, since the 1960s, the average consumption of healthcare products per person has tripled. In a neat turn of phrase, he writes that "for decades, business has been coming up with "solutions" to the problems that result from America's overconsumption of food and underexertion of bodies."

To beef up profits, companies have been hyping minor or non-existent maladies such as "shaking leg syndrome" to extract ever more profit from the American consumer. Yet, unsatisfied with gouging American workers, the same companies have also taken to low-cost production and testing of generic drugs in countries like India, with catastrophic environmental and human results. One of Cox's best sections deals with the region around Patancheru in Andhra Pradesh, which will be all but unknown to most readers. Cox finds devastating water pollution from medical factories and massive damage to local agriculture, another hidden holocaust in the annals of neo-liberal globalization.

Yet healthcare is not seamlessly integrated into Cox's wider narrative - that of the capitalist challenge to the planet's ecology and human society. It remains hard to see how drug production, and the waste resulting from it, could ever have an impact as destructive as nitrate pollution or greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture. Ditto for the effects of the health industry upon American bodies. If Americans wish to waste vast amounts of money on useless drugs and procedures, it is unlikely that this will be a prime cause of eco-collapse. The sedentary and lazy lifestyles of Americans, detached from the land and dependent on industrially farmed produce, may be more significant, but the hyping of ADHD is not related to the looming collapse of capitalist civilization. Not in my book, anyhow, but the same does not hold for agriculture.

Agriculture receives a detailed treatment in later chapters, and as plant genetics is Cox's specialist area, his treatment is strong and chilling. Corporate agriculture, he finds, has massacred rural communities, which now number 450 out of the U.S.' 500 poorest. Converted by the market into factories for processed foods, these rural areas are ironically now often "food deserts" in which fresh produce is harder to find than in urban areas.

Industrial agriculture is hopelessly inefficient - dependent upon continuing injections of natural gas to produce fertilizer, oil for trucks to transport its produce to far away markets while being massively wasteful of the manure that it generates. He calls, not originally, but sensibly, for a more modest, dispersed agriculture in which the 900 million tonnes of manure produced by American farms every year is recycled into the soil. This isn't framed as a utopian dream, but as an essential survival strategy, but Cox argues that the benefits would be very real. Revisiting Patancheru, he cites examples of community driven agriculture which "have beaten back the individual despair that had developed under the brutal logicl of the national and international economy." Yet the case is identical for many American farming families.

Cox makes it clear that the hierarchical and massively unfair economic system which underlies industrial agriculture must be dismantled if a fairer, ecologically sensible world is to be created. He has short shrift for "sustainable development" though - labelling it "code for perpetual growth," which is dead on. What is required, for Cox is a radical downshifting of elite consumption in the developed world and something akin to a "back to the land" movement to localize now dispersed economies and to distribute a safe level of economic surplus to now deprived communities. This is basically eco-socialism, and Cox alludes to eco-socialist thinkers like Joel Kovel and, refreshingly, a side of Karl Marx that few will be familiar with (an afficianado of organic manures and localized agriculture).

Echoing comedian Rob Newman, who penned an acerbic piece in the Guardian in 2006 along a similar theme, Cox concludes by arguing that "before [we] can start designing the kinds of local, regional, and world economies that are needed, we have to acknowledge and act on the fact that in the long run...we cannot have both capitalism and a livable planet." And we can't have reductions in "emissions intensity" or put our faith in miraculous capitalist efficiency either.

As Cox notes, "using efficiency to make growth less destructive is sort of like playing "whack-a-mole" at the county fair. Knock capital out of circulation here, and it will pop up over there." Controlling the beast of capital is Cox's theme, and Sick Planet is an effective call to arms for activists to do just that. Either we do it democratically and rationally, or circumstances will do it for us, bloodily and chaotically:

Provided our species survives, there lies somewhere in its future another stone age, and the faster our economic growth, the steeper the decline will be. The next Stone Age will be more resource poor and probably more toxic than the last, and there will be no shot at a comeback.

Citizens of the United States in particular, should read Sick Planet and then act with conviction and haste if such a situation is to be avoided, but don't bet on it.

Stan Cox paints a picture of the corporate-dominated world as akin to pre-apocalypse Mad Max, yet another movie parallel springs to mind, while we still have a chance to avert disaster. Noting that the average American consumes as much energy as a 30,000 kg primate, Cox summons up the image - which many people will sympathise with worldwide - of a nation of King Kongs, clinging to their Empire State Building and hopelessly swatting the spectres of imperial collapse and ecological crisis.

- Szamko