Environmental-Health Books

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
([...])

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

Excerpted from Guerrilla News Network
([...])

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

This simple book took me by surprise! The simple ideas have made a profound difference in my life. Shifting the way I think about my problems has had a dramatic and positive effect on my life. Add to that the down-to-earth ways I learned to improve my health and I would call this little book a jewel. Many of the health solutions I have never read about anywhere else, and I have read volumes on health. The clear links between financial stability, energy efficiency, and health are now apparent to me. Anyone looking to improve their lives should listen up.

Jacob has taken a complicaged subject composed of many players and presents it in an easy-to-understand format while never swaying from academic/research discipline. I think this is a must have for all who care about or have an interest in environmental policy.

Steven Gilbert, Ph.D., DABT has compiled a user-friendly book of toxicology that has utility in beginner and advanced courses of the toxicology field. It is layman friendly and selectively includes toxic product hazards of everyday life. The common chemicals include alcohol, caffeine, nicotine, pesticides, lead, mercury, arsenic, heavy metals, solvents and radiation for starters; all products of human ingestion, inhalation or dermal absorption in everyday life. In simple terms and understandable paragraphs that are digestible, one learns of the dangers to human exposure. The additional reference lists at the end of each subject enhances the ability of one to research issues further. Government agencies that can assist the reader are also presented. Toxicology is literally "the science of poisons" and is often one of the "heaviest" curriculum/ biological subjects. "A Small Dose" allows the reader to enjoy the subject matter and still learn the issues at hand in the new millennium. Dr. Gilbert makes it palatable...Thank you! He was awarded a commendation in 2004 from the British Medical Association Library book competition- a most prestigious award.

The Soil and Health is a wonderful book that is equal parts agricultural science and environmental advocacy, with just a dash of kooky Nature worship thrown in. Howard was a conventionally trained agricultural scientist in the late 19th and early to mid 20th century who was employed by the British government to bring modern industrial agriculture, based on chemical fertilizers, pesticides, fungicides and herbicides to Britain's tropical colonies. Soon, though, he realized the value of more traditional agricultural practices from India and China, especially in keeping the microbial, fungal and invertebrate life in the soil healthy.

If you believe in the value of organic agriculture, it is somewhat sad to see how little has changed since 1945. Howard confidently predicts in his book that organic methods based on compost would soon sweep the globe. Things have changed some, though. We can now buy "organic" labeled products in most markets in America, and I believe that more people have an appreciation for the importance of treating the earth well. This book does an excellent job of establishing and reinforcing that appreciation.