About this product: With the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, America's relationship with the Middle East exploded to the forefront of our national consciousness. Looking back more than a half-century, Douglas Little offers valuable, historical context for anyone seeking a better understanding of this complicated relationship. He explores the encounters between the United States and the Middle East since 1945, focusing particularly on the complex, sometimes inconsistent attitudes and interests that have shaped U.S. relations in the region.
Little begins by exposing the persistence of "orientalist" stereotypes in American popular culture and then examines U.S. policy toward the Middle East from many angles. Chapters focus on America's increasing dependence on petroleum; U.S.-Israeli relations; the threat of communism; the rise of revolutionary nationalist movements in Egypt, Iran, Iraq, and Libya; the futility of U.S. military and covert intervention; and the unsuccessful attempt to broker a "peace-for-land" settlement between the Israelis and the Palestinians. The overarching theme of the book is that a combination of American omnipotence and profound cultural misunderstanding ensured that the United States would encounter trouble in the Middle East after 1945 and that those forces continue to bedevil the relationship between these vastly different cultures to the present day.
About this product: Landscape, that region of the earth saturated by human cultures, is today a place of deeply conflicting ideas about the natural world and our relation to it. Wilson traces the responses of Canadian, U.S. and aboriginal cultures to the land. He examines the environments we have built on this continent over the past fifty years as we continue to discover, exploit, protect, restore, and re-enchant a natural world in convulsion.
About this product: Dr. Riki Ott exposes the profound legacy of the Exxon Valdez oil spill and how readers can help reshape our global energy future.
The author chronicles the long-lasting environmental harm to Prince William Sound, Alaska, and investigates the health problems suffered by many cleanup workers. Exxon's spill provided a portal to understanding a startling truth: oil is much more toxic than we previously thought. Sound Truth and Corporate Myth$ frames the larger story of discovery of the truly toxic nature of oil.
This book shows how one particular fraction of crude oil, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons or PAHs, may well be the new DDT of the 21st century. In 1999, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency listed 22 PAHs in crude oil as "persistent, bioaccumulative, and toxic (PBT) pollutants." Sharing this list of extreme human health hazards are the more commonly known pollutants--mercury, lead, dioxin, PCBs, and DDT. The latter are all highly regulated chemicals and some, such as DDT and PCBs, have been banned in the United States.
Sound Truth and Corporate Myth$ traces 15 years of lingering harm to humans and wildlife from the Exxon Valdez oil spill. It reveals how corporate greed, government short-sightedness, and manipulation of the truth and the media have kept the public from learning the deadly nature of PAHs. The author provides relevant information and practical recommendations for people and policy-makers at this critical juncture in the history of civilization. This book will inspire people to reduce their own consumption of fossil fuels and, in so doing, help permanently shift society to a clean energy future.
About this product: Each chapter in this unique compilation, designed to be informative and thought-provoking, offers an examination of incidents from The Civil War through the 20th Century, important to the development of the American Nation. It features a mix of primary and secondary source materials on approximately 30 selected "moments" in American history. Designed for use in introductory courses in American history, the incidents it covers were chosen both for their historical significance and to present a wide variety of human endeavors. Given the range of topics presented, there should be subjects of special interest to every student, regardless of major.
About this product: A look at what really happens when corporations rule the world. Dr. Picou explains the difference between natural and man-made disasters in terms of the social impacts they have. He presents the Exxon Valdez disaster from several angles, and takes the reader from the series of poor decisions and budget cutbacks that preceded the event through the ecological catastrophe to the legal and social morass that followed. This book is a must for anyone who wants to understand the challenges we face in an era of corporate globalization.
About this product: "Absoliutno blagopoluchnoe ozero Baikal!" the Russian scientist looking out over the great lake says. "Lake Baikal is Perfect!" And humans can never harm it. For a man cut loose from his life in the U.S., Lake Baikal-Siberia's sacred inland sea-becomes a place of pilgrimage, the focal point of a 25,000-mile journey by land and sea in search of connection, permanence, restoration and hope.
Following a difficult divorce, veteran environmental journalist Peter Thomson sets off from Boston with his younger brother for one of nature's most remarkable creations, in one of the farthest corners of the planet. Lake Baikal, a gargantuan crack in the Siberian plateau, is the world's largest body of fresh water, its deepest and oldest lake, and a cauldron of evolution, home to hundreds of unique creatures, including the world's only freshwater seal. It's also among the most pristine lakes on earth, with a mythical ability to protect itself from the growing human impact-a "perfect," self-cleansing ecosystem.
A trip halfway around the world by train, cargo ship and rubber raft brings the brothers to a place of sublime beauty, deep history and immense natural power. But at Baikal they also find ominous signs that this perfect piece of nature could yet succumb to the even more powerful forces of human hubris, carelessness and ignorance. They find that despite its isolation, Baikal is connected to everything else on Earth, and that it will need the love and devotion of people around the world to protect it.
On their trek to and from Siberia the author and his brother also encounter a stream of people who are also lonely, displaced and yearning for something beyond the limits of their own lives, but many of whom are also big-hearted and deeply connected to their own communities and the world around them. What begins as a search for restoration in nature becomes as well a discovery of the restorative power of trust, faith and human connection.
About this product: The day before Good Friday 1989, Captain Joseph Hazelwood and the crew of the Exxon Valdez pulled out of the northernmost ice-free port in Alaska, bound for Long Beach, California. Just hours after weighing anchor, though, the mammoth supertanker ran aground on Bligh Reef, spilling millions of gallons of oil into Prince William Sound. Cleanup workers labored for months rinsing rocky beaches and swabbing sea otters, but Cleaning Up is about when things really got sticky, as waves of slick plaintiff's lawyers washed ashore along with a flotsam of allegations and a jetsam of subpoenas.
Directing the controversial and complex civil action was an ambitious environmental lawyer from Minneapolis, Brian Boru O'Neill. From the beginning, his strategy was to stage a morality play pitting thousands of ordinary Alaskans whose lives and livelihoods depended on Prince William Sound's vast natural resources against a colossal multinational corporation reckless enough to leave 53 million gallons of toxic crude oil in the hands of an alcoholic. But, as Lebedoff writes, no case is that clear-cut; Exxon is no evil empire, and O'Neill foreclosed on small farms before he became a populist crusader. Cleaning Up meticulously reconstructs how one of the worst environmental disasters in history led to the biggest drunk-driving case of all time, but Lebedoff takes the nonfiction legal thriller one step further, personalizing the enormous impersonal devastation, adding flesh and faces to the skeletal frame provided by headlines. --Tim Hogan
About this product: Ten years later, the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Prince William Sound remains the largest tanker spill in the history of North America, and in its devastating effects upon wildlife and habitat, arguably the most damaging tanker spill in the history of the world. First released in 1991, John Keeble's account, Out of the Channel, combined on-the-scene witnessing of the oil spill's lethal results with analysis of its ramifications upon ecology, community, economy, law, the nature of public information, and upon the American mythos. The aftermath of the oil spill, and no less transforming, the spill of Exxon's money and power, reached into every sector of Alaskan life as well as into the conscience of the people of the lower forty-eight states. The event is now seen as one of a handful of signal ecological disasters of the twentieth century.
The new "Tenth Anniversary' edition of Out of the Channel adds to its evocative, original text a new and full assessment of the permutations and twists of big money, big litigation, and "petroleum speak" from the vantage point of several years' remove, as well as an account of the 1991, $1 billion civil settlement between Exxon, the U.S. Justice Department, and the State of Alaska-the largest such environmental settlement ever. In this now definitive book on the oil spill, all the primary concerns of the first edition are updated with new material, including the cause of the ship's grounding on Bligh Reef, the fate of Captain Joseph Hazelwood, the long lasting effects of the spill, the projected death toll among animals, the little-known 1993 fisherman's tanker blockade, late-developing evidence about the true quantity of oil spilled, the benefits and abuses of professional science, as well as the heartening results of citizen pressure to improve oil shipping procedures in Prince William Sound and to protect fragile habitat.
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