Americans ought to be madder than they are about the Bush administration's environmental deceit: that's the not-surprising core message of this detailed book, coauthored by Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club, and Sierra
magazine editor Rauber. That citizens aren't appalled and outraged in greater measure, they write, is thanks to what they cast as the slick rhetoric, obfuscated facts, deliberate disinformation and Orwellian way with words of Bush and his pro-growth cohorts (a Clean Air Act that adds to pollution, a Healthy Forest Initiative that encourages both more logging and more forest fires). In impassioned broad strokes, Pope and Rauber report that Bush and his environment-unfriendly cabinet (Interior, Energy, Agriculture and EPA, in particular but not exclusively) have stripped 235 million wilderness acres of protection from logging and mining interests; funneled billions of dollars in subsidies to giant agribusinesses; rewritten scientific reports to excise unwelcome findings on global warming; defunded Superfund cleanup of hundreds of toxic waste dumps; given near carte blanche to polluting industries to self-regulate; and even lied about the quality of Manhattan's air in the days after September 11. But the real energy of the book comes from its accumulation of small facts to paint the picture—of obsessive secrecy, crony capitalism and (or so the authors claim) the administration's conscious, unabashed commitment to the economic exploitation of the air America breathes, the water it drinks and the earth it walks on. (May)
