If You Love This Planet. - book reviews

Sierra, July-August, 1992 by Kathleen Courrier

With assaults on the environment multiplying and most politicians fiddling while home burns, the urge to sum up everything that|s wrong and prescribe a cure can be irresistible. This is especially the case if you are a political activist and a doctor, and even more so if you are already world-famous for taking on the establishment - especially, that is, if you are Helen Caldicott.

An Australian who lived and worked for 14 years in the United States, where she became an outspoken and effective critic of nuclear weapons, Caldicott urges us to tread the political path Australians have followed toward greater institutional and corporate responsibility. Among other steps in the right direction, mandatory voting and voter registrations, stronger labor unions, a higher minimum wage, and publicly financed political campaigns would, she says, wrest control of the future from the corporate interest groups that Caldicott sees as the biggest obstacle to environmental progress. Internationally, she would have the rich nations forgive the crippling Third World debt that we all helped engineer, and block the drift in trade negotiations toward "a new legal world order" tantamount to "total transnational control of the resources of all countries."

Caldicott's "plan to heal the earth" bears the marks of an amateur. Her research is miles wide and inches deep, and her palette runs toward black and white. Consistency eludes her, too: She warns of global warming but touts methanol use - a wash from the standpoint of greenhouse-gas emissions, since methanol requires more energy to produce (thus releasing more [CO.sub.2]) than does gasoline. But amateur also means "one devoted to a cause." Devoted she is, and her message, that Americans have to take environmental issues personally, committing themselves "heart and soul," somehow shines through a scientific and political analysis best considered a college try.