If You Love This Planet: A Plan to Heal the Earth » (Revised and updated)

Helen Caldicott is an internationally recognized antinuclear activist, cofounder of Physicians for Social Responsibility, and founder of the Women’s Action for Nuclear Disarmament and the International Physicians to Save the Environment. She lives in Australia.

“Helen Caldicott has the rare ability to combine science with passion, logic with love, and urgency with humor.” —Naomi Klein

Library Journal

Caldicott, an Australian doctor, is a former Harvard Medical School educator, the cofounder of Physicians for Social Responsibility and founder of the Women's Action for Nuclear Disarmament and International Physicans to Save the Environment. She is radical, anticapitalist, and a feminist. She is also clear and persuasive. But her presentation is often slanted--as when she implies that the submersion of 600,000 acres of rainforest would have been a huge loss in an area previously described as ``the size of the United States.'' Her documentation is often suspect: much of it is drawn from general periodicals and portmanteau sources that lead her to state, for example, that 54 percent of the U.S. wetlands are gone when, according to the Waterfowl and Wetlands Research Bureau, the figure, excluding Alaska, is 30 to 50 percent. And she can be strident--as when she writes that we should ``never have more than one light bulb burning . . . unless there are two people . . . in different rooms--then two bulbs.'' Still, her diagnosis of our planetary ills is comprehensive, her etiology fascinating, and her prescription bracing. This book will circulate.-- Linn Prentis, Milford, Pa.