Restoring the Earth: How Americans Are Working to Renew Our Damaged Environment - Softcover

John J. Berger is an American climate specialist and consultant who has written and edited eleven books on energy and environmental issues. Dr. Berger has consulted to the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences, Fortune 500 corporations, nonprofit groups, and governmental organizations, including the U.S. Congress. He was co-founder and director of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, Inc. of Washington, D.C. and helped launch the environmental restoration movement in 1985 with his book Restoring the Earth: How Americans Are Working to Renew Our Damaged Environment. He also founded and directed the nonprofit Restoring the Earth, Inc., which worked to advance the cause of environmental restoration via public education and environmental policy development. Dr. Berger is a long-time supporter of alternative energy solutions to global environmental problems. For many years he has repeatedly called attention to the nation's excessive dependence on foreign oil and the attendant economic and environmental costs, and risks. He has outlined strategies for a clean, renewable energy economy in books such as Charging Ahead: The Business of Renewable Energy and What It Means for America, Beating the Heat: How and Why We Must Combat Global Warming, and Climate Change Policy (Schneider et al., eds.). His office is located in Berkeley, California where he writes on climate, energy, and natural resources and provides scientific and technical writing as well as editorial consulting services to businesses and individuals.

This book, the result of eight years of interviews and research, reports ecological restoration efforts from Cape Cod to California, from river reclamation to parenting peregrines. Approaches vary as much as the individuals involved, but common to all is an environmental responsibleness and optimism. Berger advocates a popularly based national restoration movement as one environmentally mature solution to the necessity for stewardship at a time when our planet may well be reaching its own ecological ``carrying capacity.'' Recommended. Diane M. Brown, Univ. of Calif. Libs., Berkeley Copyright 1985 Reed Business Information, Inc. --Library Journal

In the general climate of environmental woes there is an occasional ray of light: a chemist pioneers the technology of building marshes in Chesapeake Bay, and botanists re-create the prairie; a chapter of the organization Trout Unlimited clears and stocks a Cape Cod stream; a village in Wisconsin, rejecting federal flood-relief money, moves to a new site above the flood plain. Berger (Nuclear Power: The Unviable Option) describes public-spirited men and women who have worked to repair and restore our damaged natural resources, with varying degress of success. The Nashua River in New Hampshire is improved, though still polluted; results of a toxic waste cleanup in Montague, Mich., are as yet unclear. Turning the devastation of abandoned strip mines into productive land has sometimes succeeded, with the cooperation of officialdom and owners. Berger provides some splendid models for the fight for environmental improvement. November 1 Copyright 1985 Reed Business Information, Inc. --Publishers Weekly