More historical intervention than current environmental primer, this is best read as a clear expression of liberal technocratic environmentalism at the turn of the century: confident that development, innovation and institutional reform can reconcile human prosperity with ecological survival.

Jack M. Hollander’s central claim is that environmental degradation is driven less by affluence than by poverty, and economic development may therefore be part of the remedy rather than the disease. Some (if not all) of its figures and projections are now dated, but the argument remains highly alive—and combustible. 

The book belongs to an early-2000s strain of technological environmental optimism: suspicious of collapse rhetoric, confident in markets and scientific innovation, and impatient with environmentalism that treats economic growth as inherently destructive. Hollander’s evidence-led approach is useful precisely because the thesis is not neutral. It forces the reader to distinguish between poverty as a condition that intensifies environmental harm and the political-economic systems that produce both poverty and extraction. Critics have accordingly questioned whether his account gives enough weight to the relation between scientific authority, industry and social power. 

University of California Press, 2004. First paperback printing. Paperback. Moderate shelf wear, rubbing and creasing to covers and corners; internally clean.