Pandora's Poison: Chlorine, Health, and a New Environmental Strategy

by Joseph Thornton and Joe Thornton

Book Overview

This visionary yet practical book presents a solution to one of the most important environmental problems of our time: the global accumulation of toxic chemicals. Everywhere on the planet, hundreds of industrial chemicals called organochlorines are building up in the environment, in the food supply and in our bodies. These substances - which include such infamous pollutants as dioxins, PCBs and DDT, along with thousands of lesser-known hazards - are...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0262201240
• ISBN13: 9780262201247
• Release Date: March 2000
• Publisher: MIT Press (MA)
• Length: 599 Pages
• Weight: 1.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.8" x 6.3" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

A Clear Eyed View of The Problem...And A Solution

Mr. Thornton has an eagle-eye view of the problem and presents it in layman's terms. This is a book that is well-written, factual, and presents actual solutions instead of just ringing the alarm bell.The current industry-driven approach which assumes chemicals "innocent until proven guilty" has clearly failed us. It is based on a microscopic and simple linear chemical-by-chemical rating system. This approach does not take into account accumulation of pollutants nor does it address the myriad and exponential effects of the chemicals in all the complex systems in the biosphere whose dynamics are still only dimly understood. This approach is heavily tilted towards the polluters as Mr. Thornton so skillfully shows.Mr. Thornton presents a solution that includes a much more prudent "guilty until proven innocent" approach that puts the rights of human beings and the planet first. He proposes viable alternatives for chlorine-based products and proposes a new paradigm for rating chemicals and classes of chemicals that takes into account all the "unknowns" and accumulation problems that the pro-industry (and one currently used by our own EPA)...does not.Mr. Thornton advocates true science be applied to the problem instead of the "good science" that industry always touts. Unfortunately the term [servant]whore to corporate interests.A call to arms has been rasied and champion has arisen. Mr. Thornton, on behalf of all humans, plants, and animals....thank you. An excellent job and stunningly good book.

Double Value: on Environmental *and* Information Strategy

This is the best of the several environmentally-oriented books I have reviewed recently, and it offers a double value: not only does it lay out a persuasive social, economic, and political case for abandoning the Risk Paradigm of permissive pollution in favor of an Environmental Paradigm of zero pollution; but it also provides a very fine--really excellent--case for why the current government and industry approaches to information about the environment and threats to the environment are severely flawed. In a nutshell, the current approach divorces "good science" (code for permitting what you can't prove will kill the planet today) from social consciousness and good policy; and the current approach insists on studying risk one contaminant at a time, rather than as a whole. This book is persuasive; I believe author has the right stuff and should be consulted on major policy issues. I believe the underlying moral values and intellectual arguments that this book makes, about both science and social policy, should be adopted by the Cultural Creatives and the independent voters of America, and that the recommendations of this book are so serious as to warrant country by country translations and promulgation. This book is exceptional in that is combines a readable policy essay for the non-technical citizen, with deeply documented technical appendices and notes that support a middle ground series of chapters relating scientific findings to long-term policy issues. From many small actions come revolutionary change--this book is a necessary brick in the road to environmental reform. The bottom line is clear: every year more and more toxins are building up in our blood streams, and this is going to have an overwhelmingly negative impact on the humanity, capability, and survivability of our great grandchildren three generations down--we have not have grandchildren seven generations down if the insights from this book fail to reach the people, and through the people, the policy makers and legislators.

Thornton's Inferno

Reading Pandora's Poison, I couldn't help thinking of Dante's Inferno. Thornton takes the reader on a tour of the modern-day inferno of chemicals we've created since the rise of chlorine chemistry in the early 20th century. Of course, we've known all along that these poisons were out there (and in here, and everywhere) and we knew they were troublesome, even deadly. But reading this book was the first time I took the full tour. Thornton hands the reader big pieces of technical information, but he walks you through them thoroughly, in language the literate adult can understand. I found myself reading passages over and over again, not because their meaning was unclear, but because, for the first time, the meaning of corporate chemistry and its effects was all too clear. It's obvious that while we have long known how to manipulate industrial chemicals to make our gewgaws, it is only recently researchers and writers, like Thornton have taken the time to assemble evidence of what we have done by releasing these compounds into the environment. If that isn't enough to convince you of human crassness and myopia, Thornton then takes us on a tour of the convoluted regulatory system that allows these pollutants into our air water and food, and shows us how our civil servants, who are supposed to protect us, instead give protective cover to the miserable merchants of industrial poison.Finally, he provides a solution, which isn't perfect, but would be a significant step in a positive direction and leaves me thinking the needed answers can be found if we devote half as much cleverness to fixing this problem as we did to causing it.

"Pandora's Poison" Provides Proof for Precautionists

I bought myself a copy of this book as a birthday present. It has served me well, giving me well-research information that is presented in a useful way. As an environmental activist who is constantly told by chemical industry representatives that my work is not based on "sound science," I know that I can turn to Joe Thornton's book to prove them wrong.

A great environmental book

This extremely well-written book makes a powerful argument for a fundamental but practical change in the way government and the chemical industry do business. It is amazingly well referenced and makes a powerful case that synthetic chemicals based on chlorine are harming everyone's health -- not just people who live in polluted areas but the general public, because hundreds of these chemicals can now be found all across the planet. And the book shows in a very fresh and convincing way that this problem has occurred not because we have no regulations but because we have the wrong kind. The new strategy the author discusses is a big change from the current system of bureaucratized pollution, but its strength is that it is based on principles that, after reading the book, seem like just common sense. A secondary theme is a very interesting discussion of how corporate power shapes environmental science in both subtle and obvious ways, and the implications of this for our assumptions about science and democracy. Well worth reading.