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Pandora's Poison
Chlorine, Health, and a New Environmental Strategy
Joe Thornton
Pandora's Poison presents a solution to one of the most insidious environmental problems of our time: the global build-up of toxic chemicals. Everywhere on the planet, hundreds of industrial chemicals called organochlorines are accumulating in the environment, the food supply, and our bodies. These substances—such infamous pollutants as dioxins, PCBs, and DDT, along with thousands of lesser-known hazards—are produced when chlorine gas is used to make plastics, paper, pesticides, and many industrial chemicals. In a thorough and accessible analysis, biologist Joe Thornton shows how global organochlorine pollution is already contributing to infertility, immune suppression, cancer, and developmental disorders in humans and wildlife.
Thornton proposes a major shift in environmental science and policy. He shows that the current framework radically overestimates the ability of science and technology to address the complex global hazards of chemical mixtures. And he reveals how the "sound science" that dominates environmental regulations disguises political biases that protect polluters and gamble with public health.
Articulating principles for a new environmental strategy, Thornton shows that the only practical solution is to take global action on broad classes of hazardous chemicals and the processes that produce them, starting with organochlorines. He lays out a democratically controlled program to replace the production and use of chlorine gas and its derivatives with safer, effective, and economically feasible alternatives, which are already available for the majority of chlorine uses. With an innovative interdisiciplinary approach, Pandora's Poison promises to revolutionize the debate over pollution, health, and the role of science in public policy.
About the Author
Joe Thornton, a biologist and former research coordinator for
Greenpeace, is a Postdoctoral Research Scientist at Columbia
University's Earth Institute and Department of Biological Sciences.
| "...Thornton articulates a new strategy for eradicating one of the world's most pervasive and dangerous pollutants: organochlorines."
—Publishers Weekly |
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| "For years we have bet our health and the health of our planet on the demonstrably false notion that we can determine the risk of individual chemical pollutants and regulate them accordingly. It is now evident that we have lost the bet—widespread and deadly environmental contamination are the penalty. In this brilliant and lucidly written book, Joe Thornton describes an ecologically, economically, and chemically sophisticated alternative to the pollute-and-regulate system that has failed us so badly. Pandora's Poison is a breath of clean air at the start of a new century."
—David Ehrenfeld, M.D., Ph.D., Professor of Biology, Rutgers University, and author of The Arrogance of Humanism
"For almost a decade, Joe Thornton has offered his thoughtful analyses of the organochlorine problem to the scientific community and to the concerned public. Pandora's Poison is his pièce de résistance. Thornton's quiet passion and no-stone-left-unturned research style combine to create a powerful argument. I've been waiting a long time for this book."
—Sandra Steingraber, author of Living Downstream: An Ecologist Looks at Cancer and the Environment
"Joe Thornton has produced a ground-breaking treatise in environmental health. Authoritatively documented and accessible to the non-specialist, Pandora's Poison is a broad interdisciplinary analysis of both the science and the public policy of chemical pollution and argues for bold, innovative approaches to pollution prevention."
—Philip Landrigan, M.D., Professor and Chairman, Department of Preventive and Community Medicine, Center for Children's Health and the Environment, Mount Sinai School of Medicine
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