In the latest American Prospect magazine, I've got a review of a fascinating new book called The Polluters: The Making of Our Chemically Altered Environment, by Benjamin Ross and Stephen Amter. What's important about this book, as I write, is that it's a history of "the American struggle for environmental protection before the triumphal 1970s, when Congress passed the Clean Air Act and many other landmark environmental laws." If you think corporations behave badly today when it comes to seeking to avoid regulation...well, you have no idea how far we've come, and what model citizens they are compared to, say, what they were the 1920s. That's the invaluable historical perspective that The Polluters provides. But as I write, while things have changed, they've also stayed the same:
...polluters have continued to use the same basic techniques to undermine regulation. Ross and Amter label the most effective strategy "spill, study, and ...
