Articles by Terry Tamminen
Terry Tamminen is the former secretary of the California Environmental Protection Agency and is now a policy adviser and author. His latest book is Watercolors: How JJ the Whale Saved Us.
All Articles
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A review of Water: The Fate of Our Most Precious Resource
The underlying premise is simple: without water we die. As a Turkish businessman quoted in Marq de Villiers' impressive book, Water: The Fate of Our Most Precious Resource, says, "Millions have lived without love. No one has lived without water."
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A review of You Can't Eat GNP
"The more money we spend, according to the GNP ... the better off we are," explains Eric Davidson in You Can't Eat GNP. The Gross National Product, or GNP in common parlance, is the cumulative value of products and services created and traded by a nation, and the traditional measure of economic well-being. Yet in the past decade or so, the flaws in this measuring system have become increasingly clear to a growing number of economists, social scientists, and other observers. As Davidson learned during his time as a Peace Corps volunteer in Zaire, not only does the GNP fail to account for the state of a country's health-care, education, and welfare systems -- it also fails to recognize the overall and long-term costs, environmental and otherwise, of producing goods and services.
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Utah residents fight back against toxic contamination
With its red rock canyons, snow covered peaks, alkali plains, slickrock, and Great Salt Lake, the varied terrain of Utah forms strikingly beautiful landscapes. This arresting scenery drew Chip Ward and family to the state in the 1970s, and persuaded them to settle in the seemingly placid town of Grantsville on the edge of Utah's West Desert.
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A record pace of extinction threatens American flora and fauna
"The last quarter of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th has been called the most destructive period in the history of American wildlife," writes David Wilcove, senior ecologist with Environmental Defense, in his perspicacious book, The Condor's Shadow. But he makes the case that the fin de siècle era has a daunting rival in our current age, thanks to the booming economy and rising human population in the U.S. "At stake this time is a far greater number of species, facing a more diverse and powerful set of threats," Wilcove warns.
