'This Borrowed Earth: Lessons from Fifteen Environmental Disasters Around the World, powerfully depicts in simple, transparent prose, the lasting and wrenching impact of some of the major environmental disasters of the last century, which younger generations may only barely remember. But Mr. Hernan's book does much more. It reveals a striking similarity in the genesis of these disasters that can shed light on ways to prevent them in the future -- in particular, the profit-driven development of production technologies with no heed to their health and environmental effects or the environmental fate of their products. One is convinced, after reading Mr. Hernan's book, that the only way to slow the rate of growth of devastating climate change is for governments around the world to assert control over our most basic technology -- the production of energy in ways that can lift the world out of poverty without destroying it in the process.' - Barry Commoner, American biologist

ROBERT EMMET HERNAN is senior counsel at the New York State Deptartment of Environmental Conservation, USA. He was the trial counsel for New York State in the infamous Love Canal Case. He lives in New York City. BILL MCKIBBEN is the author of more than a dozen books, including The End of Nature, Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age, and Deep Economy. A former staff writer for The New Yorker, he writes regularly for Harper's, The Atlantic Monthly, and The New York Review of Books, among other publications. He is a scholar in residence at Middlebury College and lives in Vermont with his wife, the writer Sue Halpern, and their daughter. GRAHAM NASH is the founding member of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, a published photographer, and an environmental activist.

Foreword by Bill McKibben Introduction Minamata, Japan, 1950s London Fog, England, 1952 Windscale, England, 1957 Seveso, Italy, 1976 Love Canal, New York, 1978 Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania, 1979 Times Beach, Missouri, 1982 Bhopal, India, 1984 Chernobyl, Ukraine, 1986 Rhine River, Switzerland, 1986 Prince William Sound, Alaska, 1989 Oil Spills and Fires, Kuwait, 1991 Dassen and Robben Islands, South Africa, 2000 Brazilian Rainforest, 20th Century Global Climate Change, 20th Century Environmental Organizations Sources Photo Credits Acknowledgments