Green Seduction: Money, Business, and the Environment

Bill Streever has worked in almost every camp involved with the environment. He is a scientist who has worked in both public and private sectors. He brings that wide experience and the perspective of many others like him to Green Seduction: Money, Business, and the Environment. Thirty-five years ago, polluted rivers burned, cities and farms dumped raw sewage into aquifers, highway and dam construction proceeded with little thought to environmental impact, and carcinogens and acids billowed from smokestacks. Today much has changed. Government jobs and university training programs exist in environmental studies. Nonprofit organizations serve as watchdogs on government agencies, buy land for conservation, and offer advice and criticism to the corporate world. Environmental consulting is a profession, and in industry, environmental departments have developed. Since the late 1960s, environmentalism has grown from a radical movement to a mainstream business sector that spends more than two hundred billion dollars each year. Following environmental workers on the job, Streever guides readers across a California Superfund site, through the New Orleans water system, into wetlands created in Washington, D.C., suburbs, through a south Georgia carpet plant, and elsewhere. Through these firsthand experiences, Green Seduction offers a new appreciation of what businesses have invested in the environment and what the benefits may be from that investment. Bill Streever has worked as a research ecologist with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers as well as an assistant professor of biological sciences at the University of Newcastle in Australia.