BOOKS RECEIVED.

THE PROMISE AND PERIL OF ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE

Christopher H. Foreman, Jr. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1998. (800) 275-1447. 191 pp. $22.95 Clothbound.

In The Promise and Peril of Environmental Justice, Christopher H. Foreman, Jr. argues that advocates of environmental justice who believe that low-income and minority citizens are environmentally victimized, have suspect evidence and a highly unrealistic overall approach. Foreman argues that while such advocacy has cleared significant hurdles, substantial long-term limitations and drawbacks stand in the way. Activism has yielded a presidential executive order, management reform at the Environmental Protection Agency and elsewhere in government, and numerous local political victories. Yet the environmental justice movement remains structurally and ideologically unable to generate a focused policy agenda. Foreman states that the movement refuses to confront politically inconvenient facts about environmental health risks, the severe constraints impeding a grass-roots environmental approach to social justice, and the need to choose between environmental priorities. Foreman explains how we must sharpen our national dialogue concerning the environmental stakes of these populations and develop realistic public health approaches.

Christopher H. Foreman, Jr. is Senior Fellow in the Governmental Studies program at the Brookings Institution and the author of Plagues, Products, and Politics: Emergent Public Health Hazards and National Policymaking (Brookings, 1994) and Signals from the Hill: Congressional Oversight and the Challenge of Social Regulation (Yale, 1988).

ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS AND POLICY

Walter A. Rosenbaum, 4th Edition. Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly Books, 1998. (202) 887-6363. 384 pp. $28.95 Paperbound.

Walter A. Rosenbaum is Professor of Political Science at the University of Florida in Gainesville, where he specializes in environmental and energy policy. He has served as a special assistant in the Policy Planning and Evaluation office at the Environmental Protection Agency, and is currently a consultant to the U.S. Department of Energy on environmental cleanup of nuclear weapons facilities.

In Environmental Politics and Policy, Rosenbaum provides a balanced account of U.S. environmental policy since the beginning of the "environmental era" in 1970, explaining how environmental policy is made and how political forces and actors shape it. Rosenbaum considers...