By By Dane Roberts Wans On Bookreview
THE SUBJECT OF THIS poignant work couldn’t be more current. Though “Lives Per Gallon” was first published in 2006, the warning within it’s pages couldn’t be more urgent.
Author Terry Tamminen himself in an e-mail correspondence states that the bad news is that many of his predictions are playing out as described, but the good news is that solutions are evolving to meet the problems.
Tamminen says we are destroying ourselves and our young by polluting the planet, not just the pollution you can see but the particles that you can’t. It’s the nitrogen oxide that is spewed into our air by cars, by jets. It’s our forests that are being cleared to produce biofuels that has created the pollution problem we are plagued by in our modern times. Not to mention fumes from petroleum products such as fertilizers, diesel fuel in farm equipment, bunker fuel in ships, diesel in trains, which are shortening lives and costing governments an insane amount of money to cope with the effects caused by these products.
We are in the midst of a crisis. It is a crisis caused by oil. We tend to ignore it. We ignore it by allowing our paradigm to be one of plenty. But our oil is finite. It will disappear. Yet we buy cars that need more and more gas. We buy cars we don’t need: Look at all the Hummers that dot our roads. Look at the SUV’s. Look at the consumption of oil products we use in our gas guzzlers. Look at the miles per gallon we are accepting in our cars.
Our health is affected by the tiny particles in the air we breathe daily as evidenced in the particles that
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on February 29, 2008. Read the original PDF.