The legacies of a high-tech holocaust

This is a very odd book.

In the year of Chernobyl, the Manchester air disaster and the Inter-City train crash, there is clearly a need for a serious popular book on the relation between technology, safety and society. But this is not that kind of book. Focusing on the increasing chemical toxicity of the world around us, Dr James Bellini runs through chapter after chapter on the dangers of smoke pollution, the carcinogenic character of PVC production and use in the home, the corruption of our lakes by acid rain, the explosive threat posed by Liquefied Natural Gas, the menace of radioactive wastes, and all that. It seems that no part of our environment is safe; as a laudatory full-page review of Holocaust in the Daily Mirror recently (2 September) made clear, even Britain’s sacred Christmas dinners are a bitches’ brew of artificial colourings and poisons. But what are Bellini’s conclusions from all this? First, that we need a Freedom of Information Law to make industry more accountable. Second, public awareness of man’s inhumanity to wildlife should be turned to the pursuit of the survival of mankind, for we have perhaps only until 1991 to choose between extinction or a kind of global Richard Branson clean-up operation.

These conclusions appear in the final two paragraphs of this 250-page unillustrated book. Holocaust has clearly been breathlessly revised A.C. (After Chernobyl), but it is a pity that the author has not had time to include an index. An index would have been useful, because the book could have functioned as a sort of compendium of Green anxieties. But even with an index, Bellini is so long on illustrative examples, so short on logic, that it is unlikely that his work will much influence Britain’s developing party-political debate on Sellafield, Nirex and Sizewell B, nor today’s board-level corporate discussions on unleaded petrol or E additives.

The book is, the blurbier-than-thou blurb maintains, ‘convincingly detailed’. But though the details are there it is Dr Bellini who is convinced, not us. Despite the fact that, as the publishers put it, ‘Dr James Bellini has an impressive track record as a forecaster of social and economic matters’, the man does not appear to have benefited at all from his five-year stint with The Hudson Institute, a think-tank established by the late Herman Kahn and a byword for hostility to ecological lobbies. Completely lacking from ‘Holocaust’ is any attempt to outline and then counter the charges of hysteria which the establishment so frequently – and so  easily – levels at environmentalists nowadays.

Take preservatives. To be up to date on preservatives, one must take into consideration the fact that, without them, food would go off more often. Now   Dr Bellini does show a dim recognition that technology is progressive – that preservatives bring benefits as well as they do costs. But despite references to man making ‘Faustian pacts’ with technology, there is no serious treatment of the issue.

There is plenty of reference to Rosalie Bertell’s 1985 bestseller, No immediate danger, in which the cancer research specialist predicted that, by the year 2000, as many as 22 million people will have died because of the military’s use of nuclear materials (and that’s with a ban on nuclear tests from now on!). There is also a reference to Rachel Carson’s 1962 eco-epic, Silent Spring. But there is no hint to the reader of how he or she should guide himself through the pro- and anti-environmental literature of the past quarter-century.

There are some good things in Bellini’s book. Many of his figures are fascinating: Britain, it appears, is next only to America, Russia and China in the amount of sulphur dioxide it puts out. Many of his geographical points are well taken, too – stay away from saunas in Sweden (copper in the hot water), railway trains in Poland (corrosion of the rails) and drinking taps in Stockport (aluminium pours out of them, apparently). It is also a delight to learn that one should avoid, for various reasons, decaffeinated coffee, hairsprays, credit cards and chainsaws. But really, this is a book which a young radical with a filing cabinet and a paperback deal with Pluto Press would have made a much better job of.