Another great entry into the Object Lessons series and one of the best so far. Halden's blunt delivery of humanity's ongoing destruction of the earth from a chemical point of view is equally fascinating and horrifying.

Halden focuses on facts and evidence instead of going for an emotional gut punch, with insider insights into the hazardous chemical history of events that is rarely publicly shared thanks to capitalist culture. I would have liked to have read more about solutions, but the harsh reality is there is a good chance it is too late.

Halden clearly demonstrates how the lure of a pay check nullifies world-threatening hazards and risks, and humans just don't learn from historical mistakes. While I had to stretch my mind back to my high school chemistry classes to remember some of the detailed science, it didn't distract from the message and is one even non-scientific folks can digest.

Recommended for fans of Where Have All the Bees Gone?, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, The Future We Choose: Surviving the Climate Crisis, Merchants of Doubt, Drawdown

Thank you to Netgalley and Bloomsbury Academic for the copy.

This was a depressing book. The words used were particularly dire and full of doom. Extreme language. And yet very informative, particularly about chemicals invented and used, then subsequently banned, although not all.
Is this the way to change behavior? I’m not sure people want to listen to just the negative side…what are the solutions?

How do we improve? There was barely a mention, a few sentences is all, and not nearly enough.
We are the environment, it is us, not separate from. The plastics we love are now us as well.
How do we move forward? Where do we go from here?

When I saw the cover and the title. I screamed "I should read this book"

First, I like the idea ofc, environment. This is a big deal. The environment is everything. Everywhere is different but all are connected. The author has stories on a micro-scale to share, and even a small action can give a big impact on the environment, we know that already, but how often we see it on a small scale? this book is perfect! It will give you an aha moment, and "ah, why I didn't think about the impact before?". So yeah, the environment is a big topic, too often we heard about global warming, etc, and asking what we can do about it? well, this book might guide you to look the topic from a small thing.
But somehow this book is difficult to digest for me, maybe a bit too academic. That is why took me quite some time to finish this book.

This book is one of the Object Lessons books.

I liked how Environment blended a biography with environmental issues, however I just found it dull to read. From the beginning I knew I'd struggle as it took so long to get in to just 6% and I didnt feel I was reading it properly.
When I wasn't bored, I was scared and I don't believe the author got a good balance making this readable for the average person because I was either filled with anxiety or my eyes would glaze over, whilst reading this.

I wasn't aware of the series this is a part of (Object Lessons) with the goal of bringing short but focused books on a particular object, a part of Bloomsberry Academic. This sounds like a cool concept, but I've seen other reviewers say that that concept has gotten looser as they bring out more, which is a good or bad thing depending on the reader.

It just felt too academic for me, and so in turn, as someone with very minimal, basic understanding of this kind of science, it felt unapproachable and honestly? Like I wasn't smart enough. It's a shame because I really wanted to enjoy it and believe it's an important topic to be educated on.

There was mentions of illustrations included in this book, which I don't recall seeing many of (this may just been something I have forgotten), which is a shame as it may have added to the experience, but I assume the final version will have them.

Unfortunately, this personally didn't feel beginner friendly or approachable to me, but would perhaps recommend this to someone who knows a bit of the basics and wants to expand on that.

Halden definitely knew what he was talking about. I found the book to be very informational and some of the facts were interesting. It was just difficult to get through.

A lot of information about a very wide topic crammed into a small book. A great overview/introduction to lots of interesting points

I suppose the Object Lessons books have reached a point where a large number of the "objects" are not things that people consider objects at all. Political Sign was loose, Environment is even looser. However in their author Rolf Halden, they have an advocate who isn't particularly interested in being semantically clever. He has a story to tell about the environment, and what he considers to be the environment is everything - including you.

Again there are a large amount of personal anecdotes in this Object Lesson, but Professor Halden has had a longer and more interesting life than the previous OL authors I have read. And not least because he is a Professor of Sustainability with decades of research experience he expertly threads his scientific knowledge with his life developments from Germany to Arizona. And the result is not the "Environment" book I expected (greenhouse gases and global warming is mentioned but in a minor way). He is much more interested in the human impact on the environment in a micro / macro way. This is excellently illustrated in the chapter on waste contact lenses - and if one in five contact lenses are flushed down the toilet, quite how much microplastic that ends up being.

There is a slow, dulling anger here - mainly aimed at human stupidity in meat production or chemical plants. It is ironic this is being published right now, as some of the side predictions are applicable in the days of coronavirus - not least the waste water epidemiology that shows that you can pretty much gauge what toxins and viruses are in the local population by sampling their sewage. I wonder to what degree that will be used in the upcoming year. So this is not a campaigning book, but a book that can be used for campaigning. I learnt a lot, and I think I know this stuff pretty well. And for a monograph, it gets through a lot of stuff, without necessarily scaring you, but explaining cooly why when Chlorine-Carbon chemicals were found to be so harmful, moving on to Bromine and Fluorine compounds were a singularly dumb idea. A vital short read.

[NetGalley Arc]

I was right, the environment is not a suitable subject for this series of books. Normally concerned with one specific, minor concern of our societies, cultures and environments, this more-than-worthy-of-being-a-standalone effort concerns how we have seriously and routinely fucked up our societies, cultures and environments, with the aid of a slew of chemical gunks invented by billion-dollar vested interests, legislated against by numpties who would have thought the boy with his thumb in the dyke a criminal malingerer, and that are still in every foetus we produce, decades after Rachel Carson said 'erm, that might not be such a good idea, boys'.

This ought to get one star as a book. A book means purchase – either the paper and production cost to print it, or the energy used in transmitting and reading the digital version. But this stuff is too important for star ratings, anyway. (It's certainly a lot more important than quibbling over the use of a certain F-word on this site – please, PLEASE read this to realise there are slightly greater concerns.) I still ought to give this one star, for this content doesn't deserve to belong in these covers. It deserves to be a TED Talk (whatever one of those is – I'm English, don't'cha know), it deserves to be a prime time TV ad, one of those annoying videos yahoo email show you when you clear your spam box of all the crud they let through, and it certainly deserves to be the manifesto for someone, SOMEONE, in the future. We might only have ten generations of this species left, on this evidence.

Speaking with a bit less venom, vigour and hyperbole (but no less fact), this is a very readable book in this series, that always combines autobiography with the title subject. Here we get to learn more about 1980s Germany than we thought to find when we signed up. But for once, such is the feeling of nails being hit on the head, whatever the diversion or side-issue, this is still a flawless read. It won't cover the gamut of the environment – it's about the chemicals we live with, ingest into our "landfill within" and gift to the generations we breed, rather than, say, the Amazon, habitat loss or coral bleaching. Still, however we learn the contents within – and learn and make use of them we must – this is definitely an essential.

I walk away with a reframed understanding of the chemicals around me and new considerations of how unseen their harms and ongoing effects on my life are and might be.