Dark Horses

Just as the angry red eyes of the Audubon Society, the Sierra Club, and all the ad hoc groups to save the whale, the snail darter, and tens of thousands of square miles of oil shale are riveted on Secretary of the Interior James Watt, an interesting little book comes, bearing tales of mayhem across the seas. It is by Boris Komarov, and it is called The Destruction of Nature in the Soviet Union (M. E. Sharpe, 901 North Broadway, White Plains, N.Y. 10603; $15).

Actually, Komarov is the pseudonym of a man still holding a job in a Soviet ministry; his book circulated in samizdat for a time, and in 1978 the author smuggled it out to the West for publication. Because pollution and environmental destruction are unpopular cocktail-party talk in the USSR, nobody there knows very much about it; certainly they lack hard data. Komarov’s informative book represents, therefore, the first comprehensive dissertation ever to be published on the subject. It describes the serious deterioration of the quality of air and water, the rapacious misuse of lands, the slaughter of flocks and herds, and the poisoning of human populations— conditions that are bound to worsen.

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Just as the angry red eyes of the Audubon Society, the Sierra Club, and all the ad hoc groups to save the whale, the snail darter, and tens of thousands of square miles of oil shale are riveted on Secretary of the Interior James Watt, an interesting little book comes, bearing tales of mayhem across the seas. It is by Boris Komarov, and it is called The Destruction of Nature in the Soviet Union (M. E. Sharpe, 901 North Broadway, White Plains, N.Y. 10603; $15).

Actually, Komarov is the pseudonym of a man still holding a job in a Soviet ministry; his book circulated in samizdat for a time, and in 1978 the author smuggled it out to the West for publication. Because pollution and environmental destruction are unpopular cocktail-party talk in the USSR, nobody there knows very much about it; certainly they lack hard data. Komarov’s informative book represents, therefore, the first comprehensive dissertation ever to be published on the subject. It describes the serious deterioration of the quality of air and water, the rapacious misuse of lands, the slaughter of flocks and herds, and the poisoning of human populations— conditions that are bound to worsen.