Persons of any age picking up this book will be concerned about your children and grandchildren facing the environmental degradation of our planet in general and climate deterioration in particular. Your author writes this book based on my firm belief that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as soon as possible must be revived and then greatly strengthened if humanity is to avoid climate chaos and mass extinction. While I seek to motivate and enlist pollution fighters, young and old, this book is also both a critique and a paean, mostly a song of praise for what the Agency once was and must become again if humanity is to survive on this planet. EPA brought clean air to America, climate change is just another air-pollution problem, and EPA must lead the world in stopping it. I do not hesitate to state lessons learned that today’s leaders and our posterity should know and act upon without repeating mistakes or wasting any more time.
Many parents and grandparents well know that our younger family members—some now protesting in the streets—worry about the sorry state of the planet they are inheriting from us. Parents and grandparents may welcome my book to learn more about the available environmental solutions. These are now unused but readily at hand, and in their revival and application soon there will be new jobs for our children and grandchildren. The senior generations may well give my book as a guide to our younger family members. And I hope that many mature readers will find in my book good reasons to support our descendants as they seek the education needed to become professional pollution fighters and climate savers.
This book is to demonstrate to a person of any age how you too may join in. While my path was the law, there are so many, many fields of science and engineering where you can make a big contribution. Artists, writers, economists, law-enforcement officers, policy makers, political leaders—all and the skills of many more are needed. If you can identify your skills and train yourself to use them, and if your passion is protecting the public health, natural resources, or any part of our little planet, your career will be as full of joy as was mine. All fields will eventually intersect with the law, so it will be useful that you read here the story of a pollution-fighting lawyer. If you are an older person, a mature citizen already concerned about our planet and perhaps even a leader in your sphere of influence, you too especially and right now are needed as a pollution fighter.
Fighting Pollution and Climate Change 