Author: Joanna Burger
Subject: Science
Cloth ISBN 0-8135-2338-9
Pages: 228 pp. 38 b&w illus.
Description:

The Torrey Canyon, the Exxon Valdez, birds with oil-slickened feathers, tar-covered beaches, and the burning oil wells of the Persian Gulf War--these images of oil spills have become all-too-familiar images of the threat that modern society's demand for energy poses to the natural environment.

Oil is key to the global economy, but neither the resource nor its heaviest users are evenly distributed throughout the world. Wherever oil is drilled, stored, handled, refined, transported, and transferred, whether on land or in waterways, there is the potential for spills. No place is immune. Few other environmental problems are as common or ubiquitous.

Oil Spills is the first book to survey the history of oil spills, the problems they create, the types of clean-ups and their efficacy, the legal, social, economic, and ecological consequences of oil spills, their long-term impacts on the wildlife and people who survive them, and the alternatives to oil and its transport. Biologist Joanna Burger writes clearly and accessibly both about the catastrophic oil spills that capture the headlines and the small chronic pipeline leaks that we rarely hear about.Oil Spills is essential reading for everyone concerned with environmental issues and energy policy.

Joanna Burger is Professor of Biological Sciences and a member of the Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences Institute at Rutgers University. She has written or edited ten books for both general and scientific audiences, including A Naturalist Along the Jersey Shore (Rutgers University Press) andBefore and After an Oil Spill : The Arthur Kill (Rutgers University Press).