Profitable Hazards High and Mighty: SUVs—the World’s Most Dangerous Vehicles and How They Got That Wayby Keith Bradsher (PublicAffairs, $28)
Though they’re reviled as gas-guzzling menaces, sport-utility vehicles are everywhere. In High and Mighty, Keith Bradsher, former Detroit bureau chief for the New York Times, tells the story of the SUV’s rise to popularity and the consequences for safety, the environment, oil consumption, and the auto industry itself. The author goes beyond the vehicles’ widely known contributions to air pollution and global warming to weave a fascinating tale of American business, pulling in strands of everything from war history to labor relations.
Bradsher shows how Detroit became adept at marketing SUVs by exploiting the insecurities of Americans who crave an image of adventure and toughness. The industry proved equally skilled at protecting these vehicles from government regulation. When standards were being set in the 1970s, Detroit worked assiduously to exempt a then-small sector of the market—light trucks (which only included pickups and vans)—from improvements. The next push started with the Jeep. American Motors Corporation had purchased the company that made Jeeps, and in its fight to survive turned to Washington for relief from new air-pollution and other standards.
As AMC’s Gerald Meyers put it, "We made damn sure [Jeeps] were classified as trucks, we lobbied like hell." Washington acquiesced, stretching regulatory definitions of light trucks to include the Jeep, and by default other vehicles like it.
With this toehold, the industry then convinced D.C. to classify their rising stars—the SUV and then the minivan—as light trucks, not passenger cars. This campaign set the stage for the popular gas-guzzlers that are held to weaker safety and pollution standards.
In Bradsher’s view, environmental and safety groups were slow to catch on to where automakers were going and failed to head them off. What Detroit saw in the SUV was "fat profits." As Bradsher points out, Ford dressed up its F-150 pickup truck with "a couple of extra doors and two extra rows of seats" and created a vehicle that would make it a "lush $12,000"—the Expedition—while its other cars are barely profitable. Similarly, GM morphed its inexpensive Silverado pickup all the way up to the Cadillac Escalade—"taking a $20,000 work truck, tricking it up with lots of chrome, leather seats, and a fancy stereo, and selling it for close to $50,000."
Central to High and Mighty is a thorough debunking of claims about the safety of SUVs. Bradsher provides a detailed look at rollover and design problems that threaten SUV owners and occupants, and explains why SUVs are deadly to other motorists and to pedestrians. In the competitive rush to produce ever-larger and heavier SUVs, the auto industry often ignored these problems, and fought off standards to fix them.
With his in-depth knowledge of Detroit and D.C., Bradsher makes a compelling case against the companies that build SUVs and the government that paved the way for them. He also argues for the entirely reachable goal of safer, more fuel-efficient, and less-polluting vehicles. —Ann Mesnikoff
Book Busted
Over the past year opponents of environmental regulation had been finding everything they wanted to hear in a 540-page book by Danish statistician Bjørn Lomborg: Global warming, extinction of species, and other problems were not nearly as bad as conservationists claimed. But now that the Danish Research Agency’s Committees on Scientific Dishonesty has busted the author, contrarians may have to wait for a new treatise. After examining scientific criticism of The Skeptical Environmentalist (see "Mixed Media," March/April 2002), the Danish agency, which is akin to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, concluded that the book fell "within the concept of scientific dishonesty" and "was clearly contrary to the standards of good scientific practice." But because Lomborg lacks "any special scientific expertise," the agency could not rule that he "misled his readers deliberately or with gross negligence." In other words, the committee did not accuse Lomborg of intentionally distorting science, but only of knowing too little science to be able to do so. —Bob Schildgen
New from Sierra Club Books Raven’s End by Ben Gadd is a novel with ravens themselves as characters in an adventure story that reveals an immense amount about bird life—for both adult and young adult readers.
Adventuring Along the Lewis and Clark Trail, by Elizabeth Grossman, shows how to enjoy the best in dayhiking, backpacking, canoeing, kayaking, bicycling, and wildlife-watching along the historic route of North America’s great explorers.
The Mountain World: A Literary Celebration, edited by Gregory McNamee, features myths, essays, travelogues, poetry, and folktales that convey the glories and terrors of Earth’s most beautiful heights.
Order these titles from the Sierra Club Store by phone, (415) 977-5600, through our Web site, www.sierraclub.org/books, or by writing the store at 85 Second St., 2nd Floor, San Francisco, CA 94105.
At A Glance Farming With the Wild: A New Vision for Conservation-Based Agriculture
by Dan Imhoff and Roberto Carra.
Sierra Club Books, $29.95
The fruits of the earth can flourish without the huge environmental damage caused by industrialized agriculture. Here, 30 case studies and some 100 photos show how successful farmers have learned to work with nature instead of against it.
