Eyes Wide Open: Going Behind the Environmental Headlines

Paul Fleischman's "Eyes Wide Open" is a vital nonfiction resource for young adults aged 12-18, designed to help them navigate the overwhelming and often conflicting information surrounding environmental issues. It moves beyond isolated facts, providing a comprehensive framework that integrates science, politics, history, and psychology to explain the underlying principles of our current environmental state. The book aims to equip teens with critical thinking skills, enabling them to understand complex topics like vested interests, denial, and global consumption patterns. With extensive back matter and online resources, it serves as an empowering guide for informed engagement with the world's most pressing ecological challenges.

Paul Fleischman offers teens an environmental wake-up call and a tool kit for decoding the barrage of conflicting information confronting them. We're living in an Ah-Ha moment. Take 250 years of human ingenuity. Add abundant fossil fuels. The result: a population and lifestyle never before seen. The downsides weren't visible for centuries, but now they are. Suddenly everything needs rethinking — suburbs, cars, fast food, cheap prices. It's a changed world. This book explains it. Not with isolated facts, but the principles driving attitudes and events, from vested interests to denial to big-country syndrome. Because money is as important as molecules in the environment, science is joined with politics, history, and psychology to provide the briefing needed to comprehend the 21st century. Extensive back matter, including a glossary, bibliography, and index, as well as numerous references to websites, provides further resources.