Summary

How our thirst for more and larger houses is undermining society and what we can do about it.

Have we built our way to ruin? Is your desire for that beach house or cabin in the woods part of the environmental crisis? Do you really need a bigger home? Why don't multiple generations still live under one roof? In The Housing Bomb , leading environmental researchers M. Nils Peterson, Tarla Rai Peterson, and Jianguo Liu sound the alarm, explaining how and why our growing addiction to houses has taken the humble American dream and twisted it into an environmental and societal nightmare.

Without realizing how much a contemporary home already contributes to environmental destruction, most of us want bigger and bigger houses and dream of the day when we own not just one dwelling but at least the two our neighbor does. We push our children to "get out on their own" long before they need to, creating a second household where previously one existed. We pave and build, demolishing habitat needed by threatened and endangered species, adding to the mounting burden of global climate change, and sucking away resources much better applied to pressing societal needs. "Reduce, reuse, recycle" is seldom evoked in the housing world, where economists predict financial disasters when "new housing starts" decline and the idea of renovating inner city residences is regarded as merely a good cause.

Presenting irrefutable evidence, this book cries out for America and the world to intervene by making simple changes in our household energy and water usage and by supporting municipal, state, national, and international policies to counter this devastation and overuse of resources. It offers a way out of the mess we are creating and envisions a future where we all live comfortable, nondestructive lives. The "housing bomb" is ticking, and our choice is clear--change our approach or feel the blast.

Choice Review

At best, this thin book by M. Peterson (North Carolina State), T. Peterson (Texas A&M), and Liu (Michigan State) explores the conundrum of declining indicators of ecological health and improving quality of life for some sectors of the population. At its worst, The Housing Bomb is anecdotal, inadequately detailed, and based on a conflation of issues in many disparate parts of the world. For example, country- and continent-wide statistics do not support arguments based on patterns of sprawl in the Teton Valley, a topic that might have comprised a journal paper. And metaphorical statements like "There is no magic pill to cure house addiction, so society has tried to have its cake and eat it, too" does not teach readers anything. One of the authors has defended the use of hyperbole that sets the tone of this book as a wake-up call, likening his prose to the writing of Paul Erlich in The Population Bomb. The text's hysterical tone and unsubstantiated arguments diminish its usefulness. This is a shame because there is so much that people have to learn about regulating their impulses to build, consume, and expand. Summing Up: Optional. General readers. S. Hammer Boston University