As hopes for environmental improvements take a distant back seat to the “war on terrorism,” Gordon Laird’s timely new look at Canadian energy exploration and exploitation provides a strong rallying call for the planet’s fragile ecology. Power provides a shortlist of those corporate entities profiting from the energy boom and a litany of victims suffering everything from pollution to uncertain futures in boom/bust one-industry towns. These victims include the Inuit in remote areas of Canada threatened by pollution drifts from the south andcoal miners in Cape Breton towns who believed the federal government’s promises of jobs for life.

Laird presents a strong variety of first-hand reports from such locales as an Arctic weather station, a mid-Atlantic drilling rig, and an eerily quiet Uranium City in northern Saskatchewan. And while he marvels at the technological genius of separating crude oil from sand and harvesting natural gas from beneath the ocean floor, he does not shy away from reporting on the leaks, explosions, and global warming and ozone depletion that result from our reliance on fossil fuels.

Power is refreshingly clear of rhetoric, though it could serve as a kind of environmental manifesto. One wonders, though, why Laird did not explore more alternatives to the pastiche of environmental degradation he paints so well. He does devote space to such solutions as local power control and energy conservation. But ultimately one is left with the ironic hopelessness engendered by such stories as the suburban homeowners who, outraged at the potential eyesore of a windmill in a high SUV-per-capita neighbourhood, petitioned for a lengthy environmental assessment to stall the clean energy alternative.