NONFICTION - Jan. 5, 1992

OUR ANGRY EARTH by Isaac Asimov and Frederik Pohl (Tor/St. Martin’s Press: $19.95; 323 pp.) . This most honorable collaboration is an attempt, by two men who have imagined the Earth in all sorts of fantastic permutations, to deal with its literal reality: Like the protagonist in the film “Network,” our Earth is mad as hell and not going to take it any more. There are holes in her ozone, numskulls who pump fossil fuel as though it were water, and, worst of all, politicians and special-interest groups who continue to promote profit over common sense. The problem, for the overwhelmed but well-intentioned citizen, is where to start to fight back, so the authors break the ecological disaster down into manageable chunks, explaining the conditions that led to current problems, the nature of those problems and the range of cures at our disposal. The result is a remarkably clear-headed piece of environmental advocacy, the sort of informed cheerleading that can get even the most passive couch potato thinking about the changes he could make. The one weakness to the authors’ position is that, in their zeal to save the Earth, they sometimes fail to consider the new problems their solutions would create. An obvious example is their suggestion that gasoline taxes be raised as much as 50 cents per gallon--which, in a car-captive city such as Los Angeles, would mean that wealthy people would be able to shrug and pay, while the poor who depend on their cars to get to work would have to steal from other segments of an already tight budget. More preferable is the suggestion that we wean ourselves from statusmobiles: A general downsizing seems a much more democratic idea.