.. more comfortable living there then i would in other parts of the industrial parts of the united states for the simple reason so much care and attention has now gone into the making sure that the tom's river environment is okay. >> and i want to pick up on one of the questioners who asked you whether or not companies pick communities that maybe economically disadvantaged. was tom's river like that when the company moved in? >> it was. life was slow and there wasn't a lot of economic growth was a bit of the back water franklth was looking for an isolated place, where there was plenty of water, a rail spur, and this met all of the requirements. the two previous places where the company has been really more places than two but -- in cincinnati things were crowded they were on top of their neighbors and lots of conflict resulted. toms river had advantages. >> you talked in your presentation about the regulatory environment that it's too complex when it comes to the environment, and i -- aim correctly rephrasing you? >> guest: it's not so much it's too complex. it's that it's not up to date. it's archaic. our most important environmental statutes all date from the early 1970s, with and exceptions them clean air act has been revised a couple of times, but generally speaking where we're working in a regulatory environment that is out of date, i also think that we have a funny attitude about government regulation in this country. we assume that regulatory agencies are incompetent and that they won't do the job effectively, and then what we do then is underfund them and thereby guarantee they can't do the job effectively. so funding and archaic regulations are definitely part of the problem. he world is changing quickly and our regulatory system is not keeping up. >> host: dan fagin is our guest here's the book "toms river, story of science and salvage" winner of the pulitzer prize in 2014. and chris and oak park illinois, you're the first call. >> caller: dan, i grew up at exit 117 on the parkway as little north of toms river. i was shocked to read there was that much pollution or this cat at tom's river. i remember swimming and coming out dirtier than when i went in. now it's -- as you said about toms river, it's a lot cleaner but i was wondering in light of that pollution coming into the bay, from the north, would -- what your impression of governor christie's settlement with bp rather than what the state wants to get. and i'll take my answer off the air. >> guest: so, thank you for that question. it's true that people in toms river and people around toms river are often surprised at the extent of what happened in their own town. some people knew about it. many people did not. and one of the arguments i make in this book it's only through a series of flukes and the personal bravery and tenaciousness of people involved in toms river that we now know what i call the seek secret of toms river. that doesn't mean it was an extraordinarily polluted place. it's just we know about it. that's point one. point two i have not covered the new jersey political scene day in and day out, so i would not want to set myself up as an expert on governor christie and his environmental record. based on what i have read i have serious concern about the settlement. appears to be far too low for me given the scope of the damage. and so i'm highly skeptical that was an appropriate settlement put i wouldn't want to set myself up in any way as an expert about this because it's not something i've done reporting on. >> host: environment and politics is our topic. and sheila in carrollton georgia, your on with author dan fagin. >> caller: thank you so much for taking my call. maybe i'm -- i came into -- i was wonder if you had any thoughts on radiation and also we had the -- out west, back in the day we had all those nuclear tests and we had an accident in the east, we had chernobyl. and the japanese accident, and i understand it was just a news blip back at the time about chernobyl, that some of the radiation came over here on our west coast and i was wondering about your thoughts about that. and -- >> host: all right, see sheila, thank you very much. let's hear from dan fagan about radiation. >> guest: so radiation is -- was the first environmental carcinogen, the first carcinogenic exposure that was definitively identified as causing cancer. so radiation is of course always a concern. i am not convinced that the united states has anything to be worried about as a result of the fukushima accident. i think there are important concerns and exposures in japan, and i do think that there are in general that it's really important to have rigorous regulation of nuclear power plants-but again i'm not convinced that what happened at chernobyl or what happened at fukushima posed significant risks here in the united states. i have not seen evidence that i found convincing on that. >> host: dan fagin, haven't we reduced the number of nuclear power plants active here in the united states and why? >> guest: that's true. we haven't had a new number clear plant come on line in a very long time. i don't remember how long it's been we were will soon have some nuclear plants coming online but they tend to be situated in places where there are already nuclear power plants and the local region is comfortable with them. the reason that we haven't had more nuclear power plants are economic. it has to do with the huge capital investment associated with a single plant, and for that reason it's not something that financial community is eager -- it's not a risk the financial commuter has -- community has been eager to take on. i'm not one of the people that thinks there's no future for nuclear power. i support research into innovative plant designs. i take the threat of climate change very seriously, as wail -- as we all should. it's a threat to life on the planet. for that reason it would be crazy to -- wholly irrational not to at least investigate alternative plant designs that are less expensive and also reduce risks. whether we should deploy those plants yet, i don't know. but i think it makes perfect sense to continue to research them. >> host: what's your day job? >> guest: my day job is i'm a professor at new york university and i run the science and environmental reporting program at nyu, a job i dearly love. we play an important role in producing the next generation of science journalists and i love my students and i love working with them and i'm excited about the new media environment that they are confronting because it's so different than the environment in which i did my formative work. >> host: and when dan fagin's book "toms river" came out. booktv did an extensive interview with him at new york university so you can go to booktv.org, type in his name, and you can watch that more extensive interview. david is calling calling in from pittsburg, california. you're on book tv from tie -- tucson. >> caller: hi, dan. i haven't read your book you. sort of quickly mentioned the free trade agreement and i am kind of apprehensive about the way the free trade agreement was discussed, signed into -- and implemented for the united states and so forth, and i'm also very skeptical of the transpacific partnership agreement that we're entering into which is totally top secret. i'd to have you feedback why you support this type of treaty agreement with different nations and stuff. >> host: thank you sir. >> guest: thank you for the question. again, the first thing i would say is i'm anything but an expert on trade negotiations. not something i've written about. i do know something about environmental risk, both here and abroad. and i can tell you that the difference in labor standards and environmental snarleds between the developing world and the developed world is a huge area of concern for me. so i don't have any kind of a formal position on the transpacific partnership or nafta, but i can tell you that philosophically i think it's strugglely important that we try to level labor -- try to have a level playing field for both environmental standards and labor standards. that has to happen. theoretically i think open trade agreements are very good things. reduce costs are very good thing. i just think we have to take -- labor and environmental standards into account. >> host: have the trade agreements upped environmental standards around the world? >> guest: certainly environmental standards are improving around the world. whether we could attribute that to trade agreements is a whole other question. i'm actually somewhat encouraged by what is happening in china right now. they have -- as i mentioned during the panel there's real interest at the grassroots level in improving environmental conditions. and that is a great thing. that can occur even in an authoritarian society like china is something that is very encouraging. i would not say that that is due to fair trade. that that's due to lower costs, except in the sense that all economic growth is a good thing, most of the time and that in the long run as you get economic growth you get more wealth environmental consciousness rises and that's a good thing. >> host: june from delware. hi. >> hi, how are you? >> host: fine. >> caller: thank you for taking my call. i agree with you mr. fagin, that regulation -- >> host: june, don't look -- >> caller: -- is a complicated problem. ailes tack issue with the fact you have politicians who utilize the mantra of government in your pocket, government always regulating, when it's the governmental agencies that are responsible for taking care of the people with reference to health issues. >> guest: yeah. i agree with you, june. this is a problem. we have a funny relationship with government in this country. i have rarely met government officials who are trying to do anything but protect the public health, trying to do their job. but they're working with very outdated standards, they're working in an ideological environment where many people are hostile to any kind of government intervention in the marketplace, and they're dealing with lack of funding. they're overworked, and this is a really -- this is something we need to get serious about in this country. we can't have it both ways. if we're serious about protecting public health if we decide that environmental issues are important to us if we decide that consumer issues are -- consumer protection is important to us, we have to have sensible environmental regulations and fund the agencies appropriately. if we don't, then we're going to get what we deserve which is ineffective government regulation and reduced health and environmental performance. >> host: john, sacramento good afternoon. >> caller: hi. i just want to say i found the book gripping and a page-turner, and my questions are about your press. how much time do you spend reporting versus writing both on a daily basis and overall for the book, how many tripsed did you make up there? how much reporting was, say, on the internet or other sources versus going up there and having interviews and also did you have assistance from graduate students? >> host: john, thank you. we'll get an answer in just a minute. did you pick up toms river before or after it won the pulitzer? >> caller: before, but i knew it was not nominated for the pulitzer. >> host: thank you sir. >> guest: thank you john. i appreciate the early support. those are all request questions. take the last one first. i love my graduate students. i love working with them. i do not use them to do anything but very brief research tasks. i like to do all my work on my own. that's not because my students aren't terrific. they're absolutely great. reporting this book took a long time as you know, if you have read it. most of the work was in the reporting, not the writing, but writing takes a lot of work too. i'm a big one for revising, and i tell my students and i tell anyone who asks that the first thing you write is never going to be good, but the important thing is to write it and then you revise over and over and over again. in terms of the reporting, yes, i went to toms river many times. i never actually counted the number of trips but it was certainly like around 30 trips to toms river from where i live on long island. so i'm a big believer in face-to-face conversations. yes, i use the freedom of information act and i am a big one for reading documents, but nothing can replace direct face-to-face conversations. so i interviewed more than 150 people for this book and most of those interviews were done in person because i believe that that's how you get the kind of information that is closest to the truth. >> host: dan fagin, was was the level of congresses from the company -- level of cooperation from company? >> guest: i asked them questions at various points, and they more or less responded. and the same for union carbide, another company that was a big part of the narrative. neither of those companies are in the chemical business anymore. actually ceb ay still exists in a different form as a much shrunken company. union carbide doesn't exist anymore. but they cooperated to some extent. and the thing is that what i was writing about in toms river there, was not -- there could be lots of disputes about interpretations about the facts themselves were pretty well-established by the time i started reporting the book. so there really wasn't a lot i needed from the companies, and there wasn't really a lot the companies could dispute. so much of it was well-established by the time i did my work. the journalists who i really admire are the ones who were doing contemporaneous histories and a quarter trench as the events were unfolding. one thing i try to pay tribute to with the book is the work of some absolutely terrific local journalists who at various points played important roles in explaining what was going on in toms river, even if they didn't have anied a vaccine of being able to put it together in a comprehensive narrative. >> host: jim in louisville, kentucky, thank you for holding. you're on booktv with dan fagin. >> caller: first i'd like to congratulate you and tucson festival of books for really wonderful work and i think it's very important of all the authors pointed out that science can't be separated from public policy, that they're interwoven. i couldn't help notice the smiles when referencing whether or not we could get our representatives to hear us, and i'd like to -- i'm wondering, what did you find were the most effective actions that public could take to try and get policy to clean up our environment. >> guest: right. well, that's a big question isn't it? and there are a lot of different ways to answer it. lots of things happen atoms river at various points. there will protests led my green peace, some creative. there were spontaneous meetings some substantive, some very chaotic. all those things happened. and they each played a role in unearthing what i call the secret history of toms river. what they all have in common is the idea of an engaged citizen the idea that democracy, like ben franklin said we have a republic if we keep it and the way you keep a republic is by getting involved. toms river shows what can happen when people lose interest in what is happening in their community, but it also shows what happens when -- the really positive things that result when people get engaged and go to meetings. people in toms river did this through determination, and i should be careful when i say that people of toms river because at first it was only a relatively small number of people, and they themselves faced real conflicts with other people in town who said, well why are you making our town look bad? and it's very brave what those early folks did and ultimately now i think the people of toms river recognize what those early pioneers accomplished and respect them for it. when i go back to toms river now issue don't hear people saying, oh why did you dig up the dirt on our town? why are you bringing this up again? and instead what i hear people say is, thank you for chronicling what we did and making sure it's not forgotten. thank you for helping to make sure that other communities whether here in the states or in china or wherever, can learn from what toms river went through and hopefully not repeat that. >> host: toms river was company town. >> guest: it was early on. when siba came to town the population was very small. there wasn't much else going on, and as a result, siba became very important in the '50s and '60s especially. it spurred very rapid growth. the parkway was extended down the town started growing. ultimately the town started growing so much in the republic 0s, ocean county was one of the fastest growing counties in the entire united states. ultimately toms river grew so fast that the company became a -- when the environmental problems became more severe, the company did not have the support in toms river that it enjoyed early on when it was the only game in town. >> host: dennis, lynnwood, illinois, please go ahead with your question or comment for dan fagin. >> caller: yes. i want to thank you for a great book and second of all, i want to thank c-span for having him on earlier so that i could find out what to read, what a great book it was. the question i want to ask or comment is that this was on the east coast. i live in an area which was all steel mills, and when i was growing up and stuff like that, it was like somebody would retire from the steel mills and six months later they'd all die of cancer and stuff and it was such a company area or whatever you want to call it, that we just had to endure. nobody actually did the research on it to sit there and say, where was all of these cancers coming from? i'd like to see somebody maybe in the midwest or whatever take on the pollution that we had here. the best book is read are all on the east coast or whatever. >> guest: well certainly these problems occur anyplace there's a industrialization, they can occur in places that aren't very industrialized at all. your corner dry cleaner, clear oth lean is a significant risk if it reaches groundwater. environmental risk is everywhere. that doesn't mean we should be paranoid or lock ourselves in our homes about it means we should be aware ask try to take sensible steps to reduce our risks. so yes everyone has stories about their encounters with pollution, and those encounters ten to be more extreme in this country in the 40s and 50s and 60s. since then we've gotten a little better about reducing exposures. but, yeah, you're right, it would be great if we took a look at all those old sites and disease patterns around them, realistically i don't see that happening. very expensive. >> host: pat in wanesboro, pennsylvania. we have a minute left. >> caller: okay. i have would questions. one regarding the state of the gulf of mexico after the bp oil spill. i was so shocked by the information on msnbc and how bad the situation remains. and the other is when i was a kid in the '50s and '60s my parents took us to seaside heights, we passed through toms river, and we also passed a place that was billed as a medical plant which had a terrible odor, and i never knew what it was. can you help me? >> guest: i'll take the first one first. the only maintain can think of that would fit that would be the siba plant. it was not particularly odorous. the water smelled sometimes when it was polluted and the air emissions sometimes smelled but i don't know if that's what you were thinking of. that's the only large industrial facility i can think of that would be on the way to sea i.e.d. heights. as for the gull of mexico i would not want to sees myself up as an expert but there are real concerns bat long-term impact related to speak spill but more importantly related to the long-term degradeation of the gulf that has come from the nitrogen and fertilizer that comes down the mississippi. these are -- there are disaster related issues and also the chronic exposure issues and they're both really important. >> host: here's the book, toms river, story of science and salvation, winner of the pulitzer prize in 2014. nyu science journalist professor dan fagin is the author. >> guest: thanks a lot. >> there are about 32 million kurds who live in those countries. that makes them the largest stateless people in the world. during the first world war, kurds aspired to establish a nation of their own, and while sites were sitting at the din are table carving up the map without regards to arab populations, the interests of kurds were neglected. at the paris piece conference president wilson repudiate it the agreement and addressed the congress in the winter of 1918 saying that self-determination was a cherished right and peoples and nations should not be bartered from sovereign to sovereign as though they were a chatle in a great game forever discredited. the kurds' hope as a result of the paris peace conference to be able to achieve their national as separations. the treaty of 1920 established a whole panoply of new nation states. it also created a commission including british, french, and italian diplomats to autonomy arrangements for kurds living in the area and that commission concluded that within a year of the treaty that kurds should be given the right to summit a request -- submit a request to the league of nations for independence. so the dream of a kurdistan seemed within reach but for the war of liberation that was launched by -- his war of independence rejected the treaty of sovereign. the allies had been at war for many years. they didn't want an ongoing confrontation with turkey. so the treaty was ultimately repudiated renegotiated and the treaty of lazan was finalized in 1923. the treaty azan did not mention issue in in its text the word kurdish or kurdistan so it really represented a blow to the kurdish aspirations and initiated a period in the 20th 20th century where the kurd suffered terrible human rights abuses under the boot of the countries where they resided. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. >> next on booktv, former navy seal sunshiner and iraq war veteran, scott taylor. he argues that president obama and his administration are hurting u.s. national security and should be held accountable. this is about 45 minutes. [applause] >> thank you so much. thank you so much for that wonderful introduction. good afternoon. >> good afternoon. >> that was pretty weak. let's try that again. good afternoon. >> good afternoon. >> all right. that's a little bit better. i appreciate that production. i was going 0 to go into that but i'll shift gears a little bit. i had the pleasure of going to the ranch today and it was as humble as it was beautiful. and i really enjoyed it. and it is certainly an or some pleasure to be with you here today and the young americans as well.