Sources and further reading
This book is a synthesis for general readers, not original research. Each chapter carries its own "Sources and notes" section listing the specific official agencies, standards bodies, academic sources, and reporting used for its facts, figures, and history, plus an "Open questions" note flagging any claim that is genuinely uncertain, disputed, or likely to date quickly (scale figures especially: gallons per day, number of facilities, and similar numbers shift year to year, and should be read as representative rather than exact).
A few organizations recur across many chapters and are worth knowing on sight:
- U.S. EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) and, in Canada, provincial environment ministries, for water, air, and waste regulation.
- Standards bodies such as ASME, ASTM International, NSF International, the International Code Council (building and plumbing codes), and internationally, the ISO (International Organization for Standardization).
- NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology), for measurement and calibration standards underlying almost every "how do we know this number is right" question.
- Sector regulators named per chapter: the FDA for medicine, the FAA for aviation, FERC and regional grid operators for electricity, and their provincial or federal equivalents elsewhere.
Where a chapter's claim is drawn from a single news event (a specific outage, recall, or disaster), that event is cited directly in the chapter rather than here, so the citation stays next to the claim it supports.