Environmental policies fail in conspicuous and egregious ways to sustain the natural resource base and protect citizens from production-generated risky exposures. In her engaging study, Sustainable Failures, Sherry Cable asks, why does environmental policy seem to be a contributing cause rather than a partial solution to environmental problems? Melding a biophysical science perspective of environmental processes with sociological insights into human behaviour, Cable examines the people, policies and issues of petrochemical dependence and broader environment questions. She insists that our present policies around the manufacture and use of petro products violate rudimentary ecological principles-and do so in complicated ways. Sustainable Failures is a blistering wake-up call to what is at stake not only regarding the failure of policy outcomes and grievous natural resource depletion and pollution, but also democracy and ecological survival, and, eventually, potentially, the existence of our species.