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Summary
Summary
Nothing could be more important than the health of our children, and no one is better suited to examine the threats against it than Sandra Steingraber. Once called "a poet with a knife," she blends precise science with lyrical memoir. In Living Downstream she spoke as a biologist and cancer survivor; in Having Faith she spoke as an ecologist and expectant mother, viewing her own body as a habitat. Now she speaks as the scientist mother of two young children, enjoying and celebrating their lives while searching for ways to protect them--and all children--from the toxic, climate-threatened world they inhabit
Each chapter of this engaging and unique book focuses on one inevitable ingredient of childhood--everything from pizza to laundry to homework to the "Big Talk"--and explores the underlying social, political, and ecological forces behind it. Through these everyday moments, Steingraber demonstrates how closely the private, intimate world of parenting connects to the public world of policy-making and how the ongoing environmental crisis is, fundamentally, a crisis of family life.
Author Notes
Sandra Steingraber , PhD, biologist, activist, and author, is Distinguished Scholar in Residence at Ithaca College in New York.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Eco-biologist, cancer survivor, activist, mother of two, and author of books about environmental hazards and their effects (including Living Downstream and Having Faith), Steingraber applies her knowledge and philosophy to the challenge of raising children in our toxic, climate-threatened world. She connects many child health issues, including asthma, behavioral problems, intellectual impairments, and pre-term birth to hormone-disrupting, brain-damaging, and otherwise dangerous environmental factors. Chapters tackle weighty problems-diminished fertility; how chemicals infiltrate mothers' milk; air quality and the ozone hole; neurotoxicology; hydraulic fracturing-and how they affect children and families. Two major themes emerge: first, current environmental policies must change to safeguard and support the health of children and, second, we must end our dependence on toxic fossil fuels. Less a guidebook for conscientious parents than an alarming and sobering human rights polemic, the book's narrative is nevertheless a persuasive, personal call to action. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Steingraber (Living Downstream, 1997) writes passionately about the things that matter most to her, her family and the environment. Smoothly shifting from events in her life to a broader view, she is able to springboard from such topics as her son's asthma to national statistics and a wide-ranging discussion encompassing everything from the Clean Air Act to zooplankton. An article about arsenic leaching from playground equipment leads to her daughter's school, a conflict between parents, and the sad realization that, even when there is undeniable proof of carcinogens, the differences between one group's fear and another's resignation to the status quo cannot be bridged. While she makes it clear that this is not a book about easy steps to a greener life, she has no patience with those who will not see the simple logic behind preferring compost piles and reel mowers. Steingraber wants to change the world even as she remains firmly planted in the neighborhood, seeking a way to make life better than most of us have come to expect.--Mondor, Colleen Copyright 2010 Booklist
Kirkus Review
Biologist and environmental-health writer Steingraber (Having Faith: An Ecologist's Journey to Motherhood, 2001, etc.) confronts the hormone-disrupting, brain-damaging toxins our children absorb from the playground to the kitchen floor, and everywhere in between.A mother of two, the author is extra-sensitive to the many dangers lurking in her children's everyday experiences. Though she's occasionally overly sensitive ("I don't even like having my kids in the kitchen while pasta is cooking or being drained"), Steingraber writes with clarity about many of the poisonous chemical agents that infest our daily livesthe arsenic that leaches from pressure-treated wood, the pesticides on food, PVCs in the kitchen tiling, asbestos and lead paintand the unique risks they pose to children. The author capably sketches the background of the toxins, the ways in which we are exposed to them and how she has sought to avoid them in the home. The book gets its rhythm and appeal from the twining of science and personal examplese.g., the time her husband ripped up the tiles on their kitchen floor, only to find asbestos tiles below that and then lead-based paint below that. When it comes to the politics of it all, Steingraber is bracingly elemental. Because the government has simply not done its job of ensuring domestic environmental tranquility, "[t]he way we protect our kids from terrible knowledge is not to hide the terrible knowledge...but to let them watch us rise up in the face of terrible knowledge and do something."An artful commingling of life with children, environmental mayhem and political-science primer. A great companion to Philip and Alice Shabecoff's Poisoned Profits (2008).]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
In this compelling and graceful call to arms, Steingraber (Living Downstream: An Ecologist's Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment) examines how our lack of political oversight has led to environmental hazards that severely affect children's development and long-term health. Interwoven with personal stories from her own maternal experiences, Steingraber faults the government's regulatory systems, which are "premised on the assumption that all members of the population basically act, biologically, like middle-aged men." Because of their alternative metabolic pathways and more porous barrier between blood and brain, children detoxify and excrete pollutants more slowly and are more prone to neurological toxicity. Addressing such topics as arsenic-releasing pressure-treated lumber ("the Osama Bin Laden of hazardous waste") and mercury levels in food ("tuna salad: the new lead paint"), Steingraber also tackles the pandemics of early sexual maturation, autism, and attention deficit disorder to illustrate how the "dramatic rise in incidence over a short time period certainly points to the potential role of environmental exposures." Verdict Steingraber combines the best of humorous science writers like Mary Roach with the soaring beauty of writers like Terry Tempest Williams. Fans of Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation and Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed should flock to Raising Elijah.-Julianne J. Smith, Ann Arbor, MI (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| Foreword | p. xi |
| Author's Note | p. xviii |
| 1 Milk (and Terror) | p. 1 |
| 2 The Nursery School Playground (and Well-informed Futility) | p. 27 |
| 3 The Grocery List (and the Ozone Hole) | p. 57 |
| 4 Pizza (and Ecosystem Services) | p. 83 |
| 5 The Kitchen Floor (and National Security) | p. 111 |
| 6 Asthma (and Intergenerational Equity) | p. 137 |
| 7 The Big Talk (and Systems Theory) | p. 167 |
| 8 Homework (and Frontiers in Neurotoxicology) | p. 197 |
| 9 Eggs (and Sperm) | p. 229 |
| 10 Bicycles on Main Street (and High-Volume Slickwater Hydraulic Fracturing) | p. 263 |
| Further Resources | p. 287 |
| Source Notes | p. 291 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 329 |
| Index | p. 333 |
| About the Author | p. 350 |
