Protecting Our Children in an Age of Environmental Crisis
April 4, 2011
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 problemsâdiminished fertility; how chemicals infiltrate mothers' milk; air quality and the ozone hole; neurotoxicology; hydraulic fracturingâand 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.
February 15, 2011
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 lives—the arsenic that leaches from pressure-treated wood, the pesticides on food, PVCs in the kitchen tiling, asbestos and lead paint—and 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 examples—e.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 (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)
March 15, 2011
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 sons 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 daughters school, a conflict between parents, and the sad realization that, even when there is undeniable proof of carcinogens, the differences between one groups fear and anothers 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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)