PRESS MATERIALS:
TOUR:
10.5.09 | Powell's Bookstore, Portland, OR
10.9.09 | Society of Environmental Journalists Conference, Madison, WI
10.9.09 | First Unitarian Church, Madison, WI
10.10.09 | AESS Conference, Madison, WI
>>> More Events
Media Inquiries »»»
Jaime Jennings, 202-232-7933 x44
Author blog
|
Chasing Molecules: Poisonous Products, Human Health, and the Promise of Green Chemistry
Elizabeth Grossman
 |
Booklist "Top 10 Sci-Tech Book"
"Grossman is an eloquent scientific muckraker, outing the truth about commonly used hazardous chemicals that are leaching out of everything from plastic bottles to children's toys and infiltrating the biosphere and our bodies to deleterious effect." — Booklist
|
| Biographies | Table Of Contents |
|
12.3.09: Climate Progress | Cloudy With a Chance of Toxics
11.24.09: Seed magazine | Benign By Design
11.23.09: Scientific American | Swimmers, Hoppers and Fliers
11.14.09: Huffington Post | Fat, Stupid, Impotent & Dangerous: The Future Without Green Chemistry
11.10.09: Frogs Are Green | "Extremely absorbing...It’s a 21st-century Silent Spring, very readable but sometimes shocking. Her message is an urgent wake-up call for industries to invest in green chemistry and to create products that won’t harm people and the environment."
10.8.09: Treehugger Radio
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Each day, headlines warn that baby bottles are leaching dangerous chemicals, nonstick pans are causing infertility, and plastic containers are making us fat. What if green chemistry could change all that? What if rather than toxics, our economy ran on harmless, environmentally-friendly materials?
Elizabeth Grossman, an acclaimed journalist who brought national attention to the contaminants hidden in computers and other high tech electronics, now tackles the hazards of ordinary consumer products. She shows that for the sake of convenience, efficiency, and short-term safety, we have created synthetic chemicals that fundamentally change, at a molecular level, the way our bodies work. The consequences range from diabetes to cancer, reproductive and neurological disorders.
Yet it’s hard to imagine life without the creature comforts current materials provide—and Grossman argues we do not have to. A scientific revolution is introducing products that are “benign by design,” developing manufacturing processes that consider health impacts at every stage, and is creating new compounds that mimic rather than disrupt natural systems. Through interviews with leading researchers, Grossman gives us a first look at this radical transformation.
Green chemistry is just getting underway, but it offers hope that we can indeed create products that benefit health, the environment, and industry.
|
Biographies
Elizabeth Grossman is the author of High Tech Trash: Digital Devices, Hidden Toxics, and Human Health, Watershed: The Undamming of America, and Adventuring Along the Lewis and Clark Trail. Her writing has appeared in Mother Jones, The Nation, Salon, The Washington Post, and other publications. She lives in Portland, Oregon.
Table Of Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1 There’s Something in the Air
Chapter 2 Swimmers, Hoppers, and Fliers
Chapter 3 Laboratory Curiosities and Chemical Unknowns
Chapter 4 The Polycarbonate Problem
Chapter 5 Plasticizers: Health Risks or Fifty Years of Denial of Data?
Chapter 6 The Persistent and Pernicious
Chapter 7 Out of the Frying Pan
Chapter 8 Nanotechnology: Perils and Promise of the Infinitesimal
Chapter 9 Material Consequences: Toward a Greening of Chemistry
Epilogue: Redesigning the Future
Acknowledgments
Appendix: The Twelve Principles of Green Chemistry and Further Information
Notes
Select Bibliography
Index |
Published: 09/30/2009
Publisher: Shearwater
288 p. 6 x 9
Appendix. Manuscript.
ISBN: 9781597263702
Hardcover: $26.96
ADVANCE PRAISE:
"I couldn't put this book down. I began reading before bedtime, finished as the first birds began singing, and felt a whole new world had been revealed to me. Chasing Molecules is the most important book I've read in ten years."
— Sandra Steingraber, biologist and author of Living Downstream: An Ecologist Looks at Cancer and the Environment
“There are enough environmental problems that seem insoluble… Elizabeth Grossman has given us this chronicle of a field with a bright future, the green chemistry that will replace the crude methods of the 19th century with the smart ones of the 21st. She tells us how it could happen—we should listen carefully!”
—Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature and Deep Economy
“As much as we have to fear from climate change, what scares me just as much is the vast number of untested substances we dump into the environment each year in huge quantities and with unknown effects. Only a small cadre of chemists really understands this problem and what to do about it. With Chasing Molecules, Elizabeth Grossman gives us the first book to tell their story. A tireless investigative journalist, she expertly distills the science of green chemistry and the promise it holds for a healthier world.”
—Paul R. Ehrlich, co-author of The Dominant Animal: Human Evolution and the Environment
|
