Chemicals and Toxics
Environmental Resources

Hormonal Chaos   (by Sheldon Krimsky)

Hormonal Chaos traces the emergence of a hypothesis that casts suspicion on a broad range of chemicals. The assertion is that endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs) are interfering with the normal functioning of hormones in animals and humans. Sheldon Krimsky describes how this controversial theory was first elaborated and explores the complex factors that have contributed to its increased legitimacy.

Raising Healthy Children in a Toxic World

Book summary: "Your home is the focal point of your child's life—it's where he learns to crawl, where he eats and sleeps, where he plays. Home represents a safe haven for him ... yet just how safe is it? Even if your home is brand new, it might not be as safe as you think it is." Get 101 suggestions for reducing your child's harmful exposures.

Our Stolen Future

The near-extinction of bald eagles, developmental abnormalities in frogs, reproductive deformities in Florida alligators—such stories are rightly disturbing to nature lovers. But the implications for human health should be disturbing to everyone. "Our Stolen Future" documents the widespread chemical contamination we're all experiencing and the effect it's having on our biology. (by Colborn, Dumanoski, Myers)

The Estrogen Effect

Man-made chemicals like DDT, PCBs, and other "hormone disrupters" have become soaked into our environment from their use in countless modern products, from plastics to pesticides. They are now believed responsible for genital abnormalities and cancers across a wide range of species. These hormone-disrupting chemicals may pose a threat not only to our human potential, but to our very survival. (by Deborah Cadbury)

Fateful Harvest   (by Duff Wilson)

The True Story of a Small Town, a Global Industry, and a Toxic Secret

When the mayor of a small town discovers American industries are dumping toxic waste by labeling it "fertilizer," she blows the whistle on the nationwide problem, only to be nearly run out of town. "Fateful Harvest" tells the true story of this environmental scandal. It's a gripping study of corruption and courage, of recklessness and reckoning.

Silent Scourge   (by Colleen Moore)

Children, Pollution, and Why Scientists Disagree

How does pollution impact our daily lives and our children's development? Why do industry and environmental experts disagree about what levels of pollutants are safe? Silent Scourge explains how mercury, noise, pesticides, lead, dioxins, PCBs and technological disasters such as Chernobyl and Love Canal can damage children's development.

Home Safe Home

The level of chemical exposure we experience just by using legal household and personal products—the cleaners, laundry soaps, fabric softeners, deodorants, and shampoos that are so ubiquitously displayed on the shelves at supermarkets and drug stores—is astonishing. This book will help you work you way out of the toxic soup. (by Debra Lynn Dadd)

Environmental/Chemical Toxins and Psychiatric Illness

Psychiatric illness is, in a basic sense, due to one's central nervous system malfunctioning. Scientists have a long way to go before fully understanding the causes of such malfunctioning, but it is becoming clearer that CNS problems can be caused by agents such as insecticides, lead, polybrominated and polychlorinated compounds, chemical weapons, and radiation. Read all about it here. (by James S. Brown)

Prey (FICTION)

Michael Crichton has thrilled us with fictional tales of huge, man-munching dinosaurs cloned from ancient, amber-stored dino blood. Now he's gone the other direction on the techno-size scale, and nanomachines are the threat his scrambling protagonists must deal with. If you thought mosquitoes and no-see-ums were tough, just wait! (by Michael Crichton)

Cat's Cradle (FICTION)

What if a scientist designed a material that solidified water into ice at ordinary temperatures? Kurt Vonnegut's "Cat's Cradle" has been called the first warning about the possibility of nanostructured materials getting out of control. His fans consider it one of his best works of fiction.
(by Kurt Vonnegut)

Detoxification and Healing: The Key to Optimal Health

Detoxification promotes wellness by ridding the body of poisons that can lead to a host of health problems, ranging from fatigue and depression to cancer and diabetes. In clear language, the author explains body chemistry, how detoxification works, new medications, vitamin and mineral supplements, delayed food allergies, the dangers of mercury and aluminum poisoning, and much more. (by Sidney MacDonald Baker)

Living Downstream

A Scientist's Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment

Traces the high incidence of cancer in the author's hometown and other communities around the country, documenting the high levels of environmental toxins in the high-cancer areas.
(by Sandra Steingraber, Sep-1998)

Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things

Today's "cradle to grave" manufacturing model dates back to the Industrial Revolution and casts off as much as 90 percent of the materials it uses as waste, much of it toxic. The authors argue that products and processes should be designed so that wastes and worn-out products serve as useful manufacturing inputs, not trash and pollution.
(by William McDonough, Michael Braungart)

Five Past Midnight in Bhopal

The Epic Story of the World's Deadliest Industrial Disaster

On December 3, 1984, a pesticide manufacturing plant in Bhopal, India leaked a cloud of deadly gas that killed thousands and permanently injured hundreds of thousands of others. Five Past Midnight in Bhopal tells the story of the disaster and how the inadequate government and corporate response has added to the tragedy. (by Dominique Lapierre, Javier Moro)

When Smoke Ran Like Water

Devra Davis studies how people's illnesses relate to the environments in which they live. To some extent, this mission has a personal genesis: She grew up in Donora, a town in Pennsylvania that in 1948 suffered an "industrial toxic smog" that killed 18 and sickened many more. In this book, Davis documents the high toll toxic chemicals are taking on us all.

Dying from Dioxin

A Citizen's Guide to Reclaiming Our Health

Lois Gibbs—the mother-turned-activist from the Love Canal disaster of the 1970s—has prepared a layman's guide on the what, where, how—and why-we-should-care—of dioxins. Unless you've been living in a plastic bubble, dioxins are around you and probably in you. Somehow, that seems worth knowing a little more about. (by Lois Marie Gibbs)