Books like When Smoke Ran Like Water by Devra Lee Davis

Rachel Carson’s *Silent Spring* examines the widespread use of pesticides and their harmful effects on nature, sparking the modern environmental movement.

A Civil Action is a 1996 nonfiction work by Jonathan Harr that examines the 1980s water‑contamination lawsuit Anderson v. Cryovac in Woburn, Massachusetts, and its impact on environmental law.

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.