Sandra Steingraber

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 from the toxic, climate-threatened world they inhabit.

Each chapter of Raising Elijah 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 policymaking and how the ongoing environmental crisis is, fundamentally, a crisis of family life.

Recorded On: Wednesday, May 18, 2011