This year we have been exploring four basic elements — land, water, fire, and air — derived from — James Balog’s award-winning documentary “The Human Element”. For our final Book Club of 2024, we are discussing air by reading Beth Gardiner’s “Choked: Life and Breath in the Age of Air Pollution”.
Air pollution prematurely kills seven million people every year, including more than one hundred thousand Americans. It is strongly linked to strokes, heart attacks, many kinds of cancer, dementia, and premature birth, among other ailments. In Choked, Beth Gardiner travels the world to tell the story of this modern-day plague, taking readers from the halls of power in Washington and the streets of London to Poland’s heartland and India’s capital. She exposes the political decisions and economic forces that have kept so many of us breathing dirty air. We meet the scientists who have transformed our understanding of pollution’s effects on the body and the ordinary people fighting for a cleaner future. In the United States, air is far cleaner than it once was. But progress has failed to keep up with the science.
Clean air feels like a birthright. But it can disappear in a puff of smoke if the rules that protect it are unraveled. At home and around the world, it’s never been more important to understand how progress happened and what dangers might still be in store. Choked shows us that we hold the power to build a cleaner, healthier future: one in which breathing, life’s most basic function, no longer carries a hidden danger.
Beth Gardiner is an American journalist based in London. Her work has appeared in publications including The New York Times, The Guardian, National Geographic, Smithsonian, Time, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and Yale Environment 360. These days, she focuses mainly on stories about environment, health and sustainability, but she’s written about everything from politics, education and feminism to food and the arts. “