Product Description: 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...read more

The Digital Age was expected to usher in an era of clean production, an alternative to smokestack industries and their pollutants. But as environmental journalist Elizabeth Grossman reveals in this penetrating analysis of high tech manufacture and disposal, digital may be sleek, but it's anything but clean. Deep within every electronic device lie toxic materials that make up the bits and bytes, a complex thicket of lead, mercury, cadmium, plastics, and a host of other often harmful ingredients. "High Tech Trash" is a wake-up call to the importance of the e-waste issue and the health hazards involved. Americans alone own more than two billion pieces of high tech electronics and discard five to seven million tons each year. As a result, electronic waste already makes up more than two-thirds of the heavy metals and 40 percent of the lead found in our landfills. But the problem goes far beyond American shores, most tragically to the cities in China and India where shiploads of discarded electronics arrive daily. There, they are "recycled"-picked apart by hand, exposing thousands of workers and community residents to toxics. As Grossman notes, "This is a story in which we all play a part, whether we know it or not. If you sit at a desk in an office, talk to friends on your cell phone, watch television, listen to music on headphones, are a child in Guangdong, or a native of the Arctic, you are part of this story." The answers lie in changing how we design, manufacture, and dispose of high tech electronics. Europe has led the way in regulating materials used in electronic devices and in e-waste recycling. But in the United States many have yet to recognize the persistent human health and environmental effects of the toxics in high tech devices. If "Silent Spring" brought national attention to the dangers of DDT and other pesticides, "High Tech Trash" could do the same for a new generation of technology's products.

Describes the environmental and health issues involved in the disposal of high tech devices.

Product Description: When the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 added a vast and unmapped wilderness area to the fledgling United States, President Thomas Jefferson persuaded Congress to fund a 'Corps of Discovery' to explore these lands, and he picked a young man by the name of Meriwether Lewis to lead the way...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

A nature writer based in Portland, Oregon, Grossman surveys some of the many dams that have been removed in the US and the many communities that are considering restoring free flows to their rivers. The process is long, she warns, so many of the projectsshe describes are still in the works, or in some cases still in debate. (view table of contents)

Twenty essays by such voices as Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, Pam Houston, and Rick Bass, explore the natural history, encounters with humans, and controversial future of the mountain lion