Published in 2019
312 pages
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 and the Washington Post. 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. Choked, her first book, has been recommended by NPR’s Science Friday, the Washington Post, Scientific American and Library Journal. The Guardian said, “You couldn’t ask for a better guide for non-specialists and concerned citizens,” and Refinery29 called it “incredibly readable.”
Beth spent 10 years as a reporter for the Associated Press, based first in New York and then in London. She has discussed her reporting on NPR’s All Things Considered, MSNBC, WNYC’s Brian Lehrer show, the BBC’s World at One, Sky News and Canada’s CBC, among many others. In 2019, she was a speaker at TEDx London at the Royal Festival Hall.
What is this book about?
Nothing is as elemental, as essential to human life, as the air we breathe. Yet around the world, in rich countries and poor ones, it is quietly poisoning us.
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 diesel-fogged London streets she walks with her daughter to Poland’s coal heartland and India’s gasping capital. In a gripping narrative that’s alive with powerful voices and personalities, she exposes the political decisions and economic forces that have kept so many of us breathing dirty air. This is a moving, up-close look at the human toll, where 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, which tells us that even today’s lower pollution levels are doing real damage. And as the Trump administration rips up the regulations that have brought us where we are, decades of gains are now at risk. Elsewhere, the problem is far worse, and choking nations like China are scrambling to replicate the achievements of an American agency—the EPA—that until recently was the envy of the world.
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.
