Lauren Mills, Contributing Writer

Lauren Mills is a junior at the University of Iowa, majoring in Journalism, English, and Spanish. She recently returned from studying abroad in Chile and loves to travel, but she’ll always come home to her beloved Kansas City.

Her interest in environmental journalism began when she worked the environmental beat as a reporter for the The Daily Iowan…

The Polluters: The Making of Our Chemically Altered Environment

Frustration. That is the best way to describe the experience of reading The Polluters: The Making of Our Chemically Altered Environment. Page after page reveals the history of industries spewing toxins into our air, water, and soil and a government more apt to look the other way. Presenting the conflict through the lens of individual action and human cost, authors Benjamin Ross and Steven Amter provide an engaging and unsettling account of U.S. pollution.

Turning to the first page of The Polluters, the reader is presented with an image that will haunt the pages of the book: the funeral procession of a victim of the Donora (Pennsylvania) Smog. The burial takes place as smoke from the offending factory rises along the horizon….