Interview with BETH GARDINER, author of CHOKED: Life and Breath in the Age of Air Pollution

— CHOKED:  Life and Breath in the Age of Air Pollution weaves together science, politics and the voices of those affected and those fighting for change to illustrate not only air pollution’s power and reach, but also the glimmers of progress and hope that point the way to a cleaner, healthier future. What did you want to achieve with this book?

I started on this project because I felt that air pollution was a big and important story that hadn’t been adequately told. This is something that’s killing millions of people around the world every year, and more than 100,000 in America alone — that’s more than guns, more than car accidents, more than the flu.

But it doesn’t get the kind of news coverage that that impact merits. So I wanted to help readers understand how much this unseen threat actually shapes our lives. And I’m a journalist, not an activist or a policy wonk, so it was also important to me that it be readable and engaging to a wide, general audience, not just to people who were already interested in these kinds of issues.

— What kind of research did you do for CHOKED?

I reported from six different countries, including the one I live in, Britain. I applied for a lot of grants and fellowships and ended up getting three travel grants, from two great organizations (thank you, Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and Society of Environmental Journalists!) to cover the costs of some of those trips. That was key, and it also enabled me to hire fixer/translators to help me in India, China and Poland, where I wouldn’t have been able to work without them. I tried to meet as many people in each place as I could, to make sure I’d find the ones whose stories were strong enough that I could build sections of a chapter around them.

I’m a freelancer, and one of my guiding principles has always been to never write anything on spec, because you can waste so much time on stories that don’t end up getting published. But I did almost half the reporting for this book before I wrote the proposal, found an agent and got a contract. I did a bunch of articles along the way, but that was still a lot of time invested without knowing whether the book I envisioned would get published.

— What are tips for helping readers understand both sides of a complicated and controversial issue like air pollution?

It is complicated and controversial. A lot of environmental issues are, and that’s why I love reporting in this area. To me, it’s this really rich territory where a lot of different cross-currents come up against one another. People’s health and their lives, but also their jobs and livelihoods. And a lot of times those who suffer most from the effects of pollution also depend on polluting industries for their jobs.

Like in the Polish town I visited where the air was thick with black smoke, but most people were resigned to it because they worked in one of the coal-fired power plants nearby, or had a friend or relative who did. Government regulation is often part of the story, and there are ideological and practical concerns around that. There are questions of corporate power and how to restrain it when it’s being abused. I try to lean into the complexity, because these tensions and competing forces are usually where the best stories are.

— You are a former longtime Associated Press reporter and have written for publications including the New York Times, the Guardian, National Geographic, and Smithsonian. How is writing articles different from writing a book and how did you make the transition?’ 

It’s so different, and I don’t think I really understood that when I started on this project. I’m a writer, and it’s writing, so it felt familiar, and it was building on skills I already had. But there was a steep learning curve, and while it was hard, I also really enjoyed figuring out how to do something new at this point in my career.

It took me a while to understand that you have to give readers so much more to keep them with you for the hours it takes read a book, as opposed to the minutes needed for an article. That means characters that they can care about, drama and narrative rather than just facts presented in an interesting way.

The first chapter I wrote was about twice as long as I knew it should be, and a friend from a writing group I was in said it read like a giant newspaper article, with every point backed up by a quote from an expert. She told me I didn’t need to quote all those experts, that I was the expert, and I could put Professor So-and-So in a footnote if I needed to cite something specific. That helped me start to develop a voice for the book. It also made it so much easier to cut the chapter down to size. I just started getting rid of all those unnecessary quotes, and focusing on a few important characters instead, and it began to take shape.

— What inspired you to write CHOKED?

It really sprang from own experience with air pollution in London, where I live. Not in the sense of having had any health problems from it myself, or in my family, fortunately. But there’s a thickness in the air you can feel on the streets here, and a smell of fumes that always bothered me. I’d never noticed that when I lived in New York. No one around me seemed concerned, so I ignored it for a long time.

One day, I had to read some of the science of what air pollution does to our bodies for a story I was working on, and I was really shocked to learn how profound the effects are. I didn’t start on the book right away, but I think that was when I started to feel that this was an important story that wasn’t getting its due. And of course I soon realized it was much bigger than just the city I happen to live in.

Is there another book on the horizon?

I’d love to write another book, but I don’t know what it will be about yet. As an environmental writer, I can’t see spending several years on a project that’s unconnected to climate change, which to me is so clearly the biggest story of our time. But it’s also hard to know what I can say about climate that hasn’t already been said by so many more prominent and accomplished writers. That was part of what drew me to air pollution — it’s deeply interconnected with climate, but also a distinct story that hadn’t really been covered the way I wanted to do it.

Have you ever thought about writing fiction?

No. I love reading fiction, but I’ve never felt drawn to writing it.

How did you start your writing career?

My first journalism job was working as a newsroom assistant in the Associated Press New York bureau. I answered phones, opened mail, sorted faxes. And I got to write stories when all that stuff was done, and on weekend shifts. Journalism has changed so much, I don’t know that those kinds of ways in exist any more.  

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Category: Contemporary Women Writers, Interviews, On Writing