What does a New York neighborhood have in common with an Oklahoma mining town? Both are EPA Superfund sites, with enough environmental hazards to warrant federal intervention. Earth A.D. documents these two environmental disasters, born out of the Industrial Revolution, and how their legacies poisoned neighboring communities for decades.

One story Earth A.D. tells is about Tar Creek, OK, once the largest source of lead and zinc, today contaminated by toxic metals lead, cadmium and arsenic, resulting in 70% of children in the community having lead poisoning. The second story Earth A.D. tells is about Greenpoint, NY a community layered with contaminates, leading to cancer and other rare diseases. Telling these stories together reveals how massive-scaled, complexly intertwined environmental problems vary dramatically based on race, access to wealth, and local politics.

Author and filmmaker Michael Nirenberg weaves together stories of these disasters through interviews. This oral history is rich with stories from affected citizens, and political and environmental leaders. Former school counselor Rebecca Jim explains how she became an activist after seeing firsthand polluted water from Tar Creek harming her students. Activist Mitch Wax remembered fear driving him to organize with the Newton Creek Alliance after he had a pollution associated heart-attack at 39. These carefully pieced together interviews tell a dramatic and emotional story of how two communities became toxic.

Nirenberg’s knack for storytelling shows when he vividly paints the picture of Tar Creek. The distinctive blood-red creek tells a story of how wealth and racism allowed hundred-year-old mines to poison a community. Earl Hatley, an environmental organizer and member of the Cherokee Nation details the violent process of relocation, land theft, and genocide of the Cherokee and Quapaw Nations, enabling extractive industries.

The mines in Picher provided 40% of all the lead used in WWI and WWII. Mining left deep caverns below the town, which filled with lead, arsenic, cadmium and zinc laced water. Mothers describe how mining companies left mountains of chat (mine waste with alarmingly high levels of heavy metals) their children would play in and sled down. It’s a cycle the US tends to repeat Earl Hatley says: “we find a resource, we mine it, integrate it into the population, and don’t worry about the consequences until later, when we say Oh my god, what have we done?”

Sledge Metal captures the history of Greenpoint, the oldest continuous industrial area in the US. If Tar Creek is the example of how disastrous a single environmental incident can be, the Greenpoint neighborhood is an example of multiple incidents layered on each other. Through interviews and research from historical archives, Nirenberg reveals that Greenpoint was once home to a kerosene refinery, the first modern oil refinery, sugar refineries, hide tanning plants, canneries, plastic factories, and copper plants. It was only because of local, women led activism (dubbed the “The Angry Moms”) that the site began to be remediated.

Unlike in Tar Creek, as cleanup efforts began in Greenpoint, gentrification quickly followed. As real-estate prices in neighboring Brooklyn and Manhattan increased in the 1980s, developers could barely wait to turn waterfront property into profits. Even into the early 2000s, when Greenpoint was rapidly gentrifying, the creeks bed and banks were black with the sheen and smell of petroleum, only disrupted by occasional floating tires, car frames, seats, and paper.

Tim Kent, environmental director of the Quapaw Tribe in OK, says there are three components to sites like these, “political, science, and policy.” He argues that “you have to have all three present” to truly understand and address the situation. Nirenberg lays out the complex, unjust relationships between activists, tribal nations, and state and federal authorities, revealing how politics, science, and policy interact to poison communities.

If you’re just interested in Nirenberg’s analysis of the two sites and his historical grounding, stick to the bolded sections at the beginning of each chapter. However, it is through the narratives Nirenberg weaves together that the book truly comes alive. We meet teachers, scientists, a Governor, a Congressman, Native American tribal members, historians, and high school and college students.

Nirenberg’s style was not intuitive at first, but becomes natural quickly, almost like reading a film script, watching the characters evolve and develop relationships. This style can also be jarring. One moment a mother describes her child’s lead poisoning, the next a mining company official downplays the dangers of lead, and denies widespread contamination.

This book is not an indictment of the clean-up efforts at these two sites. Rather, it highlights voices not usually heard; mothers, affected children, and tribal elders, thoughtfully bringing them together to tell the personal, lesser-known stories of these sites. Nirenberg concludes that industry is not to blame for the outcome at Tar Creek and Greenpoint because there was no way they could anticipate what would happen at these sites. This may seem inappropriate after the emotional explanations of the negligence and complete disregard of these communities. The stories of Tar Creek and Greenpoint make plain that injustice and power differences create these disasters and also continue to affect clean-up efforts decades later.