In the spring of 1997, after four years of research and writing,
I published Living Downstream,
a book that explored the relationship between human cancer and environmental
contamination. Soon after, I was sent by my publisher on a two-week
book tour that lasted a year and a half. It finally ended in September
1998 when I gave my last phone interview while sitting on a towel:
I was in labor with my first child, and my water had just broken.
I canceled an appearance in Boston that was scheduled for later
that evening and headed to the hospital to give birth. Then I went
on a self-declared maternity leave.
The 18 months I spent on the road with Living Downstream
formed an amazing journey. It was an odyssey that took me not only
to bookstores, radio studios and the sets of Hollywood talk shows,
but to medical schools, college campuses, public libraries, church
basements, union meeting halls, the floors of various state legislatures
and the headquarters of the Environmental Protection Agency. I met
with university presidents, ministers, rabbis, pediatric oncologists,
breast cancer activists, government scientists, business leaders
and elected officials--but mostly I talked with a lot of plain,
ordinary folks. I spoke with mothers of children with brain tumors
who lived near Superfund sites; Montana wheat farmers worried that
herbicides had something to do with their high rates of lymphoma;
student athletes curious about the pesticides used on the fields
where they practiced; wealthy retirees wondering about the chemicals
sprayed on their beloved golf courses; native women in Alaska who
live near old military installations that leak PCBs; and sheep farmers
in Ireland who suspected that insecticides were poisoning their
drinking water.
In all these conversations, public and private, I became impressed
with how deeply
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citizens are concerned with the question of how human health is connected
to the health of our planet. The subject of my book was clearly a
topic on a lot of people's minds. On the other hand, I became equally
impressed at the inability of many of my readers to imagine themselves
taking action to redress their situation. Even among those wholly
convinced that toxic chemicals were contributing to the growing burden
of cancer and birth defects in their communities, few seemed to believe
it was possible to bring about an end to their production, use and
disposal. Among the few who did, fewer still could imagine what they
themselves could do to bring about such a change. It was as though
the presence of harmful chemicals in our air, food, water and bodies
was an immutable fact of the human condition and not the result of
short-sighted human decisions that could be modified or radically
altered. "It's just all so depressing," many would sigh as I signed
their books.
I didn't know how to rescue my audiences from their own fatalistic
thinking, and its manifestation during our discussions frustrated
me. Perhaps because I'm a cancer survivor myself--I was diagnosed
with bladder cancer at the age of 20--I view despair as a waste
of time. Cancer patients learn to have hope in desperate circumstances,
and we don't tend to surrender when the odds are stacked against
us. If we could just bring this same damn-the-torpedoes attitude
to our political lives, I thought, we would be a powerful force
to reckon with. In this, I tend to side with my Canadian friend,
the children's singer Raffi, who argues that pessimism--with its
smug presumption that solutions to our current predicament do not
exist and cannot possibly lie just ahead of us--is a form of arrogance.
"No new paradigm has ever sprung from the cynicism of arrested imagination,"
writes Raffi in his autobiography. But I also began to see that
another obstacle was preventing my readers from finding the courage
to act on their convictions. I call it the myth of living safely
in a toxic world.
It works like this. Environmental education in this country tends
to focus on individual actions. From Earth Day pamphlets to college
environmental science textbooks, we are exhorted to recycle, compost
our food scraps, turn off the tap while brushing our teeth, and
insulate our attics. If we are interested in protecting our own
health against a toxic onslaught, we might be advised, say, to air
out our freshly dry-cleaned suits before hanging them in the closet,
or give up dry-cleaning altogether. We are not told how we might
collectively persuade the dry-cleaning industry to switch over to
non-toxic, wet-cleaning technology. (The dry-cleaning solvent perchloroethylene
is a suspected carcinogen and a common contaminant of drinking water.
In Ithaca, New York, where I live, the headlines this morning announce
a final plan for remediating the contaminated soil and groundwater
at one local dry-cleaning shop; the problem was first discovered
10 years earlier. Such stories are replicated across the United
States.)
Or consider the widespread contamination of ocean fish with mercury,
which is now widely acknowledged as a threat to public health. The
official response of our state and federal governments has been
to warn the most vulnerable among us--pregnant and nursing mothers--to
restrict their consumption of fish. Meanwhile, the industries responsible
for creating the problem--coal-burning power plants, for example--are
not warned to restrict their emissions of mercury. (OK, as of January
2001 they have been so warned, but electric utilities will not be
forced to do anything about it until 2007, which leaves all of us
having babies now with no other choice than to forgo tuna sandwiches
in order to protect the brains of our unborn children.)
This relentless attention to individual sacrifices seems almost
unique to environmental issues. Other human troubles--shootings
in schools, intoxicated drivers on the highway, cigarette addiction
among teen-agers--are widely understood as political problems requiring
political solutions. Thus, a million moms march on Washington to
demand changes in handgun regulations, Mothers Against Drunk Drivers
pushes for lower legal limits on blood alcohol levels, and tobacco
advertising is restricted. We somehow understand that inviting individual
citizens to just say no to firearms, liquor and cigarettes isn't
the total solution.
In contrast, we pretend as if we can all live safely in a toxic
world if we as individual consumers just give up enough stuff: stop
eating meat, stop eating fish, stop drinking tap water, stop swimming
in chlorinated pools, stop microwaving in plastic, swear off dairy
products, remove shoes at the door so as not to track lawn chemicals
into the living room, handwash silk blouses rather than drop them
off at the dry-cleaners. Or worse yet, we pretend we can shop our
way out of the environmental crisis: buy air filters, buy water
filters, buy bottled water, buy pesticide-removing soaps for our
vegetables, buy vitamin pills loaded with anti-oxidants to undo
whatever damage we can't avoid. It's as though we all aspire to
become the ecological equivalent of the boy in the bubble. No wonder
people feel depressed.
Fortunately--and I do think it is fortunate--few of these lifestyle
sacrifices actually offer much real protection for public health.
The reason I think this is good news is that the sooner we quit
trying to turn our bodies and homes into fortresses against toxic
invasions, the sooner we'll realize that we have no choice but to
rise up and demand an end to the invasion. The hard fact is that
we cannot opt out of the water cycle or the food chain.
Consider drinking water. You might think you can save yourself
from exposures to carcinogens in tap water by purchasing bottled
water. But the sense of safety offered by bottled water is a mirage.
Because the industry is unregulated, there is no telling what's
actually in the bottle. It frequently contains trace contaminants.
In some cases, it even is tap water. Moreover, it turns out that
breathing, not drinking, constitutes our main route of exposure
to volatile pollutants in tap water. This is because most of them--solvents,
pesticides, by-products of water chlorination--easily evaporate.
As soon as the toilet is flushed or the faucet turned on, these
contaminants leave the water and enter the air. A recent study shows
that the most efficient way of exposing yourself to chemical contaminants
in tap water is to turn on a dishwasher. (This surprises you?) Drink
a bottle of French water and then step into the shower for 10 minutes,
and you've just received the exposure equivalent of a half-gallon
of tap water. In short, we are all obligated to protect public drinking
water, with which we enjoy the most intimate of relationships whether
we want to or not.
Well, then, I'll just filter all the tap water coming into my house,
you might be thinking here. Think again. Even if these gadgets worked
perfectly--and they don't--you are faced with changing them every
three to six months. You're left with a spent water filter laden
with all the chemical toxics you're determined to keep out of your
own body. Now what are you going to do? Throw it in the trash so
it can end up leaching in a landfill and contaminating someone else's
well? Or become a source of dioxin when it's shoveled into an incinerator
and lit on fire? Filters for tap water are nothing more than a way
of playing an elaborate shell game with harmful chemicals.
Or consider breast milk, that most perfect form of infant nutrition,
with its unsurpassed powers to boost IQ, fend off infectious diseases,
encourage the development of the immune system, and prevent diabetes,
allergies and obesity. Because it exists at the top of the human
food chain, mothers' milk has become the most chemically contaminated
of all human foods. It carries concentrations of organochlorine
pollutants that are 10 to 20 times higher than cows' milk. Indeed,
prevailing levels of chemical contaminants in human milk often exceed
legally allowable limits in commercial foodstuffs. Thus, on average,
in industrialized countries, breast-fed infants ingest each day
50 times more PCBs, per pound of body weight, than do their parents.
The same is true for dioxins.
We cannot ask newborns to become vegetarians. (Soy-based formula
is far inferior to human milk. Even as chemically compromised as
human breast milk is, breast-fed babies still end up smarter, healthier,
less prone to leukemia and exhibiting superior motor skills when
compared to their formula-fed counterparts.) We could encourage
their mothers to make such changes in their diet, but it turns out
that the lifestyle approach to cleaning up breast milk is not very
effective. Unless they are strict vegans, vegetarians have just
as much dioxin in their fat tissues--from which breast milk is manufactured--as
meat-eaters. And even among those who forswear all animal products,
veganism must be long standing--commencing a decade or more before
a woman becomes pregnant--to result in meaningful declines in breast
milk contamination. A Dutch study has compared macrobiotic mothers--whose
protein sources come primarily from grains and legumes--with omnivorous
mothers. The milk of macrobiotic mothers contained less PCBs, but
their DDT levels were no different. Moreover, the nursing infants
of macrobiotic mothers were still ingesting levels of contaminants
that were two to eight times higher than the "allowable" daily intake.
On the other hand, political action works great to purify breast
milk. I am pleased to report that average concentrations of certain
key breast milk contaminants--DDT, PCBs and dioxins--have declined
dramatically since '70s. This improvement is a direct consequence
of bans, tighter regulations, incinerator closings, emission reductions,
permit denials, right-to-know laws and tougher environmental enforcement.
We nursing mothers owe a great debt to thousands of anonymous citizens
from all around the world who worked to stop toxic pollution at
its source.
The way we repay this debt--and continue the process of detoxification--is
to stop distracting ourselves with individual sacrifices and get
involved with the political struggle. Start by finding out what
toxic chemicals are being released into your home community by visiting
www.scorecard.org and entering your zip code in the empty box. Then
take a look at some of the 35,000 pages of internal chemical industry
documents that formed the basis of Bill Moyer's expose, Trade
Secrets, which was recently broadcast on PBS. These are available
in the Chemical Industry Archives at www.ewg.org.
Sit for awhile with the new knowledge you gain from these two Web
sites and notice what emotions and ideas come up for you. Ask yourself
if we have a human rights problem here. Ask yourself how other human
rights activists you admire once prevailed against formidable opponents--how
women won the right to vote, how abolitionists succeeded in divorcing
our economy from slave labor, how workers won the right to a weekend.
I think you will find depression and cynicism soon yielding to inspiration
and courage. 
On the faculty of Cornell University, Sandra Steingraber
lives in Ithaca, New York, with her husband, Jeff de Castro,
and their breast-feeding, two-year-old daughter, Faith. Her new
book, Having Faith: An Ecologist's Journey to Motherhood, from
which some of this essay is adopted, will be published in October.
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