When I was in college, there was lot of talk in the environmental movement that there's no such thing as "away." There isn't some place you throw the garbage, some place you take the toxic waste. In Living Downstream you discuss how 99.9% of pesticides --

Never reach their target.

And how 90% of incinerated waste winds up in the atmosphere. Do you think these are things people are becoming more aware of?

Definitely. I was really wrong about Living Downstream in a way. I thought it was going to ring an alarm bell for people. Instead, I discovered when I went on the road with it that people were already ahead of me. They were persuaded of the science, and they wanted to know, what should we do? What's the best political response, what's the best ethical thing, what about lifestyle issues? So this careful piecing together of the evidence, which I thought my readers were going to demand -- they were happy enough to receive it, but it confirmed in their mind something they had already thought through.

I went on what was supposed to be a two-week book tour that essentially lasted two years, as the book went into multiple printings, came out in paperback, then got picked up as a course text in environmental studies and women's studies. But more compelling to me was the way communities were reading it -- whether it was Irish farmers interested in the sheep dips they were using, or when I went to Alaska and talked to Native women who were worried about breast milk contamination. That was sort of my first entrée into that whole issue.

So I began to feel like there's this untold story out there, that we're on the brink of this new civil rights movement, really a movement about environmental health. We haven't got our Martin Luther King Jr. yet, it's not this galvanized national movement, but there are all these different groups forming: mothers of kids with brain tumors, farmers, Native Americans who rely on fishing for subsistence living, retirees -- across the demographic spectrum, but also with many different political views. Living Downstream became one little part of this much bigger conversation that was already going on, and I think is getting stronger and stronger.

It seems like it's just lurking below the mainstream now. The World Health Organization figure you discuss, that 80% of cancer is from environmental causes -- you don't learn that reading the newspaper.

That's probably right, and it's good for me to be reminded of that. Because I often wonder, if I'm seeing this incredible social movement, other people not so close to it as I am, what are they seeing?

One of the interesting things is that the cancer community, which for so long had been focused around therapeutic issues -- how to provide emotional support through a diagnosis, where to find a wig, how to talk to your kids about it -- they got very politicized in the early Œ90s, particularly the breast cancer movement. They began to ask questions about prevention, and the environment, and why more and more younger women were getting the disease. And really took a lesson from AIDS activists about ten years before us, who in the middle '80s showed how you could lay bare the political root causes of a disease, and profoundly alter the way scientific questions were posed, how they were funded, and what role patients and patient advocates played in the process of science. They really brought science to its knees and forced it to be what it should be, which is a public servant.

I played a small role in that whole thing, when in the early '90s I was a professor at Columbia College in Chicago. I was in charge of AIDS awareness education at our school. And every year, what was considered a safe behavior last year when I taught it, wasn't this year. But we couldn't stop teaching -- we were teaching in a moving stream. It was a reminder to me that just because the data are still out on a question, doesn't mean you can just say, sorry folks, we can't take any action until the science comes in.

When I started looking at cancer and focusing on writing Living Downstream, it made realize that we can't just wait until we know everything about each carcinogen and each kind of cancer before we keep people out of harm's way and divorce certain chemicals that we suspect are bad actors from our economy. We need to take those steps first, and then do the science second.

And it's not just me who is now saying this -- it's all kinds of different cancer activist groups who are joining together with the anti-toxics groups, and the organic farmers, and all kinds of different folks. I think they're really altering the whole political landscape, maybe in a quieter way, a more long-term way, than the AIDS activists did.

Do you have a sense of what started that movement rolling?

Probably, sadly, just the rise in cancer rates. It used to be that the women in these breast-cancer groups were blue-haired ladies. Gradually, especially through the '80s as breast cancer rates were really rising and age of diagnosis was falling, we started seeing 30- and 40-year-olds, and women with young children, and people were wondering, "What in the world is going on? We had ten members five years ago, now we have 30 recently diagnosed women, and they're all really young." Then once it hit women now in their 40s and 50s, they already brought a political perspective with them -- they had already maybe marched against Vietnam, they had already fought for abortion rights, and were used to thinking about the social context of a phenomenon.

The other big untold story seems to me the role of the lesbian community in cancer activism. In the early '90s, the only place you could get a forum to talk about, say, cancer in the environment, was in lesbian-sponsored groups. A lot of lesbians were working in the AIDS activist community, setting up support services for the victims, and then realizing that among their own ranks women were disappearing at a rate that was starting to approach men in the gay community. And yet they didn't have those same services available -- they didn't have someone to drive them to their doctor's appointment and walk their dogs and do all these soldiering things that were being done for gay men. Some of them actually left AIDS work and founded similar organizations for women with breast cancer. And because they were used to thinking about how to prevent the spread of a virus, it was natural for them to think, "Why are we getting cancer?" in a way that previous generations didn't ask.

It tends to be women with cancer, or mothers, that are in the leadership role of the whole environmental health movement. And it's expanded now from breast cancer to pediatric cancers, and other things I don't really have my finger on -- there's links now being reported for Parkinson's Disease, and of course multiple chemical sensitivities, and autoimmune diseases and kids with autism -- I haven't looked at all the data, but people are beginning to make connections now.

You wrote in your recent In These Times article about how people tend to personalize their response to environmental pollution -- to search only for personal consumer choices that would enable them to live safely in a toxic world. Is that something that's still prevalent, and if so, why?

Because it's an apolitical country. And because people aren't used to imagining themselves as political beings -- particularly women, who are so encouraged to live in the private sector, even now.

As an aside, one of the things I just despise about creative writing and how it's pitched to women is this focus on "journaling" -- which, number one, I hate being used as a verb. But there are all these seminars encouraging to write in their journals. I think it's really sad, because it's encouraging women to become specialists in this private, individual language. How about instead of writing in a journal, we all write letters to the editor? Why aren't we teaching each other how to stand up in city council meetings, and practice a public form of discourse, instead of all this private conversational stuff?

So even though women are the leadership in this movement -- I know I'm making generalizations here -- the first impulse is to imagine what you yourself could do, as a parent, or as a cancer survivor, to live safely within this kind of toxic bubble. From the questions I get, women are willing to do all kinds of really difficult things in their own life: Should I try to pump my breast milk, and then dump it, before I offer my breast to my baby? All these things that would take endless hours of time and energy to protect their kids. And I wish the same hours of energy and intensity of thinking were directed to the root cause of the problem.

Women are always being told, you can't change anybody else but yourself. And I think a lot of women aren't used to thinking of themselves as being able to effect social change. There are some problems that are too large for an individual to solve, but that doesn't mean they're insoluble, it just means we all have to organize together. If you want to get toxics out of a watershed, that's going to require organization of a community, just as getting rid of slavery or any other big social project that no individual could take care of by themselves.

It has to be scarier too, to think of having to change not just yourself but the world. Do you think this leads to a sort of cynicism?

It's a way out for people. It's defeatist thinking. People think, you can't possibly get dioxin out of the food chain, so I'll just become a vegetarian. I'll give up meat, fish, just tell me what to sacrifice, and I'll do that.

The fact is we've actually seen an improvement in breast milk contamination over the past two decades, if you look at some of the monitoring data out of Sweden. And it came directly in response to citizen activism in Europe that closed down incinerators and got rid of certain toxic chemicals, and the benefit was that the milk of all mothers in Europe became cleaner a few years later. So the science actually argues that political changes are what's effective. Whereas if you actually compare the milk of vegetarian mothers to meat-eating mothers, you'd have to be a purely plant-eating person since age 10 to see a meaningful change.

What about organic foods?

I make an exception for that, because buying organic is a lifestyle issue, but it's also a really potent political gesture: you're choosing to spend your food dollars by supporting farmers who aren't spreading these chemicals out into the environment. We know that farmers have higher rates of cancer than non-farmers, and so do their kids, so you're protecting your own health but also the health of the farm community, and you're preventing that 99.9% from getting out there in the environment and contaminating the fish and breast milk and everything else.

It would be foolish for us to think, however, that we can save ourselves by eating organic. There's plenty of DDT on your organic carrots, because DDT has a half-life in soil of close to 50 years, so even a farm that's been organic for five years has plenty of residues.

So it's simultaneously an individual gesture and a political gesture. Whereas buying bottled water is a different category, because you're actually consuming more resources through plastic, and by the use of fossil fuels. I mean, I'm sitting here drinking water from France, which had to come all the way from France to New York, when here we are, sitting in this whole beautiful water system. It makes a whole lot more sense on a political level to drink tap water than bottled water. And it probably makes equal sense for your health, too, since bottled water is completely unregulated, and you get most of your exposure from bathing and showering anyway. Trying to make people realize that they have an intimate relationship with their tap water, whether they're drinking it or not, is one of my campaigns.

Do you think that growing up in Illinois and being around farms gave you more of a sense of your connection to the ecosystem?

Oddly, I think my identity as an adoptee plays a big role in all this. In my attempt to figure out who I am and where I came from, which is this essential human question, because my whole genetic ancestry is a door that's absolutely barred and closed to me at this point, I've turned to explore it ecologically. So I went back to this hometown that I did live in for 18 years, and still dream about at night -- sort of my primal landscape, I guess -- to investigate what my ecological roots are. And imagine all of the chemicals that were dumped in this place that I love, that have trespassed their way into the landscape and also into my own body, and are woven into my own cells, and are as predictive of my future and my destiny as my chromosomes.

That's true for every person, but I think my adoption gave me an awareness that other people don't have. Your DNA is just one tiny component of this huge body that you live in, the water of which and the muscle fibers of which and the calcium in your bones of which, all have come into you by breathing, drinking, and eating. They are just the rearranged molecules of the landscape out there that become you.

So Living Downstream was really a kind of love story about my relationship to that particular landscape: that river, that bluff, those fields, that soil. And I find a lot of meaning in my relationship to that.

How important do you think personal environment is for people in general, in terms of sparking environmental awareness?

People in general are all over the map about this, I've discovered. When I went to places like Alaska, it means more to them than my relationship to Peoria, probably. Whereas when I give lectures in certain suburbs, people are clueless -- they don't even know if their electricity comes from a nuclear plant or a coal-burning plant, they don't know if their water comes from the river or from groundwater. They may have only lived there for a little while, they may have moved there because of a job, or because a spouse got a job, and they haven't thought about the place where they live. Before this was the housing development, what was it? Can you feel that past in your present life?

It's an interesting question. I do know that some of my biologist colleagues, who are really interested in the whole origins of life or what happened to the dinosaurs, some of those folks have led really dislocated lives, and maybe were army brats that moved around everywhere. I always found it fascinating that they sent their taproots really deep, back to the whole evolutionary tree of life.

I heard Ross Gelbspan give a talk on global warming recently, in which he described how there have been all these storms and droughts and other extreme weather conditions in recent years, yet when there's a big flood somewhere you don't hear the media making the connection with global warming. Which reminded me of how cancer is likewise problematic in that because you can't pinpoint a single cause, often causes aren't discussed at all.

I wrote a piece for a sports magazine a couple years ago about Kim Perrot, a basketball player who died suddenly of a rare lung cancer. She was from Lafayette, Louisiana, in Cancer Alley; her mom, it turned out, was a smoker. Obviously, it's not like you can point a finger and say what caused her cancer, but no one in the media ever discussed what could have been the causes. Do you think that's changing?

I think it's changing really fast, actually. I don't think it's always reflected in newspaper articles written about the death of any individual person. But what I've seen in the four years since Living Downstream came out is early on, people might hear my lecture and say, "You know, I just lost my brother to brain cancer, and my dog also died of brain cancer -- do you think there might be a connection, and could it be pesticides?" You could see they were piecing this thought together for the very first time.

Now I get people who come up to me and say, "My dog got brain cancer, my brother died of it, here's what I found out after I talked to the golf course supervisor what they're spraying here. Here's what I found out when I talked to the public health department about brain cancer in our county." They're already thinking it through and trying to get information. Even at funerals, sometimes the people who died want it to be said at their funeral program, we need to go out and take political action, do this in my name.

What about the scientific community? Has there started to be more research into--?

The scientific community had to be forced into it kicking and screaming. There were always those who were interested in the topic and labored on despite really low funding, but really there's been a transformation of science thanks to activism. Again, if you compare it to how AIDS transformed AIDS research, it's probably a lot more subtle, it's not as dramatic, it's not happening as swiftly. Actually, trying to figure out how HIV behaves in the body is a question you can get answers to a lot faster than cancer issues. The really good studies are 10-, 15-year studies. So essentially what we've seen is cancer activists demanding that science address certain questions about, let's say, the causes of breast cancer, that it just hadn't looked at before.

Because they were well organized, they finally were invited into some of the study sections where grant proposals are reviewed. (I've sat on a couple of these myself -- it's a pretty heady experience giving away $20 million in taxpayer money in an afternoon.) Previously these decisions had all been made by so-called "peer review process," meaning the colleagues of those who are applying for the grant would sit around in a room and decide who got to get the funding. Now, on a lot of those committees, there's at least one cancer advocate, who's often there to say things like, "So, is this going to save lives? Is this going to prevent anything, or are we just funding this for intellectual curiosity?"

So a lot of studies now are getting funded about pesticides in breast cancer, or breast cancer clusters, that probably wouldn't have been if patient advocates weren't involved. And the fruits of that are still to come.

Have you spoken to policymakers or industry executives about these issues? What's their response been?

I testified about breast milk at the United Nations in 1999 in Geneva during the negotiations for this new treaty on persistent organic pollutants that just got finalized -- the one Christie Whitman signed in Stockholm in May. It's a very interesting story, and I only know a little piece of it, but my impressions were that the U.S. was trying to do to this treaty what it did to [the global warming treaty in] Kyoto. And the power of, especially, breast-feeding women who were testifying there really won the day, and the U.S. was forced in the final round of negotiations that happened last fall in Johannesburg to concede at the last minute, and allow this treaty to go through.

What I saw in 1999 was that the U.S. government's policies were really being dictated to them by the chemical industry, which was there in mass, trying to influence the whole process. But I think because of some early mistakes by the Bush administration in its environmental policies that outraged everybody, and what it did with Kyoto, it felt like it had to do something. So the signing of this very powerful treaty, which is going to outlaw once and for all worldwide use and production of 12 different toxic chemicals around the world -- I think it's a great triumph of people over profits.

Are these mostly chemicals that have already been banned in the U.S.?

They are. Some of them we probably still manufacture and export, but it's probably a tiny part of our economy. So in that sense it's not any skin off our back in the immediate future. I think the reason the chemical industry was fighting it so intensely at first is that there are going to be chemicals added to the list. It's an open-ended treaty, and sooner or later we'll probably hit on one in which the U.S. does have a big economic stake. So they didn't want to go down that slope -- that's my interpretation, anyway.

I was trying to get at, could this cut across political lines -- it may not effect chemical industry executives the same way it effects people living next to a trash incinerators, but it effects them.

Yeah, it does. And I haven't had the outright attacks that some of the other writers have had, like Ross Gelbspan, and Theo Colborn when she wrote Our Stolen Future about endocrine disruptors in 1996, the year before Living Downstream came out. She was looking at a lot of the same chemicals I was, how they interfere with hormone systems in the human body, and in wildlife, and may be contributing to things like infertility, learning disabilities, behavioral problems. I know that Theo received death threats, and was openly attacked by the industry and in the press. Lucky for me, I guess, Theo kind of served as the lightning rod for a lot of those issues. They probably learned a lesson: Theo's book did really well, and it only made her more sympathetic.

There was one attack by industry on Living Downstream. The one really bad review Living Downstream got was in the New England Journal of Medicine, which really depressed me, because it's a journal I admire at lot. So I was feeling sad that I got this bad review there, and a physician who was a fan of Living Downstream got suspicious as to who the author was, and it turned out he was director of toxicology at Grace Chemical Company -- only he didn't reveal his affiliation in the review. And Grace of course has been indicted for causing all kinds of cancers -- they were one of the defendants in A Civil Action. I actually write about them in Living Downstream, and their possible connection to childhood cancers in Woburn, Massachusetts -- so the conflict of interest is more than philosophical.

It finally ended with the New England Journal apologizing in the pages of the Washington Post for violating their own conflict of interest policy. A lot of people told me that was actually really good notoriety for Living Downstream because there were all kinds of newspaper articles written about the whole brouhaha. But it was really stressful, and kind of an awful experience. I don't know if it ultimately sold more books or not, but I still would trade it all for a good review in the Journal.

In terms of activism, what do you see as some of the more important battles to be fought, or at least some of the ones that could be achieved soon?

It's hard to really prioritize -- would it be the ones that are the most toxic, or the ones that effect the most people, or the ones that effect children more than old people?

There's this buzzword about "low-hanging fruit" -- that you should go after the problems that are easier to solve. If you look at it that way, all the technology is in place to completely do away with one harmful technology and substitute a non-harmful technique. And one of those would be dry cleaning.

Dry cleaning fluid is something I have an intimate relationship with, because I grew up drinking it in Pekin. Obviously, it's a big issue for people in New York -- as far as I know, New York City is the only city in the U.S. that allows dry cleaning facilities to be located in residential buildings, so the fumes can just go right up into people's apartments. But there's this new technology called "wet cleaning" -- which is not so new in that it uses plain old-fashioned soap and water, only there have been breakthroughs in detergent technologies, and computerized control over things like humidity and agitation. The whole combination allows dry cleaning establishments to completely switch over to a non-toxic technology.

We had one of these the years I lived in Boston. I took all my dry cleanables there, and in four years, nothing got ruined. It was just as cheap, just as convenient, didn't smell like dry cleaning fluids. And I could go to bed at night knowing that no one's going to get bladder cancer -- which is one of the links to perchlorethylene -- from dry cleaning my clothes.

Tomorrow we could transform dry cleaning establishments. The problem is that dry cleaners are not Fortune 500 companies, they're mom and pop operations, and they run on a shoestring, so somebody needs to help capitalize the investment in the new equipment. Whether that should be done with subsidies or tax incentives, I don't know. But we've got the technology. Eighty percent of what we use perchlorethylene for is to dry clean clothes, so if we could transform all the dry cleaners tomorrow, we could get rid of 80% of a suspected carcinogen.

Probably the only thing that's missing is more public awareness about the dangers of dry cleaning that would galvanize people rising up and demanding that we transform these places. And dry cleaners realizing that if they do, they're going to get more customers.

So that's one. Then, incineration would be another one I'd put on that list. The whole idea of solving a waste problem by shoveling things in an oven and lighting it on fire seems profoundly primitive to me. And you can't possibly control the way these incinerators become de facto chemical labs as these molecules rearrange themselves and form new molecules like dioxins and other awful things that go up the stacks. No matter how well you can filter these things and control their emissions, you're going to have toxic waste generated whenever you burn plastic. You can either capture it all and have this really toxic bottom ash, or you can let it go out in the sky and have really toxic air.

So I think subsidizing meaningful recycling programs would solve a huge problem right there. And then substituting for things like vinyl, which is just a terrible product from beginning to end. It's probably pretty benign once it's in the form of polyvinyl chloride -- your credit card isn't going to give you cancer. But the guy who made it is in danger, and people who live around PVC plants are in danger, and then at the end of the day when you cut your credit cards up and throw them in the trash, and they're shoveled into an incinerator, they make dioxin. So it's a problem when you make it, it's a problem when you dispose of it. I think the fact that some countries in Europe have outlawed PVC for use in building materials, because it's such a threat to firefighters, indicates that it's doable.

So that's another one. Farming is a big one. Obviously organic farming is growing by leaps and bounds and is giving the lie to the idea that we'll all have these chemicals -- because farmers are getting great yields and making great profits on the organic market.

What about some of the high-hanging fruit that's --

Trickier? How to disinfect water. We know that chlorinating water invariably creates chemicals linked to cancer -- and they happen to be linked to bladder and colon cancer, which I specifically seem vulnerable to. On the other hand, chlorine is a great, cheap way of making sure you don't get cholera. There are certainly alternative technologies -- ozonation, carbon filtering -- but they're either expensive or have byproducts of their own we don't know about. So it's more vexing.

I tend to be really optimistic about human ingenuity. There have been a lot of things that are really hard to do that we've done. Going to the moon was hard, but it was considered a campaign that we had to do, and we did it. Finding safer ways to disinfect public drinking water that are affordable and reasonable and don't cause other problems is hard.

What ways can you suggest for people not to become despairing, and to keep up the energy to take action?

I always look backwards in order to look forwards. It took 70 years for women to win the right to vote. There were surely periods of time in there where we had certain presidents elected and certain governments in place, where it seemed like a total step backwards and we were never going to get there. But women kept working on. Most of the women who started the campaign never got to step in a voting booth themselves, but they won.

I think seeing yourself in a long line of people trying to make the world a better place, at least for me, makes me feel less despairing. I wasn't jumping up and down when George Bush got elected, but I also didn't think it was the end of the world. I think this too shall pass. And the long view seems to be showing us that more and more people are aware of the issue, more and more people are trying to do something about it, the science is on our side -- the more data come in, the more clear it is that we're taking needless risks, especially to the health of our kids.

So it seems like we have plenty of reason for optimism. And I think people need to look in their own hearts and ask themselves, if they're feeling despair and pessimism, are they using that as an exit door not to deal with the problem. If you get defeatist from the very beginning, and just think you've lost the battle before you even start to fight, it gives you a great reason not to fight.

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