She grew up in central Illinois, on the east bluff of the Illinois River, from which they were never allowed to eat the fish. It has been contaminated over fifty years. Sandra was diagnosed with bladder cancer at the age of twenty. While some say cancer may be hereditary, Sandra offers that if the environment is key, isn't it natural that family members eating the same food, drinking the same water, and breathing the same air would likely develop the same cancers? Interestingly, even the animals in areas of our world mimic humans for the types of cancers they develop.
A parable opens Living Downstream:
"There was once a village along a river. The people who lived there were very kind. These residents, according to parable, began noticing increasing numbers of drowning people caught in the river's swift current. And so they went to work devising ever more elaborate technologies to resuscitate them. So preoccupied were these heroic villagers with rescue and treatment that they never thought to look upstream to see who was pushing the victims in."
Sandra offers that the environment we are polluting had a huge uptick since World War II when the preponderance of DDT and other pesticides were introduced into farming. Sustainable farms with crop rotation were plowed down to plant overwhelming amounts of corn and soybeans and one-product farms bleeding the soil of its natural nutrients. We have thrown away the notion of "the circle of life" in our quest for more money and are becoming an ever-burgeoning wasteful and "throw away" society.
I am overwhelmed; it's easy for us to feel this way. There is so much I could change:
cloths instead of paper towels
cloth diapers instead of disposables
re-usable cups, not paper coffee cups daily
less make-up, nail polish, hair color
no chemical lawncare that seeps into my husband's garden
no harsh cleaning products
a clothesline
a bike, two feet
I should buy organic food, ride my bike with a basket to get there like I did in Denmark, go more frequently to buy fresh, use recycled bags, swear off pre-packaged foods, wash my dishes by hand, hang my laundry on the line, buy natural fiber rugs, furniture, and bedding. I should vote for people who agree with me, have a long term vision, and feel a moral obligation to do something, anything, one baby step at a time for our planet.
Sandra's book was published in 1997 and re-released this year. A documentary of it will be out over the next couple of weeks. She said this has become the issue of our time. In listening to her and reading her words, I wonder what we will do about it? What will we tell our grandchildren we did do about it?
She said when slavery was going to be abolished, people said it couldn't be done; the economy would tank. It was done because it was the right thing to do. When child labor was made illegal, again they said it would tank the economy; we needed those tiny fingers to produce the goods those kids were making. Again, the economy grew...and more importantly, it was the right thing to do.
What is the one right thing for each of us to do right now?
Steingraber, Sandra. Living Downstream: An Ecologist's Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment. Pennsylvania: A Merloyd Lawrence Book Da Capo Press A Member of the Perseus Books Group, 2010. Print. Photo: courtesy of Amazon.com
