Sandra Steingraber, "War"
An ecologist, author, and cancer survivor, Sandra Steingraber has devoted much of her career to demonstrating the links between cancer and the environment. Her first co-authored publication, The Spoils of Famine: Ethiopian Famine Policy and Peasant Agriculture (1988), concerned the relationship between ecology and human rights in Africa. Steingraber’s more recent work seeks to establish the impact that environmental factors have on human well-being in first world nations as well.
Drawing on her literary postgraduate education (Steingraber earned a master’s in English literature at Illinois State University before her doctorate in biology at Michigan), Steingraber published a volume of poetry about surviving cancer called Post-Diagnosis (1995). She then turned her attention to the link between environmental contamination and the development of cancer in Living Downstream: An Ecologist Looks at Cancer and the Environment (1997), the highly-lauded study from which the following essay is drawn. Steingraber compiles data about cancer incidence with newly released information about environmental toxicity to suggest that the two are more than coincidentally related. This, for her, is a human rights issue as well, and it is a right that many of those who live in contaminated communities do not have and therefore cannot exercise.
In Having Faith: An Ecologist’s Journey to Motherhood (2001), Steingraber’s most recent book, she turns her perspective as an ecologist onto the process of motherhood. The womb, she reasons, is the baby’s first environment. Just as in the world outside, if not more so, the developing child depends on the delicate balance of food, water, and vital nutrients provided by this environment. Adults suffer when the natural environment is contaminated and this balance is disturbed; for a fetus, which cannot escape the prenatal environment, any contamination is inescapable.
While she maps such the intimate environment of the womb in Having Faith, in the following essay Steingraber elevates her arguments to the geopolitical level. “War,” a chapter of Living Downstream, traces the relationship between World War II usage of the pesticide DDT, its overproduction, and its consequent release into civilian circulation as a product to be widely used by the agricultural industry. This is just one example of the growing distribution of synthetic chemicals across the nation and around the world. The research and industrial development that accompanied the war, Steingraber writes, “was a catalyst for the transformation from a carbohydrate-based economy…to a petrochemical-based economy.” Without advocating for the total cessation of production or use of these chemicals, Steingraber insists that we attend to the public health costs of their continued employment, and that we chart our future course with the health of future generations in mind.
Steingraber, Sandra. Living Downstream: A Scientist's Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment. Vintage, 1998.
Quotations are drawn from "War."
Digital image drawn from Sandra Steingraber's website.
Link to Explore:
A Podcast of a lecture given by Sandra Steingraber at Mount Holyoke College.
Woman's Hour: a podcast of a BBC Radio interview with Sandra Steingraber.
Environmental Amnesia: an article by Sandra Steingraber.
Question for Connecting:
- In “The Myth of the Ant Queen,” Steven Johnson describes how computing has helped to unlock some of the secrets of “organized complexity.” Is the situation that Steingraber describes one of “organized complexity” or “disorganized complexity”? Are the solutions the same in any case? Or has Steingraber drawn attention to a system of such complexity, with so many different variables, that the very notion of a solution is out of the question? If there is no solution, does this mean that there is nothing to be done?
For additional connecting suggestions, please go to assignments.
Explore some more:
Search for other links using Google:
|
