Why Am I Blogging About The Environment and Health

I have a couple of dogs, one adopted on the spur of the moment, when he stopped traffic—literally. There was something white hanging from his neck. Silly me, I thought it was a broken rope. I called him over: come here doggy, come here. Scared by screeching tires, he had plopped down in the middle of the road but came readily when called: any port in the storm, I suppose. I knew I was in trouble when I saw that the dangling white thing wasn’t a rope at all, but a note that said READ ME, sealed in a plastic envelope and wired to his collar.

Hi my name is Tuf, it read. I’m homeless due to unforeseen circumstances. I will love you and protect you with my life. I’m good with cats and kids and other dogs.

Tuf was young and cute and kind of skinny. His snout was a tender pincushion of porcupine quills. He wagged everything when I stroked his back. What was I to do? No other driver was ready to fight me for him. They scurried along as soon as he was out of the way.

Well, Tuf, I said, come on, get in the car.




Tuf is now middle aged in dog years, quite happy, and filled out at about 60 pounds. I share his story because he’s one of those dogs: once he gets hold of a bone, a leather chew, or anything of the sort, he won’t let it go. A team of professional firefighters could try to extricate it with Jaws of Life, but I wouldn’t place my bet on them. Tuf will keep his prize locked firmly in his chops with dogged determination: this is my bone, and I’m not giving it up.

This project became my bone. Once I started investigating chemicals and their links to our ever-worsening health, what I learned kept drawing me in deeper. I couldn’t just let it lay; I had to keep pursuing it.




The issue of environment and health, which I’d already been stewing about for a while, became an obsession a few years ago, after I flew to New Jersey for my mom’s birthday. It was torpid and muggy when I got to her house in the early evening. In spite of the temperature, the air conditioner was off, and she was curled under a blanket on the couch, bald, unable to speak because of canker sores the size of quarters, and too weak to get up. She was in her third month of chemotherapy. It is… disquieting to see a loved one laid so low.

My mother had found the lump one morning in the shower, just the week before Thanksgiving. It was her entry into a sisterhood that’s hidden behind wigs and prosthetic breasts. The breast-cancer sorority is big and getting bigger all the time. In 1940, one woman in twenty-two would join its ranks. When my mother was diagnosed, that number had jumped to one in seven. Some experts predict that by the time my young nieces are older women, their odds will be one in three.

My father died of cancer just thirteen months before my mother found the lump. His began in his intestines, metastasized to his liver. My sister-in-law has MS. My first-born nephew suffered severe colic as a baby, and was placed on Ritalin for ADHD in first grade. As an adult, he has continuing mental health challenges. Another first-borne nephew—on my husband’s side, and 1500 miles away from my blood clan—suffered from a less severe case of ADHD; his younger brother was afflicted with childhood asthma that sent him frequently to the hospital. A friend from North Jersey died at 55 of stomach cancer; another friend who lives in rural Virginia emailed that her 22-year-old son was recently diagnosed with thyroid cancer, which his sister had been treated for ten years earlier. And yet another friend—this one from Minnesota—was dreadfully sick, devastated by a collection of neurodegenerative symptoms that stymied doctors, including those at the Mayo Clinic, until one of the doctors finally tested her for a number of toxic chemicals and diagnosed her with mercury and lead poisoning. After starting chelation therapy, she was improving slowly but would likely suffer the consequences of her poisoning for the rest of her life.

This list could go on, and on, but you get the gist. Is it an unusual list? Hardly. For most of us, if we stop to take stock of our afflictions or those of our families, our friends, and our co-workers, we recognize a pattern that permeates the web of our modern lives: diseases, conditions, and disorders are everywhere. Over half of Americans are regularly taking prescription drugs; nearly a third take three-or-more drugs routinely. More than 1.2 million Americans hear the words, ‘you have cancer’, each year, and a half million die from it. Alzheimer’s afflicts 4.5 million older Americans; autism is on a steep rise among children; one in ten couples suffers from infertility problems; and perhaps most disturbing of all, fifty percent of pregnancies end in miscarriage, birth defects, or chronic health problems such as asthma or ADHD. In spite of the remarkable feats medicine has made in treating what ails us, the ominous truth is we are continually needing more-and-more treatments that individually, and as a society, we can ill afford.

I don’t know about you, but I have to confess that I tended to think of the myriad maladies around me as discrete cases—each a terribly sad story, but nonetheless an individual story. Even as I began researching (initially to satisfy my curiosity about my mom’s illness) I saw them as individual stories, but soon the picture became complex, and I began to comprehend that each individual story was connected. As threads woven into a tapestry create a picture, individual stories of disease and disorder come together to reveal a much bigger story of how we have polluted our bodies and what that personal pollution means for us, and to future generations.

The spark that first fueled my curiosity and started me thinking about the story was something my mom told me when she was first diagnosed. Her doctor explained to her that hers was a type of breast cancer that accounts for less than two percent of all breast-cancer cases. “But there is some good news,” she told me. “He said you don’t have to worry—this form isn’t genetic.”

Those words focused my thoughts on a question: If it wasn’t genes that caused my mother’s illness, what was it?