Our Bodies, Ourselves (160 page)
Read Our Bodies, Ourselves Online
Authors: Boston Women's Health Book Collective
⢠What's in the personal-care products, pesticides, and cleaning supplies that we use?
⢠How can we get a landlord to clean up a building?
But environmental health goes far beyond the home, and we shouldn't have to fight harmful side effects on our own. Luckily, we don't have to. Thousands of grassroots groups across the country are increasingly concerned about environmental conditionsâfrom polluted water to toxic landfillsâand many people are working together to ensure a safer environment. Experienced activists agree on some basic ways to take effective action in our homes and communities.
Be a careful consumer:
Read labels. It is important to have access to full disclosure of all ingredients in your food, including the use of growth hormones in dairy products, genetically engineered organisms in fruits and vegetables, and pesticide use on produce and feed given to livestock. However, some of this information is difficult to come by, with companies slipping through loopholes of government regulations. Find out where pollutants come from and what products they're used in, and refuse to buy them. Visit GoodGuide.com to search for products that are healthy and socially responsible. Boycotts are especially effective when networks of people participate. Boycotts can also address poor working conditions of farmworkers.
Investigate environmental conditions:
Get information under worker and community right-to-know legislation, and use the online scorecard (scorecard.goodguide.com). Contact groups listed in the Recommended Resources section to learn about workplace and community monitoring and campaigning for preventive measures.
Find out who paid for a study
when you obtain or your group obtains information. The answer should help you evaluate the data. Insist that information be presented in terms you can understand, not in scientific jargon. Join with local organizations battling poor environmental and occupational health to learn about what's happening in your community. Share what you learn on Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks.
Talk to your neighbors:
Develop labor-neighbor alliances between neighbors and unions around toxic exposure from factories, landfills, and waste shipment. Monitor health concerns, symptoms, and suspected exposure in the community. Conduct a community and workplace health survey. Pay attention to reproductive patterns in your area, such as the number of miscarriages and rate of birth impairments, and to the incidence of cancers. Consider using the research and organizing being done by your local health department and local advocacy groups to connect your
observations with the community at large. Contact other groups doing similar work.
Document your health:
Keep a log of exposures, symptoms, and diagnoses that you and other family members or housemates have received. The health care providers you see should (but may not) keep an accurate medical and occupational/environmental history. If they don't, ask them to, and ask to see these records every time you visit the doctor. Discuss possible patterns and health concerns stemming from the environment and work.
Work in coalition. Join with other organizations and movements.
Don't limit your protest to “not in my backyard”âyour efforts will be more effective, just, and inspiring if they don't develop at the expense of others whose resources and power are more limited than yours. Organizations such as the Center for Health, Environment & Justice (chej.org); the Environmental Justice Resource Center at Clark Atlanta University (erjc.cau.edu); the Collaboration on Health and the Environment (healthandenvi ronment.org); Physicians for Social Responsibility (psr.org); the Toxics Use Reduction Institute (turi.org); and the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health (coshnetwork.org) can advise U.S. grassroots groups about filing legal challenges, conducting surveys, building relationships with sympathetic scientists, getting a company to accept a “neighbors' inspection,” and using national data systems and community right-to-know provisions.
The CHEJ also provides workshops for women leaders. Coalitions of environmental, labor, and other social justice groups are pushing beyond right-to-know (the basic right of access to certain information about on-site toxics) and promoting right-to-act (the right to refuse work, change production activity, or enforce an emergency shutdown).
For one of the best collections of ideas, resources, and strategies visit the Women's Health and the Environment website (womenshealth andenvironment.org), a project of Women's Voices for the Earth. Its tool kit has sections on “What We Know: New Science Linking Our Health and the Environment,” “What You Can Do: Everyday Actions to Protect Your Health,” and “What We Can Do: Community Efforts to Protect Our Health.”
Taking action is often complicatedâthere are bureaucracies to fight, chemistry to learn, and the power of polluters to deal withâbut it is definitely not impossible. Consider the efforts of these women who exposed environmental health hazards and worked to eliminate them. Each one has left a lasting impact on the world.
Alice Hamilton
, who lived from 1869 until 1970, is one of the most significant grandmothers of today's environmental movement. One of the first women physicians, Hamilton is considered the founder of the field of occupational health. She made a home at Jane Addams's Hull House in Chicago, working with immigrant workers facing severe job hazards. Her book
Exploring the Dangerous Trades
revealed how lead affected workers and their children. She helped create workers' compensation, industrial medicine, and justice for workers.
Rachel Carson
, whose book
Silent Spring
(1962) exposed the widespread use and dangers of pesticides in our environment. Her research brought this to public attention, led to the U.S. ban on DDT, and helped launch the American environmental movement. Carson's efforts live on through organizations such as the Silent Spring Institute (silentspring.org), an excellent resource for news and studies on environmental
health issues and links between the environment and breast cancer.
Lois Gibbs
organized the Love Canal Homeowners Association in 1978, forcing New York State to recognize that toxic waste had contaminated the Niagara Falls community. Members did health surveys, signed petitions, confronted officials, picketed, blocked buses, and testified in Washington until the government evacuated one thousand families, bought their homes, and established a safety plan and a health fund to cover future problems. Gibbs now leads the Center for Health, Environment & Justice (chej.org), organized the BE SAFE Campaign for Precautionary Action in support of communities, and frequently testifies before Congress on environmental protection issues.
Hazel Johnson
, often called the mother of the environmental justice movement, founded People for Community Recovery (peopleforcom munityrecovery.org) in 1979, when she learned about Southeast Chicago's high cancer rate among African-American women. She documented health problems by going door to door, testified in Congress, and helped to educate and empower her community. Johnson died in early 2011, after many years of leading “toxic tours” of Chicago neighborhoods.
Peggy Shepard
, a former journalist, cofounded West Harlem Environmental Action, now WE ACT for Environmental Justice (weact.org), a coalition of young feminists and older neighborhood women, in 1988, to challenge the location of a sewage treatment plant. The group won a sizable settlement and the right to oversee plant remediation. This victory also established a community's right to seek redress of a grievance. She later served as the first female chair of the National Environmental Justice Advisory Council to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and is cochair of the Northeast Environmental Justice Network. Shepard and WE ACT are still doing community-based action, research, and public education linking health care to environmental justice. She partners with Columbia University's Columbia Center for Children's Environmental Health on its pregnancy and environment project.
Patty Martin
was mayor of a small town in Washington state in 1992 when she, along with farmers and neighbors, discovered that hazardous waste was being blended into fertilizers, causing crop failure, environmental damage, and health risks. In 2000, after being targeted by agribusiness and losing her campaign for reelection, Martin founded Safe Food and Fertilizer (safefoodandfertilizer.org); in the fall of 2003, she took the fight to the federal courts. She continues to support the health of farming communities and the food supply.
Sandra Steingraber
(steingraber.com) has been an inspiring leader in bringing attention to environmental conditions that impair reproductive health. An ecologist, cancer survivor, and mother, Steingraber wrote a powerful bookâ
Living Downstream: An Ecologist's Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment
âthat has been transformed into a film.
Having Faith: An Ecologist's Journey to Motherhood
explores how mothers can care for their children in a toxic world. Her report
The Falling Age of Puberty in U.S. Girls
, written for the Breast Cancer Fund, is another major contribution. In 2006 she was honored with a Hero Award from the Breast Cancer Fund for leadership in preventing environmental causes of breast cancer.
Theo Colborn
is influencing the way we look at reproductive health. She has transformed what we know about endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs), chemicals that subtly affect our hormonal chemistry and development. Her 1997 book
Our Stolen Future: Are We Threatening Our Fertility, Intelligence, and Survival? A Scientific Detective Story
, cowritten with Dianne Dumanoski and John Peter Meyers, brought this issue to public attention; it has since been
translated into eighteen languages. She founded TEDXâthe Endocrine Disruption Exchange (endocrine disruption.com)âwhere health providers and the general public can learn about the impacts of toxics on reproductive health, pregnancy, and early childhood.
Combating the environmental and health risks in our workplaces, homes, and neighborhoods, as well as trying to make sense of all the unknowns, is not easy. But more and more of us are building knowledge, working across differences, pushing for answers, and fighting for prevention and for precautionary measures. Women like Loretta Ross, Theo Colborn, and Katsi Cook are urging us to join them in their daily battles. We have nothing to lose and everything to gainâfor ourselves, our families, and our communitiesâby joining them.
TWO ENVIRONMENTAL CRISES THAT INSPIRED ACTION
Looking at past environmental and occupational health disasters helps us to understand the community trauma and dedication that have shaped efforts today to protect public health across the world. Here are brief profiles of two of the most troubling and inspiring lessons.
Love Canal
The story of Love Canal, a neighborhood in Niagara Falls, New York, is one of the most famous instances of environmental contamination in U.S. history, brought to light thanks to the dedication of community activists, principled scientists, and investigative journalists.
Over the early decades of the twentieth century, a dried-up canal in Niagara Falls was turned into a municipal and industrial dump site, with more than 21,000 tons of toxic waste buried at the 16-acre site. Desperate for land to serve an expanding population, the city bought the plot from Hooker Chemical, the polluter, in 1953 for one dollar. A school was soon built on the property, and by 1957, the city had constructed low-income and single-family residences next to the site. By the 1970s, health problems emerged, with residents reporting birth impairments and high rates of cancer.
Local activism was led by Love Canal resident Lois Gibbs, whose son developed epilepsy, asthma, urinary tract infections, and a low white blood cell count. When she asked for her son to be removed from the school, the city refused. Gibbs's organization, the Love Canal Homeowners Association, conducted a survey of neighborhood children and found evidence of elevated rates of birth impairments.
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Despite the efforts of activists and concerned parents, Hooker Chemical and the local health department continued to claim that the health concerns were unconnected to the buried waste. After years of continued complaints, the EPA and New York State Department of Health began to take action, with the department finding evidence of an abnormal incidence of miscarriage in the area. Pregnant women and children were encouraged to leave; a state of emergency was declared in 1978.
Tests would later show evidence of 248 separate chemicals, 11 of them suspected carcinogens, in the neighborhood. Dioxin was of particular concern. While usually measured in parts per trillion, at Love Canal, water samples had dioxin levels in parts per billionâa much higher concentration.
Eckardt Beck, an EPA administrator in the 1970s, recalls a visit to the area: “Corroding waste-disposal drums could be seen breaking up through the ground of backyards. Puddles of noxious substances were pointed out to me by the residents. Some of these puddles were in their yards, some were in their basements, others yet were on the school grounds. Everywhere the air had a faint, choking smell. Children returned from play with burns on their hands and faces.”
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The EPA calls Love Canal “one of the most appalling environmental tragedies in American history.” President Carter declared the site a federal health emergency, and this triggered the creation of the federal Superfund legislation, which provides some protections that we didn't have before. It was the women of deep conviction and courage at Love Canal who helped shape the modern struggle for environmental protection and justice in the United States.
Bhopal
In December 1984, the world's worst industrial catastrophe occurred when a pesticide plant owned by U.S.-based Union Carbide Corporation (UCC) and located in the city of Bhopal, India, accidentally leaked methyl isocyanate (MIC) gas and other toxics, exposing more than 500,000 people, including more than 200,000 children. MIC is used to produce the pesticide carbaryl, used primarily as an insecticide. Those exposed immediately experienced coughing, burning eyes, foaming at the mouth, and vomiting, with some suffocating to death as a result of their bronchial passages constricting in reaction to chemical exposure. Long-term effects included chronic respiratory infections, cancers, and reproductive and birth impairments. It is estimated that more than 16,000 people died from gas exposure, either immediately after the disaster or in the years following, with 120,000 to 150,000 becoming chronically ill.
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About 3,000 pregnant women were exposed to the gas leak. The Pesticide Action Network UK (pan-uk.org) states, “Among women who were pregnant at the time of the disaster, 43 percent aborted [miscarried]. In the years that followed, the spontaneous abortion rate remained four to ten times worse than the national Indian average. Only 50 percent of prepubescent girls who were exposed to the gas had normal menstrual cycles.”
A 2009 study reports that babies in their mother's wombs at the time of exposure exhibited hyperresponsive immune systems.
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Pregnant women also experienced increased rates of stillbirth and increased infant mortality. Other reproductive health concerns associated with the disaster include early menopause, pelvic inflammatory disease (PID), excessive menstrual bleeding, and suppression of lactation. Children of exposed
mothers were born with harelips, cleft palates, cerebral palsy, and misformed limbs, hands, and feet. According to PAN UK, “In spite of persistent demands of women survivor organizations, [the] reproductive health of gas-exposed women continues to be a neglected area in terms of official surveillance, research and therapeutic intervention.”
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Union Carbide, now owned by Dow Chemical, has evaded responsibility for this tragedy for more than twenty-five years. But an international network of concerned scientists and advocates continue to press for accountability. Dedicated community activists in Bhopal in connection with international groups such as Health Care without Harm (noharm.org) have created the Sambhavna Clinic, using traditional and Western medical approaches to support the recovery of health in the community. People worldwide look to the Bhopal activists for leadership and inspiration in how to take on polluters and how to sustain multigenerational health.
For more information on the Bhopal Medical Appeal, visit bhopal.org. For more information on international coalition and legal strategy, see bhopal.net. To see how UC/Dow tells its story of the disaster, see bhopal.com.