The Good Earth?

Sandra Steingraber On How We've Made The Environment Dangerous To Our Health

A biologist and expert on the environmental causes of cancer and reproductive problems, Sandra  Steingraber was diagnosed at the age of twenty with bladder cancer, a disease that has been linked to chemical pollutants. Now fifty, she is a leading environmental-justice advocate and speaks and writes candidly about her personal health. Steingraber’s ability to meld literary prose with complex scientific information has made her a best-selling author. Like her hero Rachel Carson, whose 1962 book Silent Spring led to the ban on the pesticide ddt and kick-started the grass-roots environmental movement, Steingraber somehow finds language beautiful and compelling enough to seduce readers to sit through a science lesson.

When she was diagnosed with cancer, Steingraber was a student at Illinois Wesleyan University. She promptly reviewed the epidemiological literature and learned that scientists had known since the nineteenth century that certain textile dyes caused bladder cancer in humans. Those dyes were still used by industries. Other suspected bladder carcinogens were produced in Steingraber’s own hometown in Tazewell County, Illinois. She discovered that the suspect chemicals were found in the groundwater there. Still, her doctors called her cancer a “fluke.”

Years later, when cancer research began to focus on genetic causes, she submitted to doctors’ questions about her family history. She would recount her mother’s breast cancer, her uncles’ prostate and colon cancers, and her aunt’s bladder cancer. The doctors would nod knowingly. Then she would reveal that she was adopted. “There is no evidence for a hereditary link to bladder cancer,” she writes, “and there never has been.”

Steingraber earned a doctorate in biology from the University of Michigan and a master’s degree in English from Illinois State University. She authored a book of poetry, Post-Diagnosis (Firebrand Books), and coauthored The Spoils of Famine (Cultural Survival), a book about ecology and human rights in Africa. Her next book, Living Downstream: A Scientist’s Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment (Vintage), was the first comprehensive effort to connect data on toxic pollutants with newly released U.S. cancer registries. In it Steingraber confirms Rachel Carson’s early predictions and defines cancer as a human-rights issue. In 1997, the year the book came out, Steingraber was named Ms. magazine’s Woman of the Year, and the Sierra Club dubbed her “the new Rachel Carson.” Living Downstream is now widely used as a college textbook, and the People’s Picture Company has made a documentary film based on it, which will be released in the spring to coincide with the publication of the second edition.

Steingraber’s most recent book, Having Faith: An Ecologist’s Journey to Motherhood (Da Capo Press), is both a memoir of her pregnancy with her daughter, Faith, and an investigation of the environmental hazards that threaten fetal development. She details how poisons like solvents, plasticizers, and pesticides can be found in amniotic fluid, umbilical-cord blood, and human breast milk. Adult humans are not at the top of the food chain, she writes: breast-feeding infants are.

Today Steingraber is a columnist and contributing editor for Orion magazine. She has taught biology at Columbia College in Chicago and held visiting fellowships at the University of Illinois, Harvard, and Northeastern University. She has participated in U.S. Congressional committees and testified before the parliament of the European Union. She once briefed United Nations delegates on breast-milk contamination, passing around a jar of her own breast milk to make a point. She says her next book, due out in the spring of 2011, will be about the “ecology of childhood.” She is married to sculptor Jeff de Castro, and they are the parents of eleven-year-old Faith and eight-year-old Elijah.

When I met Steingraber for breakfast at a restaurant on New York City’s Upper West Side, she had just returned from a four-mile run in Central Park and appeared refreshed and poised. In person she conveyed a serious intensity — strong, practical, and no-nonsense. Behind her carefully chosen words I heard an anger at the industries, lobbyists, and politicians who perpetuate the discharge of harmful chemicals into our environment. After she ate, we caught a cab uptown to Columbia University, where she was a featured speaker at a conference on children’s environmental health.

Kupfer: How did your own experience with cancer lead you to this work?

Steingraber: I had cancer at a young age, and not just any cancer, but bladder cancer, the quintessential environmental cancer. There was no lifestyle explanation. I was thin, I was healthy, and I was only twenty years old. Yet in my thirty years as a cancer patient, the words environment and carcinogen have seldom come up in conversations with doctors, and those words almost never appear in cancer pamphlets. It became evident early on that there was a disconnect between what I was reading in the scientific literature and what I was being told as a patient. I didn’t really understand why.

My aunt had died of the same type of bladder cancer that I had, and when cancer runs in a family, we are quick to presume the existence of inherited predispositions. But I’m adopted. So I began to look at what else family members have in common besides genetics. Maybe they live in the same community. Maybe they breathe the same air. Maybe they drink from the same wells.

I think of cancer risk factors as a triangle: inherited predispositions are one side of the triangle; lifestyle is another; the environment is the third. But that third side exists mostly in the back of people’s minds. They think about their genes, they think about their diet and exercise habits, but they don’t often think about the environment in which they live. My life’s work is to look at the role that involuntary environmental exposures play in causing cancer.

Kupfer: If you hadn’t been diagnosed with cancer in college, do you think you’d be doing this work today?

Steingraber: I don’t want to give cancer credit for anything good that’s happened to me. I’m not someone who would say cancer is “a gift.” Cancer is a big waste of time. It screwed me up in ways that I still have to work to overcome. At twenty I didn’t need a lesson in how to live life to its fullest; I was already doing that. I lost a lot of years to being a cancer patient: hours logged in hospital parking garages and waiting rooms. I got way too much practice at learning to disappear from my body. Colonoscopies hurt; cystoscopes hurt. Strangers were touching me, and the inside of my body was being shown on an ultrasound screen. In any other context besides a medical one, what they did to me in the hospital would be abuse. Don’t get me wrong here: colonoscopies and cystoscopies probably saved my life. I’ll be getting them until the day I die. I’m a compliant patient and a grateful one. But medical procedures are still traumatic. I spent a lot of years trying to regain my sexuality. I think going through natural childbirth and having two great kids helped heal me from the trauma of cancer.

After my diagnosis I knew I was going to spend the rest of my life in and out of hospitals, and I did not want to make the hospital my workplace too. So I switched my major from pre-med to ecology. I discovered that I could do scientific research in beautiful places.

Kupfer: Rachel Carson has been an inspiration to you, hasn’t she?

Steingraber: She is my guiding light. I still go back to her work to examine it with a writer’s eye and figure out how she did something. I’m impressed that she relied completely on scientific description and didn’t take the autobiographical route. There are private letters in which she talks about her experiences with breast cancer, but they don’t appear in her published writings. The only thing Carson used to hold people’s interest was the beauty of the natural world she was describing. Her task was to find language as lovely as what she was seeing. I try to do that too.

She was a very slow writer; she would rewrite and rewrite. I’m that way too. I find it miserable to write, actually. For some writers, writing is like breathing; they can’t go a day without it. I am not one of them. I have to almost trick myself to sit down to write. All the stars have to be in alignment: I need to have a good human story; I need to have a lot of science under my feet; I have to have an organizing principle that is compelling. And still I have to play this big chess game in my head before I figure out how to go forward.

Kupfer: Do we know how much of a role pollution plays in the development of cancer?

Steingraber: We know that cancer rates started rising in tandem with industrialization in the West. And now that other nations like China are rapidly industrializing, we see cancer rates going up there as well. But cancer is such a complicated disease. It’s clear that it takes more than one assault on the genome of a cell to put it on the path to becoming a tumor. We used to think that a mutation is required for cancer to develop, but the new thinking is that a change in the activity of certain genes, or a change in their regulation, might cause cancer. In other words, it may be the result of a change in gene function, not a physically damaged gene.

There’s a new school of thought that focuses on how different tissue types communicate with each other. In some lab experiments cancer has been formed by altering communications between tissue types — for example, the epithelial lining of the breast ducts and the stromal tissue in which the ducts are embedded. The question is: Could pollutants come in and garble this cross talk among cells in real-life settings, thereby raising the cancer risk? There is still much to be learned.

As a biologist I’m humbled by how little we know about cancer and the environment. Meanwhile, as a cancer survivor with two kids I don’t want exposed to carcinogens, I am interested in acting on what we already do know. I’m sad we are not moving faster in terms of possible environmental policies. There are chemicals we’ve known for a hundred years cause bladder cancer that are still used in manufacturing.

Kupfer: How geographically random is the distribution of cancer in the United States?

Steingraber: Cancer is definitely not a random tragedy. If you look at a map of the U.S. and plot out the incidence of different sorts of cancers, you see patterns.

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