FORWARD
When my editor, Diane Reverand, called and said she was concerned about the epidemic surges in autism, birth defects, breast cancer, asthma and clusters of other illnesses, in cities and towns around the United States, it began a chain of research that opened my eyes to a frightening world of hidden contamination around the globe that threatens all of us.
It was the 9/11 era, and I was still more concerned with terrorists and anthrax than with the deadly contamination that America and the rest of the world was bringing upon itself. I still felt perfectly safe when I breathe the air around me or drank water from the tap. When I drank milk, ate salad, fruit, vegetables, chicken or fish, I thought more about avoiding carbohydrates and calories than about avoiding chlorinated hydrocarbons, perchlorate, arsenic, mercury and thousands of other untested and often toxic chemicals. I still sprayed household pests with insecticides, rubbed mosquito repellent on my skin and my children’s skin, and used cosmetics without concern. I still cleaned my floors and sprayed my shower curtains with whatever chemical cleansers happened to have accumulated in the cabinet under my kitchen sink.
I had recently moved from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to a relatively remote barrier island on the coast of North Carolina. Even though it was only about ten miles from the Camp Lejeune military base and forty-five miles from the bustling, small city of Wilmington, I felt safe from the man-made contaminants and pollution of the big cities.
A house built right on the dunes at the edge of the ocean was the dream of my lifetime and my mother’s before me. After her death, I believed it was then or never, so I searched the entire East Coast for something remote enough to be affordable. Then, when I found it, I looked up at the stars and clouds and sensed that my mother knew we were finally there. I thought it was the purest and most primitive place I had ever lived. Countless pelicans and seagulls flew overhead. Giant sea turtles nested just 200 feet away from my door, and sand crabs scurried into holes as I took my evening walks. Sometimes, when the moon was full and the tide was high and the ocean came right to the foot of my deck, a fear of the encroaching sea or the threat of hurricanes engulfed me, but a fear of environmental contamination never did. Ironically, just as my life overflowed with the joy of my isolated fulfillment, the contamination that threatens all of us was moving ever closer.
"...thousands of military men, women and children had been sick and dying there for years while continuing to drink water that government officials knew was contaminated." Day after day, as I sat at my desk writing and looking out at the changing tides and the schools of dolphins, I noticed the warships that dotted the distant horizon, but I knew little about the sailors and Marines from nearby Camp Lejeune who manned those ships. I had not yet heard that thousands of military men, women and children had been sick and dying there for years while continuing to drink water that government officials knew was contaminated. Not until months later did I learn that the number of people who drank PCE and TCE tainted water, bathed in it and had water fights with it, was staggering. The Marine Corps conservatively estimated that 50,000 Marines and their families lived in the base housing that had been fed by the poisoned wells before they were closed. Victim advocacy groups placed the figure at 200,000, which would make the Camp Lejeune class action suit one of the largest contaminated water cases in U.S. history. Already more than 270 tort claims had been filed with the Navy’s judge advocate general’s office by former residents.
Nor did I know that my own drinking water was soon to be merged by public agreement with the water from Camp Lejeune. I was joyfully ignorant, captivated by my new sense of reverence for the natural order of all things, for the cycles of life that had evolved over millions and millions of years, and for the amazing synergism and balance that clearly existed between living things and their surroundings.
The horrifying truths about the autism cover-up, the cancer industry and the new strategies for deception that have led to a global lung cancer pandemic, soon followed.It was not until several months after the call from my editor suggesting that I write a book about illness and environmental contamination that I discovered the leukemia, birth defects and devastating cluster illnesses of my neighbors at Camp Lejeune. After that, the book evolved and seemed to take on a life of its own. I soon learned that a chemical called perchlorate, used to fuel Cold War era missiles and the rockets that put men on the moon, now polluted much of the Colorado River, which was the water source for more than 30 million people across the Southwest. Then, I found out that perchlorate had also invaded the water and food supply of millions of other people in cities and towns scattered throughout the nation. This prompted me to begin a more comprehensive investigation of contaminated food, air and everyday products and of the dangerous bonds that often exist between science, industry and the government. The horrifying truths about the autism cover-up, the cancer industry and the new strategies for deception that have led to a global lung cancer pandemic, soon followed. There were days when the research left me numb with despair, days when anger and outrage spurred me forward, and days when only my faith in something larger and wiser than ourselves kept me going. The despair and anger I experienced was often shared by the environmental groups and women’s advocates that I came to know, but it was always matched by their restraint and their determination to be wiser and more prudent than the people whose policies they fought against. They never engaged in acts of retribution. They never followed the violent policies of small handful of environmental extremists who had given the environmental movement a bad name.
As the book evolved, I found myself inspired by the people I interviewed. My spiritual faith grew. Ultimately, so did my optimism. I slowly became convinced that religious groups working together had the power, the obligation and the opportunity to bring about change, to care for creation, and save the earth for future generations.
"...dangerous poisons were also in the streams flowing deep beneath the earth, in the soil used by our farmers for planting crops..."Of course, I had known that human beings had acquired the ability to change the natural balance of things for better or worse in the last 100 years. I knew we could alter basic chemistries in our laboratories, factories, power plants and military bases in ways that even the most advanced of our scientists could only partly understand or predict. For the most part, I had accepted the slogan “Better living through chemistry” without really questioning it. I had heard that many of our synthetic creations had no counterparts in nature but, I didn’t fully understand that a chain of deadly contamination had already been distributed throughout the world simply for profit, or that the contamination occurred virtually everywhere, in the air we breathed, the water we drank, the food we ate, the vaccines our children were given, the makeup we wore and the products we used every day. I did not realize the extent to which dangerous poisons were also in the streams flowing deep beneath the earth, in the soil used by our farmers for planting crops, and in the water used to irrigate them. Nor did I understand that toxic chemicals were in the bodies of the fish, chicken, beef, pork, fruit, vegetables and rice we ate as well as in the bodies of domestic and wild animals. I did not realize that hundreds of untested chemicals had already infiltrated each and every one of our own bodies, the bodies of our growing children, our newborn infants, and even our unborn babies.
I didn’t know these things, at least in part because many politicians, chemical companies and pharmaceutical companies didn’t want me or other mothers like me to know, that completely against our will, our maternal instinct had been violated. We had become a species who violated life’s most basic principles, a species who poisoned our own infants while they were still in our wombs through the permeable barrier of our placenta and then continued the process by nursing them with our contaminated breast milk. That which sustains life and that which destroys life had been steadily merging for many years.
I still believed that the Environmental Protection Agency, the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control, the American Pediatric Association, the American Cancer Society, the National Cancer Institute and the American Academy of Science were pillars of authority and could offer the final, truthful word in each of their respective fields. I did not yet know about the intense pressure to alter or suppress information to which these groups and others were sometimes subjected or about the partnerships and sustaining bonds that too often linked some of our most powerful politicians, scientific societies, drug companies and other profit making corporations.
I had just finished writing a book about hunger and poverty in America, and I was still more concerned with children who didn’t have enough to eat than with children who ate food, drank water and breathed air that would damage all and slowly kill many of them. I did not yet know that 90 percent of childhood leukemias and as many as 70 percent of breast cancers are now believed to be caused by man-made environmental contaminants.
In the months that followed that path-changing call from my editor, my own life was to undergo a radical transformation and be darkened by the staggering new reality. I was finally to understand that what separated man-made poisons from those derived from nature was the conscious, often arrogant and careless manipulation of chemicals by scientists who frequently did not know themselves what the final outcome would be. Whether their motive was corporate profit, personal greed, political power or the genuinely well-intentioned desire to improve our lives through chemistry, the outcome was often uncontrollable, sinister and deadly.
When combinations of these chemicals enter our bodies and settle in our blood, our brains, our flesh and the deepest marrow of our bones, they can prevent the normal functioning of our organs and initiate the slow and irreversible changes that ultimately lead to cluster illnesses, birth defects, autism, malignancies and other illnesses.
I didn’t yet realize that a day by day build up of lethal chemicals was taking place in all of our bodies, all of the time, or that our constant exposure to multiple poisons, however slight and incremental, could trigger profound neurological changes, and result in slow, cumulative destruction. I had no idea that we were eating, drinking, breathing and using seemingly harmless materials every single day that, taken together, could turn out to be fatal.
Nor did I understand that global warming followed a parallel path; that the planet itself was endangered by the same sources of abuse. I did not yet know that man’s reckless misuse of his technical gifts simultaneously threatened the earth and its children.
In both cases, what even the best intentioned experts tell us about “safe” levels of deadly chemicals often turns out to be wrong, because they too are learning more as time goes on. Scientists are continually forced to revise their estimates of safety as new information becomes available.
Most of the estimated 85,000 synthetic chemicals found in the United States and other parts of the world today have never been tested for their destructive effects. They have simply been sent into our world and have become an unavoidable part of our everyday lives. Of those that have been studied, some are now absolutely known to cause global warming or disease. Among the known carcinogens, for example, there are some, PCB’s and DDT that were banned decades ago but will remain in the environment for many years to come. There are others known to be toxic, like perchlorate, mercury and arsenic, that continue to be used and argued over while we and our children regularly consume or breathe them.
Whether it is contamination from air, water, food, or the everyday things we buy and use, the patterns are the same. We are surrounded by life-threatening contaminants and carcinogens that we cannot avoid or control. Most of us have relatively little knowledge of the threat and, of course, we had nothing to do with making the decisions that have set these chemical events in motion. We were not protected by those in authority, and we were not consulted. In fact, we were often deliberately misinformed. What science conceives, industry makes possible. Government and big business give lip service to protecting us, but often they do just the opposite, and do it knowingly.
As the magnitude of all of this churned in my mind, I thought at first that maybe this book should be written by a person with a strong scientific background. It took me months to realize that what was needed wasn’t a book about science at all, but an investigative expose about the politics and greed that fuels environmentally caused illnesses. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see the terrifying patterns.
In fact, I was to learn that what the Bush Administration called the quest for “Good Science” was often just a diversionary tactic, a grand hoax, a fairytale like “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” perpetrated by people who worked together. The linguistic doublespeak allowed the government, the Pentagon and enormous corporations to mask urgent issues of public health and contamination so that they could continue to make huge sums of money even in the face of spreading epidemics and massive evidence of harm. Sometimes, the illnesses resulted from careless environmental contamination of our air, water or food supply. At other times, toxic chemicals were deliberately thrust upon an unsuspecting population. Either way, the real criterion, the driving force, the bottom line that tied autism, asthma, cancer, birth defects and cluster illnesses together, was profit.
For me, as a mother and journalist, the driving force had become the heart breaking stories of the individual victims I had come to know. It was the women who were dead or dying of breast cancer or lung cancer, the children gasping for breath from asthma, suffering from autism or dying of leukemia, and the babies who were born deformed or impaired who finally convinced me that I must write a highly accessible book for the general public, a book that synthesized the issues and the expert opinions, a book that spelled out the moral issues, the spiritual issues and the tragic human costs of remaining passive.
In some very real and threatening ways, government and industry had become life and death adversaries to the people who inhabit the earth. In the early 1990’s for example, the Department of Human Services had requested, but not demanded, a recall of all vaccines containing thimerosal, a known and dangerous neurotoxin. But, rather than offend the multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical companies, the FDA had left it up to them to decide and had allowed all fifty vaccines to remain on the market.
At the time of this writing, in the summer of 2006, that neurotoxin was still present in an unknown number of private and public health facilities. In fact, it was now being given to American children and adults, including pregnant women, in flu shots and some multi-dose shots, simply because it was less expensive to produce than the alternatives. It was also routinely still being shipped overseas despite a great amount of evidence that it was creating epidemics of autism where none had previously existed. Efforts were also still being made to convince the public, especially American mothers, that there was still no “proof” of harm.
No one can adequately predict the long term effects of Thimerosal, let alone all the combined chemicals we are exposed to, and no one can control the idiosyncratic thresholds at which our individual bodies can no longer assimilate a particular load or combination of poisons.
Corporate scientists working in their laboratories can sometimes barely recognize what Albert Schweitzer once called “The devils of our own creation.” Whenever dangerous evidence does begin to emerge, political leaders, big chemical companies, large corporations, drug companies, the military and frequently even the EPA, the FDA and other trusted watchdogs, pit themselves against everyday people, denying responsibility and actively burying evidence. As a result, we, our children and our children’s unborn children are all being forced to assume the risks, without ever being told what they are or even that they exist.
As I read Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, I found that its warnings were even more relevant today than when the book was first published in 1962. Her primary concern had been with the endless stream of insecticides and pesticides we used to kill weeds, rodents and other organisms we considered pests. She knew that these chemicals had the power to kill “the good with the bad” and asked “how anyone could believe it was possible to lay down such a barrage of poisons on the surface of the earth without making it unfit for all life.”
She also pointed out that one chemical may act on another to alter its “known” effect, and that cancer may sometimes be caused by the complementary action of two chemicals, one of which sensitizes the cell or tissue so that, under the second “prompting” agent, a malignancy develops.
Rachel Carson struggled with breast cancer for four years and lived for eighteen months after Silent Spring was completed. During that year and a half, she was ridiculed by the chemical industry and awarded every possible prize from the world of journalism and letters. She was deeply relieved that she had lived long enough to complete Silent Spring but longed to go on to other important projects. Even after tumors in her cervical vertebrae caused her to lose function in her right hand, she refused to discuss her own illness, because she did not want to lose the appearance of scientific objectivity.
Nevertheless, when she appeared at press conferences and spoke on national television and before Congress, Rachel Carson looked like a woman struggling with cancer; she wore a dark wig and suffered from the puffiness of radiation. Those who knew her noticed the dramatic change in her appearance.
Though Carson never mentioned her own cancer either publicly or in Silent Spring, she knew and wrote that many human cancers were directly linked to man made chemicals and pesticides. Industry called her an hysterical woman, who had overstepped her knowledge of science. They tried to malign her character and her research.
Today, we live in a world gone far wilder than Rachel Carson’s world, a world in which the most obvious toxic abuses are tolerated and global contamination has become a fact of life. Victims of cancer, birth defects, autism, and cluster illnesses must provide definite “proof” that a specific chemical or company has caused their problems before anything is done to protect them and even then, they are often paid large sums so that they will go away and die silently. The companies rarely admit guilt.
Not just America, but the entire human population is now caught in the terrible conflict between our human inventiveness, brilliance and creativity – and our arrogance, greed and shortsightedness in failing to care for the earth and its people.
Who is able to judge the specific load of toxic chemicals that each of our vulnerable unborn or growing children can tolerate? Who can tell us what will happen when two or more of these carcinogens act together or what is really a “safe dose” of PCE, TCE, perchlorate, mercury, thimerosal or thousands of other poisons? Who can know your particular idiosyncratic sensitivities or previous exposures or those of your son or my daughter?
I have written this book because I do not want other people to experience what the people I met on my journey have experienced, and because I know that countless millions more will.
I come to this project with no special interests other than a concern for the future of humanity. I am not a politician, a religious leader, an environmental extremist, a scientist or a board member of a large corporation. I am simply an investigative journalist, a woman and a mother who has inadvertently fallen upon an urgent matter: the slow and not-so-slow poisoning of all our people for the short term profit of a reckless few.
