Living Downstream: An Ecologist's Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment

"Living Downstream is a beautifully rendered book, part science , part history , part memoir . Steingraber’s purpose is to refocus public attention upstream, by which she means where problems begin. It is a crash course in public health, and in adopting a public health perspective on cancer and pollution prevention. Moved by its message, the filmmaker Chanda Chevannes even made Living Downstream into a documentary film of the same name. It was a pivotal book published at a pivotal moment. Public and scientific understanding of pollution was undergoing seismic shifts. The first edition came out in 1997 — the same decade scientists released the first consensus statement outlining a more nuanced understanding of the role environmental exposures played in biology, which is that chronic, everyday exposures appeared to be interfering with the hormone signalling systems that oversee metabolism, fertility, neurodevelopment and more. The United Nations had also begun moving toward what would become the 2001 Stockholm Convention on Persistent Pollutants , an international treaty that works to move the most persistent, bio-accumulative and toxic pollutants out of production systems. The first pollutants listed to the Convention included dioxins and furans, PCBs, and a number of the highly chlorinated pesticides described by Rachel Carson in Silent Spring: chlordane, dieldrin, aldrin, endrin and, the best known, DDT. Many of these were, and are, present in the environment –and in our flesh and blood in ways that we can’t easily register or perceive. Pollution as potentially invisible, as mobile, as pervasive, as cumulative, as unevenly distributed around ‘hot spots,’ as significant in trace levels, and as preventable: this was the scientific and political context in which Steingraber wrote Living Downstream . Steingraber was uniquely posed to write on this topic. She holds advanced degrees in both biology and English, and is a skilled scientist and a commanding writer, unparalleled in her ability to make complex environmental science accessible to a general audience. I wouldn’t be the first to call Steingraber our generation’s Rachel Carson, and Living Downstream the sequel to Silent Spring . What makes Living Downstream all the more compelling is Steingraber’s story and her personal, if unexpected connection to both cancer and to Carson. “I wouldn’t be the first to call Steingraber our generation’s Rachel Carson, and Living Downstream the sequel to Silent Spring . ” Like Carson, Steingraber, too, had battled cancer. It was in fact a disease that ran in her family. But—and here’s the thing—Steingraber was adopted, which forced her to ask: what else do families have in common besides genes? Her answer: families also share watersheds, airsheds and foodsheds, and whatever pollution has become a part of them. Living Downstream reads like an investigation into what role environmental factors like pollution play in the complex origins of cancers. In truth, my favourite books are wonky, historical dives into the history of chemistry and chemical engineering, which, to me, reveal much about the social, technical and political origins of today’s pollutants. These are the books I most love. But I realise I’m an odd-duck to devour them as I do. Steingraber takes this history and rewrites it narratively, tying the surge in plastics and organic chemical production to WWII geopolitics and post-war economics. I appreciate (and often study) how she makes not just science, but also science history compelling for her readers. The newly revised edition, published in 2010, updates the science, which exploded between 1997 and then. Steingraber followed Living Downstream with two other books about foetal and child health, making an elegant trilogy of science and her experience of pregnancy and motherhood. Somewhat tellingly, I read all three of these before going back and finally reading Carson again, who I found to be as relevant today as was when Silent Spring first appeared in print."