Living Downstream: A Scientist's Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment

“‘To ignore the scientific evidence is to knowingly permit thousands of unnecessary illnesses and deaths each year.’”

This statement was the conclusion of a recent state-of-the-science review of the links between cancer and the environment. As Steingraber suggests throughout her book, few studies have been accepted as providing definitive proof that the chemicals in question cause cancer. Although labeled as “likely” or “probable” carcinogens, atrazine and many other pesticides weren’t completely outlawed as of the publication of Steingraber’s book.

“To the 87 percent of Illinois that is farmland, an estimated 54 million pounds of synthetic pesticides are applied each year.”

Following World War II, Illinois farms increasingly used pesticides and herbicides. While chemicals like DDT were proven successful at combating illness-bearing insects, commercial use of the chemicals became popular. According to Steingraber, less than 10% of cornfields in Illinois were chemically treated in 1950. However, by 2005, 98% of cornfields routinely used chemical pesticides.

“By 1993, 91 percent of Illinois’s rivers and streams showed pesticide contamination. Ten years later, the streams and rivers within my childhood watershed contained 31 different pesticides, and atrazine was in all samples.”

This quote helps demonstrate the severity of chemical use in Illinois agriculture. Steingraber argues throughout the book that the chemicals used on farms end up in all facets of daily life: the water we drink, the air we breathe, and the food we eat. According to Steingraber, studies have shown that water sources contain levels of atrazine that exceed legal limits during the spring planting season.

“Atrazine remains the most frequently detected pesticide in water throughout the United States, found in three of every four American streams and rivers and 40 percent of all groundwater samples.”

This passage serves as evidence for Steingraber’s argument that precautionary measures are necessary to ensure that more generations aren’t poisoned by toxic chemicals. The statistics illustrate an alarming presence of atrazine, a chemical proven to have negative effects on human health. Atrazine has yet to be fully banned in the US.

“To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards out of men.”

Rachel Carson includes this quote by Abraham Lincoln in her book Silent Spring. Steingraber fittingly uses it in her own book to underscore the need to break the awkward silence surrounding cancer. She discusses Carson’s frustration at scientists who publish research about the topic but fail to discuss the issue in public.

First, although some cancer-producing substances—called carcinogens—are naturally occurring and have existed since life began, twentieth-century industrial activities have created countless such substances against which we have no naturally occurring means of protection.”

This quote emphasizes the fact that some substances linked to carcinogens are readily available within our environments. Coal and petroleum are two such materials. However, combining these natural materials with synthetic ones results in hazardous chemicals we don’t yet know how to combat.

“Second, since the arrival of the atomic and chemical age that followed World War II, everyone—not just industrial workers—has been exposed to these carcinogens from the moment of conception until death.”

Steingraber examines the role that industrialization during each of the World Wars had on contributing toxic materials to the environment. One argument about the existence of carcinogens is that only individuals who work in the plants that produce them are exposed. However, following World War II, many chemicals, such as DDT, were introduced to civilian households as insecticides and herbicides.

“In 2009 an estimated 1.48 million people in the United States—four thousand people a day—were told they had cancer. Each of the diagnoses is a border crossing, the beginning of an unplanned and unchosen journey. There is a story behind each one.”

Steingraber, who is one of those 1.48 million people, likes to think of plot points of data on a graph as individual cancer stories. She makes the research personal. Each diagnosis holds new evidence that needs consideration.

“Cancer associates with westernization. Whereas forty years ago, cancer was mostly a disease of wealthy nations, half of all cancers now occur in developing nations, particularly those rapidly industrializing.”

Some increases in cancer incidence may be attributed to increasing longevity. However, as industrialization across the globe increases, so does the incidence of cancer. The increasing cancer rates may support the argument that industrial pollution is at least partly responsible.

“We track pizza deliveries and overnight packages more closely than we track toxic chemicals or cancer diagnoses.”

The US lacks basic knowledge about the toxic properties of chemicals in commerce and, until 2002, lacked any system for environmental health tracking at all. At the state level, no consistent job title or agency has responsibility for following up on cancer cluster reports by citizens. No standard protocols exist for doing so, no rapid response teams are at the ready, and systematic record-keeping on prior investigations isn’t a standard practice.

“It is one thing to fumigate war refugees falling ill from insect-borne epidemics and quite another to douse the food supply of an entire nation not at risk for such diseases.”

During the World War II era and through the Vietnam War era, it was common to use insecticides to spray insects believed to be carrying human diseases. The same pesticides were introduced to the general population after World War II. The pesticides are sprayed on crops to prevent insects from becoming a problem. As the author later notes, however, some insects eventually developed resistance to these pesticides, which led to the use of additional chemical agents.

“Amid a flood of information, an absence of knowledge. Amid a thousand computer-generated words, a silence spreads out.”

This quote addresses the lack of action in the cancer epidemic despite the abundance of information. Medical pamphlets provide information about lifestyle causes for cancer but largely ignore findings revealing environmental risk factors.

“I propose a rechristening of MCF-7. Let them be called IBFM-7: the Immortal Breasts of Frances Mallon, attempt number seven. Let them be known as a sacrament: This is my body, which is broken for you. This do in remembrance of me.”

MCF-7 is a cell line created by the Michigan Cancer Foundation for use in cancer research. The cell line was developed using fluid taken from a nun, Frances Mallon, who had—and died of—cancer in 1970. The cell line is credited with significant advancements in cancer research.

“In tracing the explosion of herbicide resistance among weed species that began in the late 1980s, researchers were forced to conclude that the ‘short-term triumphs of new pest control technologies have carried with them the seeds of long-term failure.’”

This passage is significant in the education about the production and use of chemical agents. While herbicides and other chemicals were effective early in their production, over time, the species that they were aimed at attacking built resistance. The phrase “seeds of long-term failure” seems to suggest that many chemicals contaminating the environment only made the original problem stronger and more persistent.

“I love this river valley and the bluffs that rise above it, the backdrop of my childhood. I want the boys to love these landscapes, too—but with full knowledge rather than denial, in the terribly difficult way that one is asked to love alcoholic parents: not abandoning them to wretchedness, not enabling their self-destruction, not pretending there is no problem. I don’t know how to explain this to my young nephews, but maybe I don’t have to. Maybe we adults need only demonstrate an attitude of passionate attention about where we live.”

Steingraber uses this passage to emphasize the need for environmental awareness in and around our homes. To do so, we need to acknowledge significant contamination issues in the environments we love, no matter how difficult it may be to do so. The only way to address this issue is for those who call a place home to take an active role in preventing chemical contamination in the environment.

“Silence is comfortable here. The river embraces silence. The Illinois River seemed to me, as a teenager, not so much dangerous, or even endangered, as reassuring.”

This passage establishes a sense of place—or emotional attachment to a specific area—as Steingraber reflects on a positive childhood memory. The river she remembers as a child provided peace and tranquility. As an adult, Steingraber sees the river as a reminder of the contamination that has been years in the making in her home community.

“Like an accountant who proficiently measures and records individual values but fails to sum the results, this system of regulating contaminants in water suffers from a constricted one-chemical-at-a-time vision.”

Steingraber's research reveals that certain chemicals, when combined, produce toxins that have either not been tested or have been identified as carcinogens. Many of these toxins were created unknowingly by combining or burning materials with cancer-causing chemicals. Steingraber emphasizes the need to look at the bigger picture regarding environmental contamination. Mixtures of chemicals need as much scrutiny and testing as individual chemicals.

“No matter how you look at it, scooping garbage into an oven and setting it afire is an equally primitive alternative to digging a hole in the ground and burying it.”

This quote addresses the controversy of using incinerators to burn household and medical waste instead of burying the materials in a landfill. The incinerators give off toxic gases when refuse is heated to a high temperature. Waste buried in a landfill gives off dangerous gases that contaminate groundwater. Steingraber suggests that both are primitive, illness-causing methods of discarding waste.

“Whoever the new permanent farmer of this land turns out to be, I hope to stand someday with him—or her—on the wrap-around porch. I’ll tell the story of Mr. Kirby, and then we’ll turn toward the southeast horizon where, look, no incinerator rises from the earth.”

Steingraber makes this statement upon visiting a cornfield slated as the site of a future garbage incinerator. She remembers the farms and the beauty of the landscape attached to these cornfields. She hopes for a future where she can tell the story of Mr. Kirby, the developer of the incinerator who faced opposition from the community, against the backdrop of a landscape where no incinerator came to be.

“Our bodies, too, are living scrolls of sorts. What is written there—inside the fibers of our cells and chromosomes—is a record of our exposure to environmental contaminants.

Like the rings of trees, our tissues are historical documents that can be read by those who know how to decipher the code. Steingraber is a biologist who studied forest growth and often compares scientific methods from her field to those of scientists studying human anatomy. Our bodies can tell stories of trauma due to contamination as well as the trees she spent her career studying.

“The human body is an endless construction site where demolition and renovation occur simultaneously and continuously.”

This quote emphasizes the ever-changing human body and need for constant testing and reassessment of carcinogens. The body takes significant time to adapt to environmental changes and therefore doesn’t immediately develop symptoms of environmental toxin exposure.

“Cancer cells are dancers deaf to the choreographer. They are builders in flagrant disregard of zoning ordinances and architectural blueprints.”

Steingraber explains how cells divide and renew themselves. A specific methodological process governs how the body functions during cell division, or “mitosis.” However, cancer cells produce at rapid rates without following the biological process that healthy cells follow.

“In the words of the veteran cancer biologist Ross Hume Hall, ‘Too often cancer research has focused on finding the last straw. It’s time we looked at all the straws.’”

Cancer research tends to focus on the most immediate causes for an individual's mortality. Identifying immediate biological failures at the time of death is important, but examining the events leading up to the decline in the health of specific body organs is equally important.