Book Review: Living Downstream

Living Downstream: An Ecologist Looks at Cancer and the Environment, by Sandra Steingraber (Addison Wesley, 1997, $24)

Since World War II, more than 75,000 new synthetic chemicals have entered the marketplace, only 3% of which have been tested for carcinogenicity. At the same time, women born in the U.S. between 1947 and 1958 have almost three times the rate of breast cancer as their great-grandmothers did, and between 1950 and 1991 overall incidence of cancer (excluding lung cancer) rose by 35%. About 40% of Americans will be diagnosed with cancer sometime in their lives.

Asked about the rising incidence of childhood cancer, a representative of the American Industrial Health Council was quoted in the New York Times as saying, "It doesn't appear that anyone really knows yet what the causes are." She should have a word with Sandra Steingraber, Ph.D., biologist, poet, and author of Living Downstream. Steingraber underscores the International Agency for Research on Cancer's findings that at least 80% of all cancer is attributable to environmental influences.

Steingraber's significant accomplishment is to gather complex, often contradictory information -- much of it gleaned from cancer registries and the Toxics Release Inventory -- in one place and make it comprehensible. She explains exactly how human cells can be damaged in response to dioxin and other carcinogenic chemicals. Such detail makes her argument -- that environmental contaminants, not genetics, cause cancer in the majority of cases -- difficult to fault.

Steingraber's motivation comes from her family's and her own experience with cancer. She finds a parallel with beluga whales, in the contaminated St. Lawrence estuary, that were afflicted with bladder cancer -- the same cancer she developed at age 20 -- and discovers that the water she drank growing up was contaminated with industrial chemicals. Living Downstream does include "the deeply personal," but these passages at moments digress. Steingraber attends meetings with cancer activists, but we only get to be in the car on the way home: "right now I am driving home to Pekin from an evening meeting ... and I am full of pie." Pie is nice, but what about the meeting?