I found Sandra Steingraber’s book Living Downstream to be an engaging read. The mix of personal memoir and scientific data made for a lively presentation and got me emotionally involved with the topic. It sunk in deep for me as well after watching a PBS documentary special entitled Earth Day’s: A History. The program detailed the beginning of the environmental movement up to the present and reiterated much of what Steingraber talked about in her book.
Particularly of interest is how important Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring has been in advancing ecological health in our country. Carson’s call to action I found to echo much of what the Biblical and Theological tradition of Christianity and Judaism teaches. She quotes Abraham Lincoln as her inspiration for her speaking out against the injustice against the environment she saw: “To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards out of men.” For those who see evil and not to speak against it is cowardly and evil.
As Steingraber points out: “When a scientific society acknowledges a trade organization as a ‘sustaining associate,’ Carson asked, whose voice do we hear when the society speaks–that of science or of industry?” (17) This is a pressing question for today.
Reflecting on Steingraber’s book I was forced to look more closely at my own life and the death of my mother in law three years ago and the current struggle with brain cancer of my mother’s husband. Cancer can strike simply because of heredity. And this is what I have assumed was the case with my mother’s husband. He has been a vegan for more than 2o years and eats organic. He lives in Maine along the coast, not near an industrial source. But he was a river rafting guide for years–could the paper mill contaminants in the river have given him cancer? Steingraber raises a very provocative point–even if you eat organic food you still can get cancer from the air you breathe, the water you drink, the very soil you walk on!
It is disconcerting to say the least, but there is still hope–hope that practices can change and that they WILL change. I wonder about my own practices…using a computer, a cell-phone, breathing in exhaust from cars near my house…
Cancer is truly an ecological issue–one that should deeply concern the church as well. We desperately need to combat the problem of toxic pollution. It is the sacred obligation of all who claim to live in fellowship with the Creator and Sustainer of the earth to help to eliminate “the threat to human health created by reckless pollution of the living world” (266).
