Sandra Steingraber
When I was pregnant with my daughter Faith, to move on to the next generation, I had already spent 20 adult years mostly living my life out as a professional biologist and ecologist, which means I spent a lot of time studying the way organisms interact with the environments that they inhabit. So my first thought, and I don’t think it will come too much as a surprise to you, upon looking at that plastic stick on which I had just peed and seeing two lavender lines, indicating a positive pregnancy test, were, “Oh my God, now I’m a habitat.” And I immediately felt that inside me was this inland ocean with its population of one, this little sea mammal who was swimming around. At that point–as a lot of you know from [what is] probably my most well-known work, Living Downstream–I had been looking very closely at the role that environmental contaminants play in contributing to the causes of cancer. And I made a lateral move at that point in deciding to take a look at fetal toxicology, because it occurred to me that if the external environment is contaminated, so too is the internal environment of a woman’s body. And if a woman’s body is contaminated, then so too is the child that inhabits that body. … What that means is that we assume there’s a safe level of exposure to a toxic chemical below which there is either no harm or transitory harm, and that through careful study in both laboratory animals and epidemiological studies of humans we can determine what the safe threshold level is. Those of you who know how we regulate pesticides will recognize that we have promulgated hundreds and hundreds of these food tolerance levels, and maximum contaminant levels for pesticides in drinking water, by which we try to police the food chain to make sure that no one of us is exposed to too much of these toxic pesticides–and all of them by definition are poisonous. Right? So the harm is considered negligible. But what has historically been overlooked both in Europe and the United States in the process of promulgating all these regulations, is the unique susceptibility during pregnancy and infancy and other key moments in a lifetime. And these also include adolescence and old age, which I hope I’ll have time to hit on here. … We do know that the herbicide atrazene interferes with ovulation in all mammals. We don’t yet know whether that might play a role in lowering fertility in women. As far as I’m concerned any chemical that messes with the menstrual cycle of women has no place in our agricultural system and should be phased out immediately. … With sperm we have some more evidence. We know that men in Missouri who drink water from wells in rural areas with pesticide contamination have higher numbers of deformed sperm and slow sperm. There’s active research going on now to see if that means their partners have increased difficulty getting pregnant, but we definitely have an emerging body of evidence showing that exposure to pesticides in men seems to interfere with the vitality and viability of sperm. These are not farmers, these are not people who necessarily have other exposures. As far as we know their main exposure is simply through living in a rural area and drinking water that others have contaminated with agricultural chemicals.