Making Our History
Emily Donovan, Maria Rodale, Dr. Devra Lee Davis, Kelly Vlahakis Hanks, and Sharon C. Lavigne
I like — and think it is absolutely necessary — to keep repeating the theme that ours is the most youthful of all activist movements. The progress we are making is miraculous. Yet the situation is dire. The country needs us. Needs thoughtful citizens.
We didn’t exist until Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962. We didn’t have the vocabulary or even concepts in mind to know what to think about or how to think about what we didn’t even know. Barely anyone knew of endocrine disruption, forever chemicals, xenoestrogens, parts per trillion (ppt), or zero tolerance. Who but a few unfortunate couples would have ever dealt with infertility and associated it with hidden chemical toxins?
But today, despite notable evidence of progress, everyday exposures for most Americans have reached the tipping point where they are harming altogether too many of our families and, for all of us, our shared future. They harm too many children’s ability to think. They harm the ability for boys to be fully masculine and they make being a woman a perilous cancerous journey. They damage the fertility of both sexes, increase environmental cancer and other diseases’ incidence from diabetes to obesity, and cause kidney, immune system, and liver harm. They are taking the people we love from us far too early. They are robbers.
I see the dying victims, weakened with cachexia — in my own family and when I visit Cancer Alley in Louisiana where the acute awareness of the harm being done is is so focused and genocidal — but not the loss of hope or the desire to rise up. And what’s going down in Cancer Alley, although there it is Ground Zero for the antitoxic movement, is being tragically replicated in small towns and communities all across the nation. That increases the awareness but not the empowerment. I’m on the side of empowerment.
We each of us have the power to protect ourselves and children and to make shopping choices that count for making the world better for our friends and neighbors in nearby at-risk communities. If only more of us saw the faces of the kids of Cancer Alley who go to school next to the nation’s only Neoprene plant that is known to be polluting the nearby air with a carcinogen called chloroprene, maybe we would find better alternatives to so many everyday products that put them at risk.
Do we need Neoprene koozies or mouse pads? No, of course not. As one of my friends and colleagues, Maria Rodale, might remind us, nature holds so many of the answers. Why not use cork mouse pads? Isn’t that better than giving the kids cancer? Of course, we need to take this to the next level with legislation. We need both personal and legislative because we’re the first adapters in a newly emergent world that has changed all of us.
Our nation’s future is at stake, and we will lose it if we don’t realize that many of our most cherished family values are being destroyed by how we are now quite knowingly changing our children’s own genes. We can understand it. We can make it better. We can give them back their future. Together, we’re each of us part of something larger and together making history.
But we’re fighting such huge battles, and we have to keep ourselves and friends’ healthy. Among the history makers, I am grateful to these five nationally important antitoxic activists. They took the time to offer advance praise for my new book Raising Healthy Kids: Protecting Your Children From Hidden Chemical Toxins (Skyhorse Publishing, June 4, 2024).
Dr. Devra Lee Davis is one of the nation’s most influential epidemiologists and environmental writers. She is founder of the Environmental Health Trust.
Devra Lee Davis, Ph.D., is the author of When Smoke Ran Like Water and The Secret History of the War on Cancer. I truly urge you to put these hall of fame works of literature on your reading list. I met Dr. Davis before my first book Diet for a Poisoned Planet was going to be published and become a best seller. Dr. Davis was the scholar in residence at the National Academy of Sciences where I served representing the public interest on the safe seafood committee. She was the first researcher to show cancer mortality striking Americans at younger and younger ages and the boomer generation is at higher risk. Today, as founder of the Environmental Health Trust, Dr. Davis is the strongest and most influential voice today on cell phone and wireless safety. Disconnect, her latest book, is a sobering examination of the damaging health effects emanating from living in a wireless world. She was part of the team of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change scientists awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 with the Honorable Al Gore as lead author on research assessing climate mitigation policies.
Maria Rodale, author of Organic Manifesto and Love, Nature, Magic, is the former CEO of Rodale Publishing.
Emmaus, Pennsylvania, is a magical place of real hope, location of the legendary Rodale Institute’s “experimental” organic farm, that influenced me. Prevention and Organic Gardening coming in the mail when magazines were king were shining lights of knowledge and optimism in a world of persistent chemical poisoning and pessimism. News reports from the Rodale farm led the way in pioneering organic agriculture and federal adoption of our present day law. Robert Rodale’s death in 1995 in Russia, while introducing organics there, devastated me personally. I really read everything the Institute wrote, including its vaunted White Papers.
Maria Rodale has continued her family’s important tradition as the CEO of their publishing empire and now as an author in her own write. I have both Organic Manifesto and Love, Nature, Magic. Most recently, Maria’s tales of garden shamanism have been warming my nights with the Audible version of Love, Nature, Magic, and I am enjoying the transcendent journey of her gardening as well as her exacting moral compass. Plus, I’m glad she’s taking on the carbon capture and sequestration schemes the petro monsters are concocting and reminding us of how much carbon can be trapped from something much simpler called our soil. Cancer Alley needs these kinds of influential voices and saving the people. They’re dying.
ECOS CEO Kelly Vlahakis Hanks at the Fifth Ward Elementary School, in Reserve, Louisiana, where the company’s Green Team put on an experiential green cleaning lab for the students in conjunction with the Concerned Citizens of St. John, Rise St. James, and the Healthy Living Foundation.
I think of Kelly Vlahakis Hanks, CEO of ECOS, practically everyday. Well,I have a reason: besides valuing her friendship, I also use ECOS cleaning formulas daily in my own home. ECOS and the Healthy Living Foundation (HLF, for which I am chief officer) have teamed up with Concerned Citizens of St. John and Rise St. James to aid the children of the Fifth Ward Elementary School, which is beside the Denka Neoprene plant that emits dangerously toxic and allegedly illegal amounts of chlorprene, a powerful carcinogen, into the community air. Together, ECOS, HLF, and the other groups have delivered high efficiency particulate air filters, green cleaning supplies, and we have put on an all day green science lab at the school. I know we are going to do more here, too. Kelly to the rescue! Thank you, my friend, for your deep caring and works.
Emily Donovan, founder of Clean Cape Fear, is a national voice for all of us.
I do not believe that in 2009, when Emily Donovan moved to Brunswick County, North Carolina, she had any idea she would encounter what are known as poly- and perfluoroylalkyl substances (aka PFAS or forever chemicals) in her community public water supplies or have to confront the tidal wave of disaster that followed. Emily is co-founder of Clean Cape Fear. Her work has helped elevate North Carolina’s PFAS contamination crisis to the national stage. She has testified before Congress twice regarding PFAS contamination. She helped organize and co-host two screenings of the movie, Dark Waters, in Wilmington and Raleigh featuring special guest, Mark Ruffalo; the events resulted in the state’s attorney general suing DuPont/Chemours for natural resource damages. Recently, she helped secure reverse osmosis filling stations for 49 public schools impacted by PFAS contamination in Brunswick and New Hanover counties. She frequents Washington, DC and Raleigh to pressure lawmakers and regulators for quicker responses to our growing PFAS public health crisis. Emily is a history maker. It isn’t because of just the legislation, though. It’s the kids of those 49 public schools. They are innocents, all of them.
Sharon C. Lavigne at the proposed Air Products hydrogen plant site
Winning the 2021 Goldman Environmental Prize ought to mean everything. But I can tell you it won’t mean a thing to Sharon C. Lavigne, founder of Rise St. James, if she doesn’t stop Formosa from building its three thousand acre plastic plant in St. James Parish, Louisiana, in Cancer Alley, where there is a real and authentic genocide occurring. I don’t mind using such a strong word. People are dying. They are dropping like flies. We’re going to change things, though. Change is going to come. I tell you, it’s coming.
Isolation is the chemical industry’s secret weapon. They don’t want us to talk about our sicknesses or share our stories. That’s how the hair-dye industry escaped its accountability for decades. You can’t imagine all the threatening letters I’ve gotten from lawyers when I published my reports associating their use with lymphoma, leukemia, and breast and brain cancer. They don’t want us talking about cancer or their chemical plants and sharing our stories and connecting the dots (as we are finally doing in the age of the Internet). That we’ve not had many story tellers has hurt our movement. It’s not just the cold clinical published studies that move people. It’s people coming forward, sharing their stories, and speaking out about their own lived experience, getting to the realization that zero tolerance is our only sane health policy. Laws must empower citizens to enforce them.
How to do it? How to do it for ourselves and kids? The HLF has successfully sued or is in the midst of legal action against major corporations and brands like Herbal Essences, Pantene, Justin’s, General Mills, Bumble Bee, California Olive Ranch, and others to legally require them to disclose their hidden chemical toxins. I have put all of this inside information and real facts and test results into Raising Healthy Kids: Protecting Your Children From Hidden Chemical Toxins (Skyhorse Publishing, June 4, 2024) to make everyone a black belt when it comes to protecting their family in the toxic chemical battlefield.
But I do it through story telling. I met so many people. I naturally identified with everyone (myself being the first victim to come forward when we discovered the Santa Monica Bay in Los Angeles was a DDT dumping ground). I traveled the country to get the stories and the biggest ideas to make change in your personal life, your kids’, and our nation. There’s so much to do. But it’s not hopeless at all.
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After a year of interviewing some of the most heroic parents in America today, I’m delighted to announce presale copies of Raising Healthy Kids: Protecting Your Children from Hidden Chemical Toxins are available. Be sure to visit https://tinyurl.com/4a9ctywu or your favorite independent bookseller.
