Raising Elijah

Whether published in the peer-reviewed medical literature, a government report, or a popular parenting magazine, whether spoken at the podium in a Ph.D.-filled conference hall, into the microphone at a Congressional hearing, or as part of a PowerPoint presentation in a church basement, the message is the same: Ecologically speaking, children occupy another world, separated from us by dietary habit, behavioral pattern, and body size. Any speaker or author on the topic of children and the environment is practically required to preface his or her remarks with some version of the following:

Pound for pound of body weight, children drink more water, eat more food, and breathe more air than adults.

One wonders who this memo is for. It’s not news to parents that four-year-olds dine on fewer foods in proportionally larger quantities than the grown-ups at the table. (It was not an adult member of my household who decided to subsist for a month solely on bananas, eggs, and avocados.) And compared with those of us who share our homes with children, non-parents seem even more attuned to their unique attributes. The adjectives used by one of my childless friends to describe babies—loud, leaky, and rude—are all points of contrast with the full-grown sophisticates who occupy his world. I’m quite sure that he, along with other members of the children-are-aliens school of thought, would be unsurprised to hear the news that preschoolers, as compared with adults, have a greater tendency to mouth breathe.

In fact, we are not the intended audience for this message. The reason that the experts keep harping on the myriad ways in which children are different is not to surprise members of the public but to highlight the ways in which our environmental policies pretend that children—who make up 40 percent of the world’s population—do not exist. Entire regulatory systems are premised on the assumption that all members of the population basically act, biologically, like middle-aged men. The laws and rules so generated by those systems are thus blinded to the unique characteristics of children that should be obvious to everyone.

Disregard of juvenile differences begins in the laboratory with the methods used to test chemicals for toxicity. Traditionally, these tests are performed on post-pubertal rodents who are exposed to a given dose of a potential toxicant and then examined for health effects when their corresponding age in human years is between sixty and sixty-five. The results of these toxicology studies are then fed into risk analyses that attempt to model routes of human exposure and estimate their effects. Reference doses are set—with arbitrary safety factors added in—and decisions are made as to how much of an inherently toxic chemical is permissible in, say, air or water. Needless to say, the presumptions used in these models have not always been representative of children. Until 1990, for example, the reference dose for radiation exposure was based on a hypothetical 5’7” tall white man who weighed 157 pounds.

Reference Man and his adult lab rat friends illustrate how environmental laws have historically ignored children in all their splendid, vulnerable Otherness. Given that our environmental laws are, at this point, mostly historical—with the big federal statutes on air, water, and toxic substances control dating back to the 1970s—it’s fair to say that we adults basically do not—and, absent sweeping changes to those laws, cannot—adequately protect children from environmental dangers. Consider, too, that only 200 of the more than 80,000 synthetic chemicals used in the United States have been tested under the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976, and exactly none of them are regulated on the basis of their potential to affect infant or child development.

Our chemical regulatory system has essentially ground to a halt. It is not only locked in an old Reference Man mentality, it is unresponsive to the development of new chemicals and emerging evidence about previously unknown types of danger, such as cumulative impacts and the additive effects of chemical mixtures. It’s as though the government were choosing to ignore electronic identity theft because our laws about fraud predate the invention of the Internet.

Recently, some well-intentioned attempts have been launched to redress the problem. In 2000, the U.S. Congress authorized the prospective National Children’s Study, which will measure the environmental exposures of 100,000 U.S. children from conception through age 21 and will examine their relationship to various health outcomes, including pediatric cancers, learning disabilities, early puberty, asthma, and autism—all of which show signs of increasing prevalence. But recruitment of subjects for the National Children’s Study began only in 2009. The final results will come long after the children of today are no longer children. In 2010, the Toxic Chemicals Safety Act was introduced. It seeks to reform the Toxic Substances Control Act with an eye toward more stringently regulating chemicals to which children have unique vulnerabilities. At this writing, its successful implementation is far from guaranteed.

Parents trying to protect their children need reform of our antiquated regulations that reflects how infants and children are unlike us. Here are some additional differences to contemplate: Children have alternative metabolic pathways and are thus slower to detoxify and excrete pollutants. They have a more porous barrier between blood and brain and are thus more prone to neurological toxicity. They eat and inhale more house dust—which is why children typically have higher blood levels of lead and flame retardants than the adults in the household. And they practice what researchers call “frequent hand-to-mouth interactions.” To be specific, young children insert their hands into their mouths an average of 9.5 times per hour with the average amount of hand entering the mouth equivalent to three fingers worth.

In spring 2001, Jeff and I set out to find a nursery school for Faith to attend the following fall. By then, she would be a big sister, and I would be leaving on an extended book tour with the individual responsible for her new status as sibling. Jeff was facing grant deadlines and needed more child-free hours. The choice seemed particularly fraught. Or maybe all parents approach the day-care decision for their first-born with a similar sense of peril.

I looked at large parent-run cooperatives and visited small home-based operations. Jeff studied the pink towers and chiming bells at the Montessori school on the hill, and he considered the wonder balls and woolen fairies at the Waldorf school in the valley. We reviewed snack policies, peered into dress-up boxes, examined art supplies, and, at the end of each day, compared notes as though we were a team of day-care inspectors. We pondered tuition schedules. We met with various teachers. They all seemed nice. They all asked me the same question, “So, what’s your daughter like?”

I never knew how to answer this. Faith was the only child I’d ever really known, and I wasn’t sure which adjectives applied to her alone and which to her whole age cohort. And yet, my lack of vocabulary about her personality seemed amateurish. I felt like a freshman. So, what’s your major? Blurting out undeclared was sure to invite awkward silence.

Faith liked to sing, dance, listen to stories, and squish soap. She was inquisitive. Beyond that, the only particularity that I could dredge up about my undeclared daughter that seemed somehow relevant was that she was fond of pretending that she was a character in a story about herself. So, she sometimes talked about herself using third-person dialogue and incorporating lines from her favorite story books. Our conversations went something like this:

Mother: “Faith, let’s go down and have breakfast.”

Child: “Okay, said Faith, as she descended the stairs.”

Mother: “Do you want jam on your toast?”

Child: “No! . . . came the unexpected reply.”

In the end, Jeff and I chose a nursery school that operated out of a community center at the end of a quiet road. There was a frog pond out front and a play structure out back. The trees were full of chickadees and nuthatches. It was the least expensive. It was close to home. The snack policy extended to blue doughnuts, but, all other things being equal, keeping our daughter here in our own community seemed like the right decision. Moreover, when Faith herself visited the school, she had immediately joined the other kids sitting on the rug for story time and refused to leave when the story was done.

Arsenic is a poison. One ounce can kill 250 adults. It’s ranked number one on the federal list of the top 275 most hazardous substances found at toxic waste sites. Arsenic is an element (number 33 on the periodic chart), which means it can’t break down and go away. At levels far below what’s needed to kill a rat or a cheating spouse, arsenic causes cancer of the lung, bladder, and skin. It’s also linked to kidney, nasal, liver, and prostate cancers. Both the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the World Health Organization classify arsenic as a known human carcinogen. Low-level arsenic exposure also carries risk for stroke and diabetes.

Arsenic is soluble in water. This property means it remains in the body for only three days and can be peed out (which is why it is associated with kidney and bladder cancer) and sweated out (which is why it is associated with skin tumors). It causes lung cancer when inhaled as dust. Arsenic can be absorbed through the skin but not easily. Eating and drinking are thought to be the main routes of exposure.

Arsenic is found in bedrock. From here it can leach into groundwater or rise to the surface when coal or metal ores are mined. Elemental arsenic can be scraped off the inside of the stacks after copper is smelted. Indeed, smelter dust is the source of most of the arsenic sold on the world market. Most commercial-grade arsenic comes from China.

Here are some less known attributes of arsenic. It is deadlier when all by itself than when combined with carbon. That is to say, inorganic arsenic is more powerful poison than organic arsenic. (Curiously, the opposite is true for mercury, element number 80 on the periodic chart. Mercury is far more poisonous in its organic form, methylmercury, than as an inorganic element.) In its elemental form, arsenic impersonates phosphate ions. By replacing phosphate inside the cellular machinery that extracts energy from sugar, it can grind respiration to a halt. In a sufficient dose, it destroys the heart, the brain, the nerves, and the lining of the intestine. Death follows.

As a carcinogen, arsenic is a far more shadowy assassin, and its modus operandi not well described. In trace amounts, arsenic appears to interfere with glucocorticoids, a family of hormones with two very different functions. Glucocorticoids regulate blood sugar. That’s their Clark Kent day job. They also serve to suppress the growth of tumors. That’s their Superman job. According to results from recent studies, arsenic atoms can bind with glucocorticoids, which may explain why arsenic raises the risks for diabetes as well as cancer.

The villain named arsenic can also take out another superhero : our tumor-suppressor genes. According to a 2010 review of the evidence, arsenic silences these genes by attaching carbon groups to them. This subtle change, known as methylation, is the genetic equivalent of a chloroform-soaked handkerchief to the nostrils. When tumor-suppressor genes are knocked out, nascent malignancies are allowed to bloom.

Inconsistencies remain in the studies of arsenic carcinogenesis, but the main point is this: Even though much remains to be learned about how arsenic causes cancer, there is no doubt that it does. If indeed, as now seems true, arsenic is an endocrine disruptor as well as a silencer of cancer-protecting genes, then no safe level of exposure may exist.

The absence of safe threshold levels for arsenic exposure holds particular dangers for children. Their alternative metabolic pathways are less able than ours to convert the highly poisonous inorganic form of arsenic into the less toxic organic form. Accordingly, children receive higher doses of arsenic at equivalent exposures, and these doses remain in their bodies for longer periods of time before being peed out.

Yes, I know (came the unexpected reply). But, for a series of peculiar historical reasons, arsenic and children have ended up together. And the resulting predicament, which isn’t easily remedied through parental acts of vigilance and self-sacrifice, raises some fundamental questions:

• If it turns out that we, as parents, can’t easily protect our children from exposure to environmental toxicants like arsenic, is it better to know about the evidence of harm? Or to not know?

• If we decide to know, can we consider the evidence without rationalizing it away? (Well, I can’t protect my kids from everything.)

• And if we decide we are better off not knowing about problems like arsenic—because down that road lies only despair and futility—what else are we willing to close our eyes to?

The close encounter between children and arsenic began in 1933, when an Indian engineer, Sonti Kamesam, made a discovery that saved the lives of countless coal miners: Namely, copper and arsenic, when injected into wood, prevent timber beams from rotting. (Copper kills fungus. Arsenic kills insects.) Both metals were well-known pesticides at the time. Kamesam’s special technique was to add chromium to the mix, thereby binding the toxic metals to the wood fibers. The result was stronger roofs in the damp underground tunnels through which coal is extracted. A patent was granted in 1938.

Researchers in Mississippi pounded wooden stakes treated with Kamesam’s formula into fields that swarmed with termites. Months later, they were still standing. In 1950, a highly impressed Bell Telephone applied for permission to use chromated copper arsenate—CCA—on utility poles. In 1950, arsenic was acknowledged to be an acute poison. It was also suspected to cause skin tumors, but its ability to cause bladder and lung cancers was not known.

For the next two decades, CCA-treated wood remained a specialty product. Porches, fences, docks, and boardwalks were still constructed out of tree species that were naturally rot- and insect-resistant. Cedar. Redwood. Cypress. Fir. Then, in the 1970s, the price of wood soared. Cheap, plantation-grown southern pine became the construction material of choice. But it rotted and drew insects and fungus. It could be made to repel these with a formulation originally intended to prevent mines from caving in. So treated, it became known, euphemistically, as pressure-treated wood and, with this new name, entered the home building and construction trades. CCA-treated pine was promoted as an ideal framing material in spaces where dampness was a problem.

The word pressure refers to the way the mix of pesticides is applied to the wood. Pressure-treated lumber is made by placing a freshly milled board inside a vacuum chamber and sucking from its fibers all water and air. The pressure is then reversed so that copper, chromium, and arsenic are forced into the now empty cells. Pressure treatment is essentially a form of embalming. Chromated copper arsenate is 22 percent pure arsenic by weight.

Early concerns surfaced during the 1970s as faux-redwood, California-style decks became popular additions to suburban homes in the East and Midwest. Pressure-treated wood was an affordable material for their construction, and it was advertised to homeowners as such. This second marketing leap—from the building trades to weekend do-it-yourselfers—brought arsenic into the backyards of countless homes. It was as though a controlled substance, previously obtainable only through prescription, had become an over-the-counter drug recommended for all kinds of off-label purposes. A CCA deck right off the kitchen was a long way from telephone poles and coal mines. No one eats, barbeques, or sunbathes on the pesticidesoaked rafters of mine tunnels, and yet the backyard deck was specifically designed with such activities in mind.

In 1978, an increasingly concerned EPA began a special review of all arsenic-containing pesticides with the possible intent of revoking their registration. It was increasingly clear that CCA posed a cancer risk greater than the EPA’s risk criteria. The EPA’s review took ten years. During that time of regulatory inaction, the manufacture of pressure-treated wood increased by 400 percent, and its use expanded to other types of construction: including picnic tables, gazebos, and . . . children’s playgrounds.

During the 1980s, wooden, castle-style play structures, complete with towers and suspension bridges, became the rage. They were erected in school playgrounds, city parks, and day care centers. Almost without exception, they were constructed from pressure-treated wood.

In 1988, the EPA reached a decision: CCA was re-registered as a pesticide for wood; its use by the wood preservation industry would be allowed to continue. (However, by 1993, all other arsenic-containing pesticides were banned.) To address concerns about carcinogenic exposures from contact with the wood, the EPA recommended that pressure-treated wood sold directly to consumers via lumberyards and home improvement centers bear warning labels. The timber industry objected, proposing instead that retail stores distribute fact sheets to educate buyers about the wood’s potential hazards. The government agreed. And so, lumber departments of home improvement stores were provisioned with pads of tear-off sheets whose warnings often read like infomercials—touting the virtues of the product rather than describing its dangers to children who might play or eat on its surfaces. Moreover, many buyers were not even told about the availability of these consumer information sheets. Thus, almost no one in the general public was aware that pressure-treated wood contained pesticides. Nor that those sawing or sanding the wood should wear goggles and gloves. Nor that clothing that comes in contact with the wood should be washed separately. Nor that frequent, prolonged exposure to skin should be avoided. Nor that food should never touch it.

Signs of harm began to trickle in during the 1980s. Workers in wood treatment plants were found to have elevated levels of arsenic in their urine. A government employee became completely disabled after building picnic tables in an unventilated shop. Eight members of a rural Wisconsin family fell ill with a mysterious neurological disease that turned out to be arsenic poisoning caused by burning pressure-treated lumber in the wood stove.

In other words, CCA was granted a special exemption to hazardous waste rules. This decision allowed pressure-treated wood to be dumped in ordinary, unlined landfills rather than in hazardous waste landfills—even though the chemicals in the wood constitute hazardous waste (and did so even by the standards of the day). Had this sleight-of-hand exemption not been granted, the market for CCA lumber would have undoubtedly contracted. How many dads would have lined up to buy pressure-treated wood at the hardware store if they knew that they would have to pay hundreds of dollars in hazardous waste tipping fees once the kids outgrew the play fort?

Between 1970 and 1995, the production of CCA wood increased by fourteenfold. Meanwhile, the scientific case against arsenic became more damning. In 1998, the National Research Council reported that arsenic exposure through drinking water was linked to lung and bladder cancers and could exert its carcinogenic powers at much lower levels of exposure than previously believed. Children were shown to be at particular risk. Other discoveries followed, including the finding that arsenic interferes with glucocorticoid hormones.

Far from the lab bench, a Connecticut chemist, David Stilwell, began crawling around backyard decks throughout New England. In 1997, he reported that the soil under and around pressure-treated structures contained concentrations of arsenic far in excess of background levels, and, in some cases, far in excess of the clean-up standard for toxic waste sites. The amount of arsenic in the soil under the decks increased with the age of the wood: the older and more weathered the deck, the more arsenic leached out. He also found that he could wipe arsenic from his hands after running them along the vertical poles of children’s playground equipment.

In spring 2001, an investigative journalist in Florida, Julie Hauserman, followed up on Stilwell’s findings and published the results of her own investigation in an exposé headlined “The Poison in Your Backyard.” She collected soil beneath playgrounds in a five-county area and sent it to labs for testing. “Arsenic,” she wrote, “is leaking out of huge wooden playgrounds. . .. It’s leaking beneath decks and state park boardwalks at levels that are dozens of times—even hundreds of times—higher than the state considers safe. And discarded pressure-treated lumber is leaking arsenic out of unlined landfills . . . posing a threat to drinking water.”

Hauserman’s reportage was a cultural tipping point. Newspapers and television stations throughout the country followed up with investigative stories of their own. Two environmental organizations demonstrated that arsenic wiped off easily from the surface of wood purchased in retail home improvement stores. Levels ranged from 20 to 1,000 micrograms per 100 square centimeters, which is about the size of a four-year-old’s handprint. This was considerably more arsenic than the EPA allowed in drinking water. Moreover, the dislodgable film of arsenic that coated new wood also coated old wood. Investigations revealed that, as pressure-treated wood weathers and rain penetrates the cracks, arsenic dissolves in the raindrops and moves toward the surface.

In September 2001, the National Research Council announced that cancer risks from arsenic in drinking water were even greater than it had estimated two years earlier. Only 10 micrograms per day of long-term arsenic exposure in an adult were required to raise the lifetime risk of lung or bladder cancer to 1 in 300. It was easily possible that children climbing on arsenic-treated play structures were accumulating on their hands more than this amount.

Home from travel, I’d resumed daily life as a working mother, shuttling between my office at home and my office at Cornell. Jeff took the morning shift, dropping Faith off at school, and I took care of the afternoon pick-up. Glancing through the newspaper in the parking lot while waiting for Faith on a snowy Thursday, I noticed a story on toxic playgrounds. A school district near Rochester, New York, had decided to rip out its play structures after tests had found startlingly high levels of arsenic in the soil under and around them. The EPA was expected to make some kind of announcement within the next month about arsenic in the wood of these kinds of structures and the cancer risks posed by them. But the superintendent of this district wasn’t willing to wait. He wanted precautionary action.

And thus I was introduced to chromated copper arsenate. Except that it didn’t feel like an introduction so much as it did opening a door and finding an old and unwelcome face staring back. It felt like an unexpected visit from a bad ex-boyfriend. What are you doing here?

I am a bladder cancer survivor. Arsenic is a bladder carcinogen. That much I knew. Indeed, what had led me into the field of environmental health in the first place was my intimate experience with this particular disease and all the ongoing medical surveillance that it required. (Of all cancers, bladder cancer is one most likely to recur.) I had written an entire book about my life as a cancer patient and about the demonstrable evidence linking bladder cancer to environmental exposures. Having been diagnosed when I was barely out of childhood myself meant that childhood cancer risks were, for me, neither remote nor hypothetical.

I looked out at the nursery school playground where recess was in full swing. Three- and four-year-olds, including my own daughter, were charging back and forth along a wooden gangway, crawling through wooden tunnels, calling to each other from top of wooden towers, hiding behind wooden posts, climbing into a wooden boat, and rolling wood mulch and halfmelted snow into slushy balls. Right next to the wooden bridge was the wellhead for the nursery school’s drinking water.

Was it possible that the play structure was impregnated with known bladder carcinogens? It was difficult to believe. Lovingly erected by parent volunteers in 1987, the play structure was a jewel of community pride in little Ellis Hollow. And it was also a memorial site: a brass plaque dedicated the playground to the memory of Ed Rosenberg, a local father who had died unexpectedly. His own children had attended this school. Nestled in a grove of maples, the playground attracted kids in all seasons of the year. The previous summer I had watched a boy dressed only in swim trunks stick his chewing gum onto the banister of that play structure, eat a sandwich he had lain down on a stair rail, and, when finished, put the gum back in his mouth. I had laughed at his resourcefulness.

Back in my office, I dug into the scientific literature. The problem was that very little was known about the behavior of arsenic in the bodies of children. Nearly all the toxicology studies and occupational health studies had been conducted on adult animals or adult humans. Routes of exposure were also ill defined. In the case of children at play, transfers of arsenic first from wood to hand and then from hand to mouth were presumed the primary pathway of exposure, but quantifying these potential exposures—and then estimating cancer risk based on these numbers—was vexing work. Researchers at the University of Miami were currently investigating the issue.

How could we estimate the arsenic exposure of a child on a play structure? The answer seemed to hinge on how often the child put her hands into her mouth. This line of inquiry brought me to the arresting jargon about pediatric rates of hand-to-mouth interactions: 9.5 times per hour. And yet, this is just an average. It’s clear that very young children put their hands in their mouths far more frequently. The National Exposure Research Laboratory estimates eighty-one mouthing events per hour for children under the age of two (a statistic that, admittedly, included mouth and tongue contact with body parts other than hands). But, then again, the hands of older children had larger surface areas. But, then again, younger children were more likely to lick or chew on the wood. But, then again, older children had longer playtimes. But, then again, younger children did more “soil play,” and thus were more likely to inhale arsenic-contaminated dust. And what about children who eat dirt?

According to one estimate, the average five-year-old playing on a CCA play structure could exceed within two weeks the lifetime cancer risk considered to be acceptable under federal pesticide laws. The EPA had identified children in day-care settings with CCA decks and play equipment as high risk, especially if they also lived in homes with pressure-treated wooden decks.

Four-year-old Becca was Faith’s special friend in the nursery school. Becca’s mom was a research biologist. At the next afternoon’s pick-up, I shared with her the newspaper story I had read and the results of my research, and we immediately became co-principal investigators. Within a week, we confirmed that our nursery school playground was indeed constructed from pressure-treated wood; we gained the unanimous support of parents—and the wholehearted permission from the community center’s board of directors—to test the wood for arsenic leaching; we identified a lab certified to conduct chemical analyses; we gathered and submitted samples.

The results: All of the swipes of the playground equipment came back positive for arsenic, as did all of the soil samples. In all cases, the levels of arsenic greatly exceeded the naturally occurring background level for arsenic in New York soils—as well as the clean-up standard to which industrial sites in the state of New York are expected to attain. One soil sample collected near the slide contained 101 parts per million of arsenic. The clean-up standard for arsenic in the soil in the state of New York is 7.5. The mean arsenic level on the swipes collected from the surface wood, while somewhat lower than that reported for freshly milled boards, still exceeded 15 micrograms/100 square centimeters.

In February 2002, the EPA announced that backyard decking, picnic tables, and playgrounds could no longer contain arsenic: CCA’s registration for use in residential settings was hereby cancelled. In making this announcement—which was a reversal of its 1988 decision—the Agency noted that arsenic was a known human carcinogen. However . . . the ban on CCA would not start until 2004—two years hence—to allow the wood treatment industry to use up old inventory and find chemical alternatives. And, under the terms of the phase-out, the millions of preexisting wooden structures made with arsenic-treated lumber, like ours in the nursery school, would remain in service. No recall. No replacement. No testing. No recommended actions for removing the threat. Until it could complete an assessment of pediatric health risks, the agency simply advised that children should wash any exposed skin after contacting CCA play equipment.

Until the numbers came back from the lab, a sense of concerned unity bound us nursery school parents together. A Playground Committee was formed. Lines of communication were opened with the community center’s board. We learned that the company that had designed our playground happened to be located right here in Ithaca. Indeed, one of the company’s employees was a regular customer in the motorcycle shop owned by one of our fathers. From him we heard that the wood on our play structure had been sealed. Although no real data existed yet on whether or not painting CCA wood with sealant prevented it from sweating arsenic, we felt reassured. To be on the safe side, we consulted with an agent from the county cooperative extension office who suggested that we not only insist on handwashing after trips out to the playground but also eliminate playground snacks and wipe children’s shoes thoroughly before re-entry to the school. And so we did.

The playground was abandoned. Whether or not it had been previously sealed, it was clearly leaking arsenic. Until we could devise a more permanent solution, we moved the children out to the unfenced front field for outdoor play. This created crowdcontrol challenges for the teachers, so extra parent volunteers were recruited to help oversee recess, and those of us who could, signed up for tours of duty. But beyond this collective action, parents were at odds about what course of action to pursue. About half thought we should say nothing publicly because we risked shutting down our nursery school, putting two very good (and very underpaid) teachers out of work. The rest thought that speaking out was the only way to get the problem redressed and that knowledge carries with it the obligation to do something.

I volunteered to represent the Playground Committee before the community center’s board of directors. The meeting was a disaster. When I passed around copies of the lab results, they were quickly shuffled under stacks of other papers. No one even pretended to look at them. Instead, my remarks prompted board members to compare stories about their own backyard decks and reminisce about the erecting of swing sets. More than one person mentioned that his own kids had grown up on the nursery school playground. One board member expressed concern that the community center would be deemed a toxic site, as though the problem were not arsenic but people talking about arsenic. Replacing the play structure—one possible choice—was rejected out of hand as cost-prohibitive. The reverse-engineered conclusion seemed to be if we don’t have the money to remediate the problem, then it is not a problem.

A decision was made to run an appeal in the next issue of the newsletter calling for community volunteers to recoat the playground with sealant during the coming summer—how about June 9?—and replace the wood chips. Meanwhile, the board would await the release of the forthcoming EPA report, which promised to address the question of how much cancer risk pressure-treated wooden playgrounds posed to children. Who knows? Maybe the results would even prompt state grants to defray the cost of equipment replacement. In a subsequent newspaper story about our playground imbroglio, the president of the board said, “We don’t want to get too far ahead of the curve.”

As winter melted into spring and no good solution to our problem emerged, rancor among parents swelled. The lab results were a Rorschach test. The arsenic data—65.0 micrograms; 13.5 micrograms; 30.4 micrograms—were numbers onto which an individual could project a worldview. Some saw in these figures low exposures and negligible risks. Compared to the lab results from some of the other arsenic play structures that were in the news, ours were not the worst. These parents argued for playground restitution. They wanted their children to have daily play adventures, for which, after all, they’d paid good tuition money. They reminded the rest of us that daily physical exercise was important for child health—probably more important than worrying about arsenic. And anyway, it was just time to move on. The school was starting to receive inquiries from community members who had noticed that our children were no longer using the play structure. How would the resulting rumors affect recruitment of students for next year? “More attention should be paid to the consequences our decisions will have on the overall functioning of the preschool,” said Toby’s mom in a memo to the rest of us.

The only safe level of arsenic is no arsenic, countered those who saw in the numbers unnecessary danger. They didn’t want their children anywhere near the playground. To the accusation that they were alarmist, these parents pointed out that other communities had decided to replace their playgrounds on the basis of numbers similar to ours. Moreover, CCA wood was already banned for use in playgrounds in much of Europe, as well as Japan and Australia. They asked the others to remember how some of our children liked to splash in the water that pooled on the playground’s wooden decks, wipe dew off the railings, and race their small hands up and down the boards over and over. “I do know that our children are playing with carcinogens and I cannot get beyond this,” said Derrick’s dad in a memo to the rest of us. “I would really like to refocus the community on removing and working on replacement of the structure.”

At home, parents were consulting various Web sites and bringing in statements and studies that bolstered their position. By the end of March, no one appreciated receiving any more information from alternative points of view. After reporting that the San Diego and Bronx Zoos had initiated prohibitions on arsenic-treated wood, I was accused by one mother of comparing our children to zoo animals.

Through all this, the school’s two teachers remained neutral. Finally in April, they broke their silence and expressed their strong belief that children need unstructured, imaginative outdoor play and the opportunity to negotiate among their peers with little adult restriction. The fenced-off playground in its shady grove of trees had provided that. It was an integral part of the school’s built environment. The unfenced, unsheltered, wind-swept field, where the children were now exiled for an hour each day, did not. To play in a treeless expanse of grass required adults to supervise games and maintain boundaries. Moreover, with one group of parents insisting on playground right of return and another insisting on arsenic liberation—hey, why not just organize more field trips to the frog pond?—our nursery school, said its teachers, was becoming a house divided.

The president of the nursery school—Howie’s mom—called an emergency meeting. Parents were told to come ready to vote. Should we return to the playground or not? But when we were all gathered, the first item on the agenda was an unannounced Presentation of Research on the Potential Risk of CCA-Treated Wood. Behind the scenes, Ethan’s dad and Connor’s mom had quietly teamed up in an attempt to determine how much arsenic exposure our kids might be getting from one hour of daily play on the playground and then to evaluate the danger of that exposure. In the absence of any sort of government risk assessment, they had leaped into the breach and created their own. And now they were going to present their results.

Using parameters from an EPA document, the two co-authors plugged in some numbers for hand-to-mouth frequencies, calculated estimates for utilized amounts based on ingestion rates, and compared arsenic loading of hand swipes versus tissue swipes (taking into consideration potential nonlinearity in loading as a function of surface area). They then compared the number they derived for ingestion, corrected for bioavailability, with the EPA’s lowest observed adverse effect level and with estimated intakes from other sources.

From their equations and spreadsheets, they concluded that the health risks to our children from playground-derived arsenic were minimal. According to their calculations and the assumptions contained therein, exposures from the playground were less than exposures from other sources, such as food and water.

And this is how the parents of a rural nursery school, in the absence of any direction at all from their government, acted as their own regulatory agency. And, shortly thereafter, the vote was to return to the playground. Except for the families who refused. One of which was mine.

Well-informed futility refers to a particular kind of learned helplessness. It’s a term that was coined in 1973 by psychologist Gerhart Wiebe who was writing in an age when television had brought war into the living rooms of Americans for the first time. Wiebe noticed that a steady onslaught of information about a problem over which people feel little sense of personal agency gives rise to futility. Ironically, the more knowledgeable we are about such a problem, the more we are filled with paralyzing futility. Futility, in turn, forestalls action. But action is exactly what is necessary to overcome futility.

Just down the street from well-informed futility resides denial. According to contemporary risk communication expert Peter Sandman, we all instinctively avoid information that triggers intolerable emotions—such as intolerable fear or intolerable guilt. In the face of knowledge too upsetting to bear, there is nothing to do but look away. Well-informed futility and its inattentive neighbor, denial, especially flourish, says Sandman, when there are discontinuities in the messages we receive, as when we are told that a problem is dire (mass extinctions, melting icecaps) but the proposed solution (buy new lightbulbs) seems trivial. If the problem were really so dire, wouldn’t we all be asked to respond with actions of equivalent magnitude? So . . . maybe the problem isn’t so dire. Discontinuity provides an exit door.

Given this, I could understand why the initial solidarity among nursery school parents had fractured, why many parents just wanted to put the issue behind them, and why a homemade risk assessment that made our playground seem less threatening was so attractive. After all, if pressure-treated playgrounds were really so dangerous—I could imagine parents and teachers thinking—wouldn’t the EPA or the Consumer Product Safety Commission have demanded an immediate recall?

The discontinuities of arsenic were multiple. On the one hand, the federal government had placed arsenic on the top of its toxic Most Wanted List. Lethal, indestructible, and water soluble, arsenic was the Osama Bin Laden of hazardous waste. On the other hand, between 1964 and 2001, the government had allowed 550 million pounds of arsenic to be injected into lumber, much of which was used to build things that children would have intimate contact with—and it did so even after good evidence showed that the wood leaks and serves as a reservoir for toxic releases.

On the one hand, the government set allowable limits for arsenic in the soil of industrial and hazardous waste sites. These limits represented thresholds above which the risk for cancer was calculated to be more than negligible. Exceeding them triggered regulatory action. On the other hand, when they occurred in playgrounds and backyards where children reside, these same releases were ignored. Arsenic released from pressure-treated wood in residential spaces routinely exceeded allowable limits for industrial or hazardous waste sites—sometimes by one or two orders of magnitude. Yet the EPA had no allowable loss rates for arsenical chemicals from pressure-treated wood.

On the one hand, the government of Norway was so concerned about arsenic-treated wood that it had decided to remove it, along with the soil it had contaminated, from 40,000 schools and parks and from 6,000 day-care centers. On the other hand, my own government was leaving the problem for individual citizens to solve by themselves, and the unofficial recommendation for excessively worried people was to coat the wood with sealants. Indeed, that was the solution the community center was pursuing. Yet, there were no studies to demonstrate the effectiveness of applying sealants, and layers of paint did nothing to stop migration of arsenic into soil from underground posts.

I thought about that a lot. I also thought a lot about our nursery school’s well. The water our children drank and used to mix their finger paints lay beneath a leaking arsenic-filled play structure. Becca’s mom and I hadn’t thought to bring a tap water sample to the lab for analysis as part of our first-pass sampling, and the community board and the majority of parents were now adamant that further chemical testing was unnecessary. I could only hope that the high clay content of the soil was preventing the arsenic from migrating into the water table. There was a lot of wishful thinking going on.

And then there was the mother of all discontinuities: On the one hand, chromated copper arsenate was universally acknowledged to be wickedly hazardous. On the other hand, thanks to an administrative exemption that reclassified wood pumped full of chromated copper arsenate as non-hazardous, piles of old pressure-treated lumber enjoyed unlimited access to unlined landfills as though they were paper bags full of coffee grounds, broken crayons, and empty toothpaste tubes. And yet, if all the arsenic contained in the wood were extracted and placed in a bag, its disposal would require a call to a hazardous materials hauler.

Here, then, lay the real conundrum: What should happen to all the CCA wood out there when it finally reached the end of its usable lifespan? Pressure-treated lumber lasts a long time—twenty to fifty years—but it’s not immortal. Sooner or later, somebody was going to start falling through the floorboards of their deck, play structures were going to chip, crack, and warp, and the word demolition was going to be spoken out loud. Seventy percent of single-family households in the United States have pressure-treated structures of some kind. All together, those facts had to mean that, during the lifespan of my two children, hundreds of millions of cubic feet of pressure-treated lumber would be dumped in landfills, carrying within their splintery fibers thousands of tons of arsenic. Decks, fences, swing sets, picnic tables, treehouses—and all of the 1,000 or so large, community-built, pressure-treated wooden playgrounds now in service across the United States—will go there. So buried, they will pose unending threats to groundwater.

What would the alternative be? CCA wood certainly shouldn’t be burned in incinerators: the arsenic evaporates and enters the air and also creates highly poisonous ash. Mulching pressure-treated wood dramatically increases the leaching rate and is actually illegal (although it happens anyway because CCA lumber gets into the woodstream that finds its way to the chippers). And because of potential liability, there is little market for reuse. CCA wood, it seemed, violated every precept of sustainability. It was unrecyclable, unburnable, and uncompostable. It was dangerous to bury, dangerous to reuse, and dangerous just standing there, quietly shedding arsenic into the environment—although this last option might actually pose the least threat for the shortterm future.

Was it possible that the EPA’s odd decision to cancel CCA for new residential construction while doing nothing about CCA in preexisting residential construction was an unspoken acknowledgement of this exact predicament? Without a coordinated program to remove and safely encapsulate old decks and play structures, a recall would just trigger a rush to landfills and bring about a massive transfer of arsenic from the surface of the earth to a hole underneath the earth. Which could, some scientists were alleging, create even bigger threats to public health if aquifers became contaminated.

I was now futilely well informed. And here is where the growing fractures within our nursery school community extended into my own heart. I honestly didn’t know what should happen to our playground, and I couldn’t solve the problem on my own. I was not the nation state of Norway. No amount of fundraising would pay for its transport and disposal into a lined hazardous waste landfill. (Nor could I ever convince the neighbors that their beloved memorial to Ed belonged in a haz mat dump.) And it was possible that dismantling the playground and sending it off, board by board, to the regular landfill ultimately posed a bigger threat to children than letting it stand. Arsenic-contaminated drinking water is a far more efficient carcinogen delivery system than bridges and turrets—whatever one thought about all those micrograms of arsenic that Becca’s mom had so easily wiped from their wooden surfaces.

And yet, I could not watch my three-year-old narrate stories about herself while climbing around on a structure that contained carcinogens. Known carcinogens. Bladder carcinogens. It was my job to keep my children safe. Whatever I could do to prevent my daughter from entering the world of biopsies, ultrasounds, and phone calls from the pathology lab, I would do. It wasn’t even a choice. If I couldn’t remove the play structure from the community, then I would have to remove Faith from the community.

While reading through a mind-numbingly dense technical document on the regulatory history of chromated copper arsenate, I came across a curious detail: When the very last remaining use of arsenical pesticides was voluntarily ended—arsenic acid was prohibited from cotton agriculture because of unacceptable cancer risks to workers—its cancellation allowed for the sale of existing arsenic stock to the wood preservative industry for reformulation into “registered wood preservative products.” Otherwise known as CCA. The year was 1993, a boom time for CCA-treated playgrounds and backyard decks.

In other words, a chemical deemed too carcinogenic to be handled by adults was sold off to an industry for use in products that children would handle. Adults: large people with protective clothing and access to Material Safety Data Sheets. Children: small people who stick gum onto playground equipment and then put it back in their mouths.

So that was the deal? The sellers of arsenic acid lose their agricultural market but get to dump their poison into playgrounds like this one? Is that how it went down? Go ahead, stand over there on the mulch by the slide—101 parts per million arsenic, by the way—and tell me, the mother of a three-year-old, how I’ve got it all wrong.

I would say that I was experiencing an episode of intolerable rage. And the problem was not that it led me to inattentive despair but rather—obviously enough, I guess—that the person with whom I needed to have an intolerably enraged chat was not identifiable to me. I think this is the place where a lot of parents find themselves. It’s not that we’re not paying attention to the environmental threats surrounding our children, it’s just that the web of causation and responsibility is so complicated that we don’t know how to navigate it or where to focus our actions. Or it becomes navigable only in hindsight after the damage is done.

By contrast, when chains of custody are clear—and public safety agencies are responsive—knowledge about potential dangers to our children can be a source of power for parents rather than a source of impotence. For example, even as I was getting ready to wave the white surrender flag from the top of a pressure-treated castle tower, I was successfully addressing another menace, about which I was equally well informed but feeling far less futile. It involved a dog.

A quarter mile from us along our road was an A-frame back in the woods where a revolving collection of young adults lived with a revolving collection of dogs, all of them unneutered males with Nazi-sounding names. Periodically, there were drug busts. Periodically, their dogs came into our woods. I once mistook one of their Rottweilers for a black bear.

And one afternoon that same dog chased me up onto my own porch and then lunged at me through the screen door. So I invited one of the young men in the A-frame over for a conversation. We stood on the porch, and I explained my problem, baby in arms, Faith clinging to the back of my skirt. And when he smirked and said something flip, I found myself saying, in a voice I had never heard myself use before, If your dog so much as touches my children, I . . . WILL . . . TAKE . . . YOU . . . APART.

The first draft of the EPA’s promised risk assessments was released in late 2003. It provisionally concluded—in contrast to the homemade one presented at our parents’ meeting—that children who frequently play on pressure-treated wood experience, over their lifetimes, elevated cancer risks. The extra deaths could be as many as five per 10,000 children exposed, but there was debate about the validity of setting threshold doses. The Consumer Product Safety Commission reached a similar conclusion in a 387-page report.

Refinement of the mathematical model used to calculate the number of children who would eventually get cancer from contact with CCA wood continued in 2004. The problem was the “considerable uncertainty associated with quantitative estimates of children’s arsenic exposure from CCA-treated wood.” Specifically, there was a need to refine estimates of hand-to-mouth transfer, skin absorption, and gastrointestinal absorption. To assess children’s exposure to arsenic from wood preservatives, the EPA developed the Stochastic Human Exposure and Dose Simulation model. A complicated formula was developed to estimate the number of micrograms of arsenic per square centimeter of a child’s palm. This parameter was called handloading.

In 2005, the EPA reported the results of its sealant study. The good news was that sealants could—by a factor of ten—reduce levels of dislodgeable arsenic on the surface of a deck. The bad news was that arsenic rebounded to its original level after a period of several months. Moreover, the tests were conducted in Maryland and North Carolina; the results were not applicable to regions with freeze-thaw cycles. The following year, a science advisory panel concluded that “many uncertainties exist with regard to using surface coating or sealant studies to estimate reduction of dislodgeable arsenic.”

In a 2010 survey of playgrounds in New Orleans, researchers found arsenic concentration in soil under pressure-treated wood play structures at 57 parts per million—nearly 40 times higher than background levels. Quoted in an editorial, lead author Howard Mielke said, “If we want to protect our children, don’t expose them to toxics. If we find arsenic in the environment, we should deal with it directly.”

There is little doubt that some number of children will die from cancers acquired from playing on arsenic-treated playgrounds and backyard decks. But after a decade of study, we still don’t have a good estimate of what that number of cancers is, except that it could be as high as one in 10,000 for highly exposed subgroups and is almost certainly greater than one in a million. One in 10,000 does not include cancers other than bladder and lung, cancers caused by exposures to mixtures of chemicals of which arsenic is just one contributor, or other diseases like diabetes and stroke in which arsenic also plays a role.

The difference between death by drowning and death by low-level arsenic exposure is timing. As any water safety expert will tell you, child drownings are silent and swift. One minute you’re talking to a toddler in the kitchen; the next minute he’s face down in the pool. By contrast, arsenic requires 20 to 45 years to cause cancer. By then, nobody remembers daily recess in the nursery school castle or the paper doll parties out on the deck. The long lag time between exposure and onset of disease—together with the fact that lots of things other than arsenic cause lung and bladder cancers—means that the cancer patients created by pressure-treated wood are anonymous. We can’t name the dead, and we can’t name those responsible for the dead. But the suffering will be real.

It’s worth thinking about what we are willing to do to protect our children from potential harm and why. When do we take precautionary action and when do we just shrug our shoulders and hope for the best? And how are these actions judged? When I enrolled Faith in Red Cross water safety classes and spent my Saturday mornings sitting in the bleachers at the pool, I was seen as a good mom. When I brought data on arsenic contamination into the community center, I was seen as alarmist. (Actually, I believe the adjective was hysterical.)

Finally, it’s worth revisiting that fundamental parameter around which working parents orbit: convenience. In this fastpaced world of ours, so goes the dominant narrative, trace chemical exposures are the price we pay for convenience—whereas the items in the sustainability bin trend toward time-consuming and inconvenient. But CCA wood offers no such trade-off. It manages to be both unsustainable and terribly inconvenient.

Here, from Pediatrics for Parents, is a partial list of safety tips for homeowners with pressure-treated decks and play structures:

• Wash hands thoroughly with soap and water immediately after touching the wood.

• Keep a towel by the door for children to wipe their feet on after they have played on the equipment or walked on the deck.

• Wear gloves and a mask when sawing or sanding the wood. Safely dispose of all sawdust.

• Avoid bringing sawdust indoors.

• After working with the wood, thoroughly wash exposed areas of the body.

• Don’t allow children or pets under the deck.

• Till the soil near the play equipment and deck and cover with clean topsoil or virgin mulch.

• Seal the wood annually.

• Launder clothes separately.

After reading through the list, I looked out the sliding glass window at the arsenic-treated planks of our deck, with all the irksome inconveniences they generated. Beyond them stood living trees, whose cells contained sap, not poison. They would not rot in the rain. They would not necessitate disposal in a hazardous waste landfill. They required none of my time. No towels. No handwashing. No gloves or masks. And one of them looked like a pretty good climbing tree.