Foreword

IN ALTON, Illinois, downstream from the river town where I grew up, the abolitionist Elijah Lovejoy was pumped full of bullets on a dark November night by a mob intent on silencing the man once and for all.

On this evening, they succeeded.

By dawn, Elijah was dead, and his printing press—the means by which he distributed his radical ideas—lay at the bottom of the Mississippi River. The year was 1837. The Reverend Lovejoy was buried on his thirty-fifth birthday.

But the story doesn’t end here.

Almost immediately, membership in antislavery societies across the nation swelled. Vowing to carry on the work of his fallen friend, Edward Beecher, president of Illinois College, threw himself into abolitionist efforts and, in so doing, inspired his sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe, who went on to write the most famous abolitionist treatise of all: Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Meanwhile, Elijah’s brother, Owen Lovejoy, turned his own house into a station along the Underground Railroad. Owen went on to win a seat in Congress, and, along the way, befriended a young Illinois politician by the name of Abraham Lincoln.

These facts impressed me as a child.

Reading Reverend Lovejoy’s biography as a grown-up mother, I find other things impressive. Such as the fact that, at the time of his assassination, Elijah had a young family. And yet, in the weeks before his death—when it became clear that the terrorist mob pursuing him was growing bolder by the hour—he did not desist from speaking out against slavery. While all around me is violence and tumult, all is peace within. . .. I sleep sweetly and undisturbed, except when awakened by the brickbats of the mob. So declared Elijah in one of his final speeches.

Truly? With a pregnant wife in the bed next to him and a one-year-old son in the next room? He wasn’t worried?

A letter to his mother in Maine tells a more nuanced story:

Still I cannot but feel that it is harder to ‘fight valiantly for the truth’ when I risk not only my own comfort, ease, and reputation, and even life, but also that of another beloved one.

And then there’s this poignant aside:

I have a family who are dependent on me . . . And this is it that adds the bitterest ingredient to the cup of sorrow I am called to drink.

Here’s something else that I’ve noticed while reading his words. To the slave owners and murderous thugs, Elijah spoke calmly. He reserved his fierce language for the members of the community who gladly lived in the free state of Illinois but wished to remain above the fray: the ones who added their signatures to a resolution asking him to cease publication of his newspaper and leave town but would not sign a resolution that urged protection of law against mob rule; the ones who agreed that slavery was a homicidal abomination but who feared that emancipation without recompense to slave owners for loss of property would be socially destabilizing; the ones who believed themselves upstandingly moral but who chose to remain silent about the great moral crisis of the day.

They included fellow clergymen.

 

In Raising Elijah I call for outspoken, full-throated heroism in the face of the great moral crisis of our own day: the environmental crisis. And, because the main victims of this unfolding calamity are our own children, this book speaks directly to parents.

In fact, the environmental crisis is actually two crises, although they share a common cause. You could view it as a tree with two main branches. One branch represents what is happening to our planet through the atmospheric accumulation of heat-trapping gasses (most notably, carbon dioxide and methane), and the other branch represents what is happening to us through the accumulation of inherently toxic chemical pollutants in our bodies. Follow the first branch along and you find droughts, floods, acidifying oceans, dissolving coral reefs, and faltering plankton stocks. (The oceans’ plankton provides half of our atmospheric oxygen supply. More on this in Chapter 6.) Follow the second branch along and you find pesticides in children’s urine, lungs stunted by air pollutants, abbreviated pregnancies, altered hormone levels, and lower scores on cognitive tests.

The trunk of this tree is an economic dependency on fossil fuels, primarily coal (plant fossils) and petroleum and natural gas (animal fossils). When we light them on fire, we threaten the global ecosystem. When we use them as feedstocks for making stuff, we create substances—pesticides, solvents, plastics—that can tinker with our subcellular machinery and the various signaling pathways that make it run.

Biologist Rachel Carson first called our attention to these manifold dangers a half century ago in her 1962 book, Silent Spring. In it, she posited that “future generations are unlikely to condone our lack of prudent concern for the integrity of the natural world that supports all life.” Since then, the scientific evidence for its disintegration has become irrefutable, and members of the future generations to which she was referring are now occupying our homes.

They are our kids.

I mean this in the most basic of ways. When my son, at age four, asked to be a polar bear for Halloween, I sewed a polar bear costume—and I did so with the full knowledge that his costume might easily outlast the species. No other generation of mothers before mine has ever borne such knowledge—nor wondered if we should share this terrible news with our children. Or not. It’s a novel situation. Indeed, according to the most recent assessment, one in every four mammal species (and one in three marine mammals) is now threatened with extinction, including that icon of Halloween itself: the little brown bat. Thus, animal costumes whose real-life correspondents have been wiped from the Earth may well become commonplace.

This leads me to wonder: What will we say when our grandchildren ask us the names of the departed? When bats, bees, butterflies, whales, polar bears, and elephants disappear, will children still read books about them? Will they want to dress up as vanished species? Or, by then, will the loss of favorite animals be the least of their worries? (Talking with children about environmental devastation is the topic of Chapters 7 and 8.)

At the same time, chronic childhood diseases linked to toxic chemical exposures are rising in prevalence. (These receive my close attention in Chapters 1, 3, 4, 6, and 9.) Here are a few of the current trends:

• 1 in 8 U.S. children is born premature. Preterm birth is the leading cause of death in the first months of life and the leading cause of disability. Its price tag is $26 billion per year in medical costs, special services, and lost productivity. Preterm birth has demonstrable links to air pollution, especially maternal exposure to fine particles and combustion byproducts of the type released from coal-burning power plants.

• 1 in 11 U.S. children has asthma, the most common chronic childhood disease and a leading cause of school absenteeism. Asthma symptoms have been linked to certain ingredients in plastic (phthalates) as well as outdoor air pollution, including traffic exhaust. The annual cost of childhood asthma is estimated at $18 billion. Its incidence has doubled since 1980.

• 1 in 10 U.S. children has a learning disability, and nearly 1 in 10 has attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder. All together, special educational services now consume 22 percent of U.S. school spending—about $77.3 billion per year at last count. Neurodevelopmental disorders have significant associations with exposures to air pollution, organophosphate pesticides, and the heavy metals lead, mercury, and arsenic, among others.

• 1 in 110 children has autism or is on the autism spectrum. Annual costs are $35 billion. Causes are unknown, but exposure to chemical agents in early pregnancy is one of several suspected contributors.

• 1 in 10 U.S. white girls and 1 in 5 U.S. black girls begin breast development before the age of eight. On average, breast development begins nearly two years earlier (age 9) than it did in the early 1960s (age 11). A risk factor for breast cancer in adulthood, early puberty in girls is associated with increasing body fat as well as exposure to some hormonally active chemical agents. We have no cost estimates for the shortened childhoods of girls.

All together, asthma, behavioral problems, intellectual impairments, and preterm birth are among the “new morbidities of childhood.” So concludes a federally funded investigation of pediatric environmental health. Ironically, by becoming so familiar a presence among children, these disorders now appear almost normal or inevitable. And yet, with an entirely different chemical regulatory system, farm bill, and energy policy, their prevalence might be much reduced. While environmental factors are not the only cause of the problems named above, they are unquestionably contributing to them, and they are preventable. The fact that we do not identify and abolish hormone-disrupting, brain-damaging chemicals to which children are routinely exposed raises profound ethical questions. As the authors of the pediatric environmental health investigation rightly point out:

In the absence of toxicity testing, we are inadvertently employing pregnant women and children as uninformed subjects to warn us of new environmental toxicants. . . . Paradoxically because industry is not obligated to supply the data on developmental neurotoxicity, the costs of human disease, research, and prevention are socialized whereas the profits are privatized.

In the absence of federal policies that are protective of child development and the ecology of the planet on which our children’s lives depend, parents have to serve as our own regulatory agencies and departments of interior. Already maniacally busy, we are encouraged by popular media reports to read labels, consult Web sites, vet the contents of birthday party goody bags, shrink our carbon footprints, mix our own nontoxic cleaning products, challenge our school districts to embrace pesticide-free soccer fields, and limit the number of ounces of mercury-laced tuna fish consumed by each child per week.

Thoughtful but overwhelmed parents correctly perceive a disconnect between the enormity of the problem and the ability of individual acts of vigilance and self-sacrifice to fix it. Environmental awareness without corresponding political change leads to paralyzing despair. And so, eventually, we begin to discount or ignore the latest evidence for harm. We feel helpless in the face of our knowledge, and we’re not sure we want any more knowledge. You could call this well-in formed futility syndrome. (Chapter 2 does.)

And soon enough, we are retreating into silent resignation rather than standing up for abolition now.

 

In Raising Elijah I seek a path out of that despair. This book is not about shopping differently. Indeed, it rejects altogether the notion that toxicity should be a consumer choice. Instead, it seeks the higher ground of human rights in which to explore systemic solutions to the ongoing chemical contamination of our children and our biosphere. And because I believe that stories move us to action more than data alone, the scientific evidence is strapped to the hood of an autobiographical tale that begins with the birth of my son and spans the first nine years of my life as a biologist mother of two. Once I chronicled interspecies relationships in a central American rainforest; now I seek to understand the complex habitat of my own household. (Readers who seek more technical detail will find it in the Source Notes at the end.)

Throughout these chapters, I discover that the domestic routines of family life with young children—however isolated and detached from public life they seem—are inextricably bound to the most urgent public health issues of our time. Bedtime snacks are linked to global systems of agricultural subsidies. Sunburn at the beach is linked to the stability of the ozone layer, which, in turn, is threatened by particular pesticides used in the production of tomatoes and strawberries. Risks for asthma are related to transportation and energy policies. The highly explosive raw materials used for manufacturing my kitchen floor pose demonstrable threats to national security. The rabid bat I capture in the kids’ bedroom reveals the precautionary principle in action as an enlightened public health policy. The proposal to shatter the shale bedrock of our rural county and extract from it natural gas reveals the abandonment of that same principle (Chapter 10).

And through these various explorations, two epiphanies emerge:

One: Current environmental policies must be realigned to safeguard the healthy development of children and sustain planetary life-support systems on which their lives depend. Only within a new regulatory framework can parents carry out our two most fundamental duties: to protect our children from harm and provide for their future.

Two: Such a realignment necessitates emancipation from our terrible enslavement to fossil fuels in all their toxic forms. In other words, as Elijah Lovejoy exhorted his fellow citizens when encouraging them to imagine a U.S. economy no longer dependent on the unpaid labor of people held as property: It’s time to “show a spirit of freedom.”