A cancer survivor traces her family's three diagnoses to environmental toxins, uncovering how synthetic chemicals and radiation have driven childhood cancer rates from near-zero to a leading killer. Eco-grief becomes fuel: women-led movements prove collective action can reverse the damage.
So, when I was 35, my life completely changed. I was diagnosed with cancer. Hodgkin's disease. But not only that, my mother had died the year before with cancer. Lymphoma. And 5 years before that, my father had died with a brain cancer. A metastasis from melanoma. So, you can imagine I was devastated and reeling. But more than that, I was 35 and I hadn't yet had children. And I really, really wanted to be a mom. And the chemo that I would undergo would reduce my chances of having children by 50% and given my age, I felt pretty doubtful about it and I was really, really upset. So, whether I would survive or have children, I was just devastated. Three cancers in a family of five. I couldn't understand it. So, I I went through the chemo and let me tell you, it was brutal. And while I was going through it, I'm a researcher, so I wanted to understand what were the reasons for this cancer in my family? What was going on? So, I read a lot. I read Rachel Carson and her work on DDT in which she looked at the connections between chemicals, synthetic chemicals, and cancer. I read the work of Theo Colburn who also looked at chemicals and the connections to cancer. And I read the work of Alice Stewart who in the 1950s did this study. And she found that one single x-ray to the womb doubled that child's chances of developing cancer. I also found out some interesting things. I found out that one in four men will get cancer in their lifetimes. One in five women. And I found that childhood cancers which were practically non-existent before the 1950s when we started using all these chemicals and radiation and polluting our environment, didn't exist, but then suddenly it spiked. And today, second to accidents, it's the leading cause of death in children. Nearly 16,000 children will be diagnosed with cancer every year. So, I'd go into my chemotherapy treatments armed with all this information and lots of questions. And I would ask my oncologist, "Are you seeing more cancer over the years?" And he would say, "Yes." And I asked him, "Do you think it's related to environmental pollution?" And he would say, "Yes." So, I finished the chemo and my cancer went into remission. And yes, I'd have to go in for appointments to be checked and there was a secondary cancer they had to worry about from the chemo, which was leukemia. So, I was going in pretty often, but I still really, really wanted to be a mom. It was what I wanted more than anything in the whole world. So, for 2 years I worked with an infertility specialist. And lo and behold, I got pregnant. And I was thrilled. My My daughter's father was so happy and it was just a really joyous time for us. We could put some of that grief behind us a bit. And then one night, I was pretty pregnant and I was in bed and there's a storm raging outside and I'm reading a book called A Civil Action by Jonathan Harr. It's a story of a childhood leukemia cluster in Woburn, Massachusetts. Now, if anyone's pregnant out there, I recommend you do not read this book. Not a good idea. I went into quite a panic, as you can imagine. I literally threw the book across the room. I started crying and crying and wailing because I realized, no matter how good I'd been, and I was good. I ate only organic food. I ate practically all vegan. I made sure that I used nothing toxic on my body. I had We had no cleaning products in our house that were toxic. We were so careful, or so we thought. But in that moment, I realized there was no way to keep these toxics out of my body. Because scientists now know that all that stuff, all that pollution, it crosses the placenta. And babies today are born with hundreds of chemicals in their bodies. So, I'm I'm weeping. I'm crying. I'm wailing. And not just for me, but for everybody. Because it wasn't about and it isn't about my cancer or my family's cancer or my baby. It's about all babies everywhere and everyone. Because this is affecting everybody and all biotic life. And it's not just chemicals and radiation. It's climate change. It's natural disasters. It's water issues. It's species extinction. It's deforestation. I mean, it's so vast and I felt so overwhelmed with grief. I felt what I now call eco grief. Psychologists are even recognizing this. They call it eco grief. For all that tremendous sadness that we're living with and I I found it unbearable. Now, I'm not one to sit and grieve for long. I'm a doer. Anyone who knows me knows this. I'm a pretty busy person. So, I got busy and I started thinking about the women I studied when I was sick. Rachel Carson, the mother of the American environmental movement, right? Lois Gibbs, a housewife who's called the mother of the Superfund Act because she found toxic hazardous chemicals in it in Love Canal. And she fought with other mothers and other activists and this led to the Superfund Act. So, now places are required to clean this up. The EPA goes after them. It's an act. I found Wangari Maathai, a Nobel Peace Prize winner from Kenya who has reforested She's passed away now, but she's a Nobel Peace Prize winner and she has a She had a movement and has a movement that's still active called the Green Belt Movement. Reforesting tremendously all over Africa and an inspiration to others around the world. I found Vandana Shiva, a seeds rights activist and a water activist and an activist for farmers in India. I found Petra Kelly, the co-founder of Germany's Green Party Movement. Well, look at Germany right now. It's a leader in green activism and and renewable energy. It's It's It's a country that's really at the forefront of where we need to go for climate abatement. So, I found lists and lists of these women. Peggy Shepard, who's in New York City working really hard to protect black children from environmental pollution. So many women. I couldn't possibly list them all now. Well, this information was so empowering to me. It really helped me lift that eco grief. And then I started to teach a class called eco feminism. And in this class, we looked at these women and we looked at the issues going on in our environment and the different ways that they acted. We looked at the science. We looked at the literature. And I started to write about it. Well, my daughter's now 9 years old and we go into New York City. I live in Long Island. We go into New York City and we have lunch with an old family friend of my mother's, Phyllis. And we're sitting in a restaurant and it's really, really noisy and there's my healthy daughter, 9, and we're all having a nice conversation, family family gathering. And Phyllis says to me, "So, Heidi, what are you working on these days?" And I said, "Eco feminism." And she said, "Eco feminism? Well, you must know that story about myself and Sal, our other family friend, and your mother. Women Strike for Peace. Women Strike for Peace." Now, I'd never heard of this and I certainly didn't know this story about my mother and her friends. Let me step back a minute. Now, my mother in my mind was pretty much, you know, your typical 1950s housewife. I mean, yeah, she did a few things, but she was this brilliant woman who didn't live up to her potential, so I thought. She was under my dad's shadow and she raised the kids and that's the way women were then and I kind of felt bad for her. So, Phyllis goes on to tell me, "In the 1950s, there was a nuclear arms race between the US and the USSR. And these countries and others were detonating nuclear bombs above ground, nuclear test bombs. And right here in the US, they detonated hundreds and hundreds of them in the Nevada desert. And radiation was spreading clear across the US. It didn't just stay in Nevada. And some of that radiation was strontium 90. Strontium 90 was getting into children's bodies. It acts like calcium in the body. The body thinks it's calcium. So, there was a study called the St. Louis Baby Tooth Study. And these scientists gathered baby teeth from all over and they did find in fact that there was strontium 90 in this baby in the baby teeth. So, mothers organized across the US, 50,000 of them. Now, remember, this is the time before social media, before Facebook, before Twitter. Even making a long distance phone call was a big deal. So, that 50,000 women could organize across the country in this grassroots way was pretty phenomenal. And the head of this organization was Dagmar Wilson, a very good friend of my mother's friends and Bella Abzug, the future congresswoman. They organized. And they organized something called Women Strike for Peace Lobbying Day. And 15,000 of them went to Washington and they lobbied and they marched and they talked to their senators and they It was an amazing, amazing thing. Well, three of those 15,000 was my mother and her friends. They left their kids at home, not done in those days to leave the kids for the dads to take care of, and they took the train and they went and they marched and they lobbied. Well, guess what? The result of this was the partial nuclear test ban treaty in 1963. The USSR was on it, the US was on it, and England. This blew my mind. When Phyllis told me this story, I got chills. It It was as if the whole restaurant went quiet. All I could see was my mother and her friends and these women and what they'd done, and I couldn't believe it. My mother had done this, and what an amazing thing to do. Think about it. All that radiation no longer spreading across the planet for all these years. What an incredible feat. Mothers, mostly stay-at-home, white, middle-class mothers organized this movement. I felt myself healed. I felt that eco-grief lift off of me. It was just an amazing moment. I can't even tell you. So, now I go home and I am obsessed with nuclear history. Okay, I was writing this book on eco-feminism and suddenly now I have to include nuclear history in it. I didn't even know of this piece of it. So, I'm watching every film probably that's ever been made since 1945 on nuclear history, reading everything I can. I am deeply immersed in it. It's of winter. It's dark out. I wake up and I'd look up in the afternoon and miss picking my daughter at the school bus cuz I was so obsessed with this information. And guess what? Three nuclear meltdowns in Fukushima. Nuclear power plant meltdowns. Well, I'm riveted. Um I couldn't believe it, and I kind of could cuz there were a lot of things that suggested Japan's very seismically active place, not necessarily the best place to put a nuclear power plant, and I'm watching I'm watching the stories, and a few months later a group of mothers comes to New York City to speak about what's going on in Japan and the issues with their families and their children and their concerns. And I went into New York to hear their talks. And I heard unbelievably heartbreaking talks. One mother, Sachiko Sato, an organic farmer, six children, had to whisk her children in the night from their farm. Big family farm, this is her life. School on the property, teaching kids forever. Gone. Can't go back there. The kids her children spoke. They told their stories, how hard it was to never go back home, to not be at school, to not be with her friends, to lose their bedrooms. So, I heard these stories and I became really, really taken with them. And I began including them in my book and writing about them in other places and recording them. And after they left, I continued this recording and talking and interviewing through Skype. And in one of my Skype interviews with Aileen Mioko Smith, who's a leading green activist in Japan, who's been working on this issue and anti-nuclear issues for many, many years. She's the author or co-author of the Minamata book and had gone and interviewed people at the Three Mile Island after the partial nuclear meltdown there. And she came back to Japan and she became active in the '80s. And she told me in all these years she's been going around talking to women's groups, and every time she does, she says, "If Women's Strike for Peace could do it, we can." Well, I again I I can't believe this. I The chills are up and down my body. I I I I'm just overwhelmed. I Again, that eco-grief is just lifting. And I see this connection between my mother and all the mothers here and all the women doing all this work around the world, and I see it clear across to Japan. And I feel these women's arms linking, and men too, cuz lots of men are involved with this work. Linking, linking across Asia, India, Europe, South America, US, South Pacific, Australia, all the countries in the world with all the amazing women and men doing this work. And I felt the power of these stories and the retelling of these stories and how important it is for us to know them and to see the incredible things they've done and are continuing to do and how they pass these stories down. Now, I want to say something for a minute. I'm sure you're feeling like, "You know, I don't want to hear about climate change and pollution and cancer." And you've got your blinders on, and you would just like me to stop right now. I know a lot of people feel that way about all these problems, but remember, I understand. I had my blinders on, too. When I got pregnant, I knew about all the chemicals around us. I already knew there were 254 Superfund sites where I lived and all the chemicals leaking and leaching and I knew all about the 70,000 plus spills. I knew all about the plumes. I knew all of that, and I didn't want to think about it. I just wanted to be a mom. I just wanted to have a good pregnancy and enjoy my life a little bit and not be worried all the time. But I read that book. I read A Civil Action, and the blinders flew open, and I couldn't close them. And then I felt eco-grief, and it hurt, and it was hard, and I did well, and I did cry, and it was difficult. But it led to something else. It led to a call to action. It led to actually lifting that eco-grief. I want to ask you for just one moment because I know you feel it. I know as closed as you might be and don't want to know, there are those moments when you see that image of that polar bear on a little piece of ice and you hear that tick, tick, tick of the clock, and you know. You know, there's not much time. And when you hear about the the rhinoceros, no more. They're They're just about extinct. Elephants, look what's happening to them. Lions are about to be extinct. I know you feel heartbreak. It's impossible not to, and you might shut it down, but deep down you feel that heartbreak. So, I'm going to ask you for just a moment, try to leave those blinders open. Just try. And feel that grief. Feel it. Because when you do, you will be called to act. And then you will join us. And then we will fix this thing. Thank you.