"Living Downstream" by Sandra Steingraber

This book was my favorite read for our care for creation class. In this book, Steingraber looked at the possible environmental causes of cancer and how they affect the quality of our lives. At the same time, she interweaved her own story of battling with cancer as well as other stories of people with cancer. I like that she did this because it made it a more interesting read--notjust about the sciencey stuff, but about real experience too.

This book really opened my eyes to the things that we as humans do to the earth that we are given charge of taking care of--sometimes without even realizing it. Sometimes though, the possible negative impacts of what we are doing are realized and are just ignored, with horrible affects on people and the land and animals and creation in general. Weed-killers like DTZ are an example of this, where we saw the negative impacts but ignored them and did it anyway.

This type of study is so hard because, as Steingraber wrote, "decades can transpire between the time of exposure to cancer-causing agents and the first outward symptoms of disease" and "When someone we love is diagnosed with cancer, questions of cause are often of less immediate relevance than questions about treatment" (27). It's also hard I think because we've been taught that cancer is something that "just happens." It is true that we all have genes in our body that are more susceptible to cancer than others (as Steingraber also points out in her book) and I think cancer is often pushed aside as something we can't control. When my children ask why some people have cancer, like their grandmother who died from pancreatic cancer, I myself even explain it away as something we don't have an answer to. The question then becomes, what are we doing in our world that could be adding to the amount and kinds of cancer that we live with on a day to day basis but just explain away as some unknown phenomenon.

At times when I was reading this book I felt my attitude change to a rather pessimistic one, thinking that there isn't anything I can do without increasing my chances for cancer. I can't go outside because who knows what fertilizers are being put on my grass and I can't breathe in the outdoor air because of the car exhaust in the atmosphere and so on and so on. But while this is a thought I may have had from time to time, the book reminds us that there are things that we can do, however small, anything at all is helpful at this point.

All in all, this book told me to open my eyes to the world around me and stop pushing away the illnesses we have in this world. I don't know that we can ever reconcile what has happened to this point, but closing our eyes to the matters at hand definitely isn't helping us at all either. I feel more aware of the world around me after reading this book.