Over a decade ago, I read a very remarkable book, Living Downstream: An Ecologist Looks At Cancer And The Environment by Sandra Steingraber. As a young woman, Steingraber was diagnosed with cancer. It was not that surprising, since there was a history of cancer in her family.
Just one thing, though. Steingraber was adopted.
That key biographical is the turning point away from the conventional cancer treatment establishment, and toward an ecological understanding of cancer that rreveals how all of us are “living downstream” from the unconscious poisoning of entire planetary ecosystem. The book has now been turned into a movie, which is beginning to be shown on the festival circuit. Here is the trailer for the film:
And here is a brief presentation by Steingraber at the 2008 Bioneers conference, the final passage of which is transcribed below:
I believe our grandchildren will look back at us now and marvel that our economy was once dependent on chemicals that were killing the planet and killing ourselves, and they will think of it as unthinkable.
Now I am willing to concede the point that this environmental human rights movement that I am betting on is less an evidence-based prediction than a mother’s fervent hope that my children will never have to fear the phone ringing on a Sunday afternoon, and it’s bringing bad news from the pathology lab.
I am willing to admit that this bet is a wish that my children will grow up in a world with a functioning jet stream and some ice caps and a few coral reefs and some octopi for my daughter to write her first book about, and some honeybees to help my son the farmer grow some apples. It’s a wish that his polar bear Halloween costume not outlast the species.
Wishful or not, I am not willing to be wrong about this bet. Because my children’s lives are inextricably bound to the abiding ecology of this planet, which is worth everything I have. An environmental human rights movement is the vision under which I labor, from which I am not free to desist, and which may, if we all work together in concert, become a self-fulfilling prophecy. May it be so.
This is the business we need to be about. And it is so far beyond the business that preocupies Versailles that is almost impossible to think that we are living on the same planet, much less in the same country.
Because, in fact, we are not.
For information on screenings and events, go here.
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