Take Action for Women's Health this Mother's Day!
Honoring great women leaders for environmental health, plus some ideas from Toxic Free NC for a healthy, happy Mother's Day.

Women often lead the charge for environmental health, justice and sustainability in the US and around the world, perhaps in part because they are affected differently than men by toxic exposures.

In this Toxic Free NC Action Alert, you'll learn more about how toxic pollution in our environment affects women's health, and about the lives of some great women who are inspiring change around the world.

We've also got some great ideas for celebrating Mother's Day with your mom this weekend.

Have a happy, healthy Mother's Day!

Honor women's health this Mother's Day!

Get Inspired: Read about the lives of Rachel Carson, Rashida Bee, Sandra Steingraber, and some of the other great women working for health, justice and sustainability around the world.

Take Action: Mother's Day ideas that protect women's health and the environment.

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Women Leaders for Health & The Environment | Gift Ideas for Mother's Day

Great Women Leaders for Health & The Environment

Women are leading the charge for environmental health in the US and around the world, perhaps in part because they are affected differently than men by chemical exposures. Exposure to pesticides, for example, has been linked to higher risk for breast, uterine, cervical, ovarian and vaginal cancers. At the same time, female reproductive disorders such as infertility, miscarriage and endometriosis are on the rise in the US, and the vast majority of those who suffer from Multiple Chemical Sensitivity are women.

A wide variety of published studies on laboratory animals and wildlife have connected exposure to environmental pollutants like pesticides to cancer and reproductive disorders. Long-term epidemiological studies suggest that environmental exposures are affecting human cancer rates, as well. Women from industrialized countries have higher rates of breast cancer, and women from countries with low breast cancer rates who then migrate to industrialized places acquire higher cancer rates within a generation or two. More research is certainly needed to better understand the consequences of having 80,000 synthetic chemicals in our environment (1). But women are not waiting for the results of those studies before implementing preventive measures to protect their health, and taking action to ensure a safer future for our daughters.

The lives and activism of Rachel Carson, Rashida Bee, Sandra Steingraber, Theo Colborn, and Vandana Shiva show us that protective measures are not enough; women not only need to get informed about how the environment affects their health, they need to get politically active.

Rachel Carson
(1907 - 1964)

Photograph: Erich Hartmann/Magnum
Courtesy of Resurgence Magazine

"It is a wholesome and necessary thing for us to turn again to the earth and in the contemplation of her beauties to know of wonder and humility."
- Rachel Carson

May 27, 2007 marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Rachel Carson. A zoologist disturbed by the high use of synthetic chemical pesticides after World War II, Carson reluctantly changed her study focus from the ocean to the long-term effects of pesticides, and was one of the first scientists to sound the alarm about the dangers posed by man-made chemicals. In her 1962 book Silent Spring, she described how persistent chemicals were contaminating the natural world, and documented how those chemicals can accumulate in our bodies.

Carson was attacked by the chemical industry and some in government as an alarmist (“hysteric” and “communist” were also used), but courageously spoke out to remind us that we are a vulnerable part of the natural world subject to the same harm as the rest of the ecosystem. Testifying before Congress in 1963, Rachel Carson called for new policies to protect human health and the environment. She died after a long battle against breast cancer. Her ground-breaking book Silent Spring initiated the environmental movement in the USA, and she continues to inspire new generations. (2)

Together with Champa Devi Shukla, Rashida Bee is at the heart of the campaign to hold Dow Chemical accountable for the 1984 Union Carbide methyl isocyanate gas leak tragedy in Bhopal. Official Indian estimates recorded a death toll of 22,000. (3) In addition, more than 300,000 people suffered injuries. (4) Rashida Bee lost her husband and her father was injured. Defying the Muslim tradition, she was forced to get a job to support her family. “I met so many women in the same situation. Many had debts because of the disaster. Almost all faced starvation because the men could not work.”

She met Champa Devi Shukla, a Hindu, while working at a stationery factory in 1986, where they founded an independent women’s union to fight for better labor conditions and wages. The campaign was a success, giving them the confidence to seek justice from the chemical giants responsible for the disaster.

Dow Chemical, which merged with Union Carbide in 2001, says the case was resolved in 1989 when Union Carbide paid $470m in a settlement with the Indian Government.

Rashida Bee
(b. 1956)

Champa Devi (left) and Rashida Bee accept the 2004 Goldman Environmental Prize for excellence in grassroots environmental change. Photo courtesy of the Goldman Environmental Prize.

"We are not expendable. We are not flowers offered at the altar of profit and power. We are dancing flames committed to conquering darkness and to challenging those who threaten the planet and the magic and mystery of life."
- Rashida Bee in her acceptance speech for the 2004 Goldman Environmental Prize

But most survivors have received less than $500 of those $470m compensation payout, which has been mired in Indian bureaucracy and other delays. The two women assert that the disaster is still killing and injuring thousands of people a year through poisoned groundwater. In 2004, they received the prestigious Goldman Environmental prize for their battle on behalf of the victims of Bhopal. Bee and Shukla are still fighting, through hunger strikes, and protests at Dow shareholder meetings. Bhopalis are seeking cleanup of the toxic waste in their community as a result of the disaster, and medical care for the 20,000 affected survivors. Before the disaster, Ms. Bee was illiterate. “I knew nothing of the world outside until the day of the disaster. It changed my life.” (5)

Sandra Steingraber
(b. 1959)

Sandra Steingraber and her daughter, Faith, from the cover of her book, Having Faith, an ecologist’s journey to motherhood

"(...) The contamination of breast milk infringes on a child’s right to safe food and security of person. It violates a sacred communion. The breastfeeding relationship is said to be the strongest of all human bonds. It shouldn’t also represent a toxic transfer from mother to infant."
- Sandra Steingraber, discussing the contamination of breastmilk with pesticides and other chemicals

In her 20’s, Sandra Steingraber developed bladder cancer. She was not alone: in several of her books, she describes an apparent cancer cluster in her hometown. (6) After her cancer went into remission, she completed her undergraduate degree in biology, worked several years as a field researcher, and eventually earned a doctorate in biology from the University of Michigan.

Steingraber draws damning connections between environmental pollution and cancer. Women born between 1947 and 1958 are three times more likely to get breast cancer than their great-grandmothers were at the same age. Sandra Steingraber keeps Rachel Carson’s spirit alive when she says “It’s impossible to live safely in a toxic world. It’s not about creating your own little survivalist bubble in which you think you can live safely – you can’t.” In her book Having Faith, an ecologist’s journey to motherhood, she sees her body as the “first environment,” one affected by all the contaminants that are in the outside environment. She hopes that her book will convince mothers that the best way to protect our children is to keep industrial poisons out of the environment in the first place. “We have to get political” is her message. (7)

Theo Colborn received her Ph.D. in zoology at age 58. By then, she had raised four children while working as a pharmacist. In the 1970s, she began to see disturbing patterns of illness in the six Colorado communities where she worked, and tracked the source of the community’s health to its water quality. As a researcher, Colborn studied the impact of pollution on wildlife in the Great Lakes, and found disturbing problems in the animals she studied: cancer, reproductive failures, genital deformities, thyroid malfunctions, behavioral anomalies and immune suppression. She was able to track all these health problems in wildlife to pervasive toxic pollution in the Great Lakes, and began to think about whether those same pollutants might be affecting humans.

In 1991, Colborn organized a conference to discuss her hypothesis that all those problems could be the result of damage to the endocrine system. Endocrinology is the science of hormones, the chemical signals that manage the organism’s most vital functions. Hormones tell the ovaries and testes how to make eggs and sperm, tell the lungs how to breathe, the intestine how to digest, and the heart how to pump.

Theo Colborn
(b. 1927)

Photo courtesy of OurStolenFuture.org

“Think of how many billions we’ve spent on cancer research. If these chemicals threaten our ability to reproduce, then we ought to be spending at least as much money on understanding how they work and whether we need them to get out of our environment. If we can’t reproduce, whether we get cancer or not is a moot point."
- Theo Colborn (8)

If hormones cannot do their job properly, the consequences are legion, some subtle, some disastrous. The conference’s participants, world-class scientists from across many different fields, agreed that man-made chemicals had the potential to disrupt the endocrine system of animals, including humans, by mimicking the activity of a hormone, by blocking it, or through other mechanisms, and that many wildlife populations had already been affected. They named that class of chemicals “endocrine disruptors.” (8) That story and the results of the research that followed are described in Colborn’s book (with John Peterson Myers and Dianne Dumanoski), Our Stolen Future. (9)

Vandana Shiva
(b. 1952)

photos by Linda Wolf
Courtesy of The Teen Talking Circle Project

“The purpose of the state is to limit the power of corporations for the public good, not limit the power of the public for corporate good.”
- Vandana Shiva speaking at the Slow Foods conference in Tierra Madre, Italy, Fall 2006.

Vandana Shiva was originally trained as a physicist. Shiva participated in the nonviolent Chipko movement in India during the 1970s. The movement, whose main participants were women, adopted the tactic of hugging trees to prevent their felling. (10)

She later founded Navdanya, the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology, which works to “protect nature and people's rights to knowledge, biodiversity, water and food.” The organization works primarily with rural farmers in India, and its programs support organic farming, saving seed and protecting biodiversity, and fair trade.

Reading one of Vandana Shiva’s books and many articles is like receiving a crash course on the effects of globalization, the links between development, democracy and corporate power, and the need for everyday people to get involved.

1. From: http://www.thegreenguide.com/docprint.mhtml?i=110&s=reprohazards (verified 05/01/2007)
2. From Linda Lear Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature (1997), www.rachelcarson.org
3. From http://www.indiatogether.org/2004/apr/env-goldman.htm
4. From http://www.thenation.com/doc/20040524/hertsgaard
5. From http://www.pro-environnement.com/blogs//rasheeda-bee-une-femme-indienne-debout,626.html
6. Sandra Steingraber, Living Downstream: an Ecologist Looks at Cancer and the Environment. (1997) Addison-Wesley.
7. From Liza Gross, Rachel’s daughter at http://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/199909/rachels.asp
8. From Gay Daly, Bad Chemistry: Hundreds of man-made chemicals- in our air, our water, and our food- could be damaging the most basic building blocks of human development, in On Earth magazine, vol. 27, number 4, winter 2006. http://www.nrdc.org/onearth/06win/chem1.asp
9.Theo Colborn, Dianne Dumanoski, John Peterson Myers, Our Stolen future Are we threatening our fertility, intelligence, and survival? – A Scientific Detective Story (1996)
10. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vandana_Shiva

Rachel Carson (1907 - 1964)

Sandra Steingraber (b. 1959)

Theo Colborn (b. 1927)

Vandana Shiva (b. 1952)

Rachel Carson
(1907 - 1964)

Sandra Steingraber
(b. 1959)

Theo Colborn
(b. 1927)

Vandana Shiva
(b. 1952)