Toxics and Environment

For almost three decades, I have been writing about how how toxic chemicals in consumer products we use at home affect our health, but I had never written about how the toxic chemicals we use in consumer products  affect the environment. Nor had I written about how we are exposed to toxic chemicals in the environment beyond our homes.

Indeed, indoor air quality studies continuously point out that the air inside our homes is much more polluted than the air outdoors, leading us to focus on the pollutants in our homes and ignore the toxic chemicals we are exposed to outdoors. 

But the truth is, the entire Earth now is polluted with toxic chemicals—every breath of air, every drop of water, every handful of soil, and everything that lives within the ecosystems of Earth.

In my new book, Toxic Free, I began to write about our toxic environment for the first time, for two reasons. One, because the environment IS a source of everyday toxic exposure that affects our health and, two, our use of toxic chemicals in our daily lives is killing the ecosystems on which our very lives depend.

I wrote about

• How Toxic Chemicals Harm the Environment
• How Toxics in the Environment Can Damage Your Health, and What You Can Do to Protect Yourself
• How You Contribute to Toxic Pollution in the Environment, and What You Can Do to Reduce Your Toxic Impact
• Community Action

It's a bit of a different viewpoint than is usually stated, as it assumes we humans are all interconnected with the environment, both in what we give to it and what we receive from it, rather than human health being considered as an issue separate from the environment.

I'm starting this website with one page and some links, to establish a place where I can write more on this important subject.

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An excerpt from my book Toxic Free...

Since this is a book about how toxic chemicals can make you sick and what you can do to get well, why is there a chapter about the environment?

Because toxic chemicals in the environment are damaging the environment itself, polluting the air, water, and soil that sustain ecosystems, and altering or killing many species. And even though we spend 90 percent of our time indoors, we are still exposed to enough polluted air, water, and soil in the environment for them to be sources of toxic chemical exposures that can damage the health of our bodies.

For me, the environment isn't "out there" somewhere. I live in it, and what I do to it—for better or worse—directly affects my own health and well-being. Without the Earth, we would have no air to breathe or food to eat or houses to live in. So, for me, the health of our bodies is completely dependent on the environment.It's all one system of life. We must safeguard and protect the environment at large in order to safeguard and protect our own bodies.

We need look no further than Rachel Carson’s groundbreaking book Silent Spring for evidence that the Earth is contaminated with toxic chemicals that are damaging both planet and people.

From 1940 to 1960 some 200 pesticides were created to kill insects, weeds, rodents, and other organisms considered to be “pests.”

The first manmade pesticide was DDT, introduced to control malaria and typhus during World War II. DDT was so effective that it was made available to farmers in 1945. In 1973, DDT was banned due to its toxic effects to human health and the environment.

In 1962, Miss Carson wrote of these pesticides

They have entered and lodged in the bodies of fish, birds, reptiles and domestic and wild animals so universally that scientists carrying on animal experiments find it almost impossible to locate subjects free from such contamination. They have been found in fish in remote mountain lakes, in earthworms burrowing in soil, in the eggs of bird—and in man himself. For these chemicals are now stored in the bodies of the vast majority of human beings, regardless of age. They occur in the mother’s milk, and probably in the tissues of the unborn child.

This situation also means today the average individual almost certainly starts life with the first deposit of the growing load of chemicals his body will be required to carry henceforth.

Silent Spring beautifully describes the many ways toxic chemicals were, and still are, destroying life—from contaminating surface waters and underground seas, poisoning the soil, disturbing plant communities, silencing songbirds, tainting fish, polluting air, and fouling our food supply, to sickening humans, disrupting fertility, and causing cancer. A grassroots uprising followed the publication of her book, and our modern-day environmental movement was born. Born to protect the environment from toxics. Yet still, almost fifty years later, there are more and more toxic chemicals, and damage to our health and the environment continues.

At the time Silent Springwas written, toxic pesticides were already widespread in the environment, and in the bodies of every living organism, from humans in urban areas to Antarctic penguins. My body, and your body.

And many millions of tons more toxic chemicals of all kinds have been added to our environment since.

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Next year it will be fifty years since Ms Carson first wrote about toxics and toxic products are still being made and sold and used. 

Fortunately we now have many nontoxic products we can use and we know of ways we can remove toxic chemicals from our bodies but the earth can't go on a detox program, the whales and the butterflies can't take detox drops. 

We need to create a world where toxic chemicals are the exception rather than the rule. And wherever another alternative exists, we should all be using it. Now.

I love to hear from my visitors with any comments, questions, or feedback, so please feel free to write to me.

Debra Lynn Dadd