This is the first piece of a new series featured on The Pump Handle. New Solutions, A Journal of Environmental and Occupational Health Policy, is taking their work from the world of print to an online medium, posting once-monthly blogs about environmental and occupational research, activism, advocacy, and campaigns. To read more about New Solutions: The Drawing Board, click here.
Dear readers,
We are Alice and Philip Shabecoff, authors of Poisoned Profits—The Toxic Assault on Our Children (Random House, 2008), a book about the effects of everyday toxins on the health of American kids. We are reaching out to you, who engage with the fields of environmental and occupational health as professionals, students, concerned parents, and/or active community or union members, to ask for strategies to motivate and kick-start a public health movement to create a healthier and more sustainable society. What can be done to get through to ‘the people’? How can we capture attention away from “America’s Top Model” and break through the stranglehold of industry PR? We look to you—policy makers, researchers, community activists, professors, doctors, union leaders and members, concerned parents, interested students—to brainstorm and help lead this movement. What can be done to not only inform, but also effectively enrage so that tangible action occurs, and occurs soon?
On the assumption that you are knowledgeable and creative, and that you do not easily give up just because the fight is difficult, we write to ask your ideas, opinions, and advice.
The American people as a collective entity are undeniably faced with many heavy burdens: the rising cost of health care; the funding of several foreign wars; a dismal unemployment rate. Yet while these issues all make for burdened minds and lives, this reality has not spurred the American public to action. Troubled as we are, we’re doing our best to hold down a good job and raise a happy family and pay our bills with the goal of being good and normal, but without the inclination to push boundaries, without the desire to rock the boat, without striving to make a difference.
As lifelong researchers, writers, and activists, we observe that it is becoming increasingly difficult to move the public on progressive issues. The plethora of problems marring health care reform is indicative of our country’s move to the right. A dwindling active anti-war movement in the face of U.S. troop increase abroad and the steady move towards radical conservatism not only in the Republican party, but among Democrats as well, gives already beaten-down liberal politics and actions a death blow. Even efforts to combat global climate change are failing, despite the enormous media and political attention it has gained and disregarding its importance to every human being on earth.
Our purpose for writing Poisoned Profits was to light a flame under parents, to incite action. Since one out of three children in this country suffers from an environmentally-triggered chronic illness, we thought there would surely be a large response at the grassroots family level.
Yet despite dire statistics and the irrefutable knowledge that our homes, communities and schools are daily poisoned with harmful, even life-threatening chemicals, we heard from just a few dozen parents directly. We did discover quite a few who had organized their communities to protest against local pollution and more who had made their families’ ways of living more healthful, but a larger outpouring, the kind of response engendered in the 1970s, just didn’t happen.
Yet we do see some hope for and interest in change. While our political leaders all but discarded a single-payer option from day one of health care reform, polls indicate that a majority of the country’s citizens are in support of some sort of Medicare for all. In spite of Obama’s troop surge in Afghanistan, an increasing number of Americans are against the continuation of this war, as well as the occupation of Iraq. People from all parts of the political spectrum are enraged over billion-dollar bank bailouts at taxpayers’ expense. Labor-neighbor coalitions and blue-green alliances are bringing seemingly disparate people together to fight for environmental and social justice; campaigns are taking place across the country to ban the use of Bisphenol A (BPA) from childrens’ products; community gardens and bike co-ops are sprouting up in small towns and big cities, encouraging healthier lifestyles. Lastly, we cannot deny meaning of the election of the first African American president upon a grassroots, progressive platform.
With this hope, New Solutions, A Journal of Environmental and Occupational Health Policy, is teaming up with the esteemed public health blog The Pump Handle in creating an on-line forum. New Solutions: The Drawing Board will support a dialogue to:
- Discuss environmental and occupational health research, writing, and organizing;
- Brainstorm how we can disseminate and use the knowledge and tools acquired in classrooms, through studies, on the job, and on union shop floors to harness and energize a larger movement;
- Ensure that the issue of environmentally-damaged children and other environmental and occupational health issues gets the attention that we know is necessary to achieve change;
- And work together to organize effective actions, such as consumer boycotts, rallies and protests, and community media.
Through The Drawing Board, we encourage you to share your ideas, inspirations, successes, and roadblocks, so that we may all learn from and work with one another in creating effective change.
With hope, and in solidarity,
Philip and Alice Shabecoff
Authors, Poisoned Profits—The Toxic Assault on Our Children
The Pump Handle 
9 comments
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March 3, 2010 at 11:11 pm
Chuck Levenstein
From Myra Donnelley:
Tammy Miser’s reposting of your call to action showed up in my FB newsfeed today.
I am tired of yelling at my television during Race for the Cure ads (I hate Breast Cancer Awareness Month pinkwashing with a passion) – “You want a cure? How about PREVENTION? How about we don’t cure toxic chemical poisoning with more toxic chemicals?” Alas, there is only my cat there to agree with me. And she will agree with me about anything as long as I keep feeding her.
You are right. There is a lot of information out there, and people know things are “bad”, but how to build widespread awareness, support demand for change and build political will to face down corporations that have been allowed to run riot in the name of free markets and profits for more than three decades?
Media consolidation at the top has given us the distracting and inane un-reality shows you lament, newspapers have cut investigative journalism in a last-ditch bloodbath of cost containment as they watch their profits circle the drain, and our digital nation has driven and supported fragmentation and balkanization at the net/grass roots of our society. Progressives are no longer working together. Forget that, PEOPLE are no longer able to perceive their shared interests across sectors and work together on anything. And as Americans, we all seem to believe that simple, easy answers that are cost and sacrifice-free are .
Why, for example, do the parents of children with autism, who were so active and vocal around the “perils” of vaccination (undoing decades of progress in communicable disease eradication), not realize that perhaps they were on the right track, but pointing in the wrong direction. Why have they not become alarmed and active about the total chemical exposures of themselves and their children that surely MUST have some impact on healthy brain development. Something is attacking their children’s neurological systems, but maybe it is not JUST ONE THING. Maybe it is the total environment we currently live in, maybe it is a constellation of triggers within that environment (and by “maybe” , I mean, hello, of course it is – we just don’t know exactly what they are yet.).
The bad news is: a simple solution to complex problems does not exist.
When Bill Moyers produced and aired “Trade Secrets” in 2004 there was tremendous (and very well-funded) push back from the petro-chemical industry. Our food, air, water, homes and workplaces are all toxic – permeated with chemicals. We have lost so much ground since the 1970s that it is impossible for most individuals to imagine how they could ever even think of making a difference. So they watch American Idol and “vote” for their favorite “star” to win.
Regulatory agencies are an emasculated joke and only beginning to recover from the damage done to oversight, regulation and remediation under Reagan, Bush, Clinton (yes, him, too) and most egregiously, Bush II. And demanding accountability means we all have to admit to ourselves that we allowed this to happen, that we, too are to blame for what was allowed to happen in our name and on our watch.
There may yet be another “Silent Spring” or even an “Inconvenient Truth” that momentarily grabs the American public’s attention, but until we make a case that it is in Labor’s interests, shareholder’s interests, government’s interest, healthcare’s interest, parents’ interests, big agriculture’s interest and even the petrochemical companies’ interest to give a rat’s ass we are spitting into the wind.
No, today, it is much more important to prove that the President is an illegal immigrant who was born in Kenya. And is a Muslim and a racist who hates white people. And that everyone should carry a Bible and a gun.
April 11, 2010 at 8:10 am
Karla Armenti
I commend the Shabecoffs for bringing attention to the constant assault of chemicals on our bodies, especially our children. In response to what we might do to spark a revolution (yes, that’s what we need), I can’t help but think that perhaps we are being too cerebral about it all. It’s funny that Chuck brought up the image of young “wanna-be famous” singers on American Idol. I have always told anyone who will listen that, we need to hop on the bandwagon and produce our own reality shows that highlight these issues in a way that makes it personal to those who are watching, and in a way that infuses into our populace an understanding of the limitations of our political system to protect us….(without them knowing we are doing this). A couple of shows come to mind: 30 Days by Morgan Spurlock, which covered (right, it’s no longer on TV) the experiences of two completely opposite minded people when they have to spend 30 days with each other (one good episode was the hunter who had to work with a group that helped protect young cattle in CAFO’s) and the current program, Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution. While these programs aren’t exactly what we need, they do address difficult issues in our society that haven’t been addressed in mainstream “Hollywood-style” media before. And kids love these shows….start the revolution with them.
I could be way off, and I certainly haven’t formulated any detailed thought about what our first reality show might be….but this is where the people are (unfortunately). It’s a captive audience, and maybe there’s a more important message we can give them than being a famous singer should be a young person’s major goal in life!
March 4, 2010 at 9:41 am
Chuck Lvenstein
Ralph Nader, interviewed on Democracy Now:
So I’m going to make a specific proposal. There are a number of enlightened, advanced-age billionaires in this country who’ve got to take a portion of their fortune—like Jerome Kohlberg is an advocate for clean elections, he retired some years ago from the giant mergers and acquisition firm Kohlberg Kravis—and put about $250 million into organizing every congressional district, 2,000 people in a district, two full-time organizers per district, zero in on the Senate and the House, and get these legislations through, including a good energy bill, a good single-payer bill, and, of course, financial regulation, after the greatest corporate crime and speculation move, wave, in our history. So we have to talk about these solutions.
Everybody has been documenting the corruption of the Senate, the paralysis of the Senate, the indentured status of the Congress to corporate power. We now have to move to the next stage and try to persuade a Ted Turner or a Warren Buffett or a Jerome Kohlberg or a William Gates or somebody to organize the people back home to take control of their Congress. We’ve got the solutions. We’ve got the public sentiment. As Abraham Lincoln once said, you can do anything with public sentiment. We don’t have the organized people and the voters focusing on their senators and representatives.
March 7, 2010 at 2:55 pm
Craig Slatin
Thanks to Philip and Alice for starting this dialog with the friends of New Solutions. And thanks to the Pump Handle (Celeste and Liz) for giving us the space for this, and to Mara Kardas-Nelson for taking on the work of a New Solutions blog.
As an author of a book, I recognize Philip and Alice’s frustration that their excellent telling of the story of our polluted environment has not generated more movement action. Oh, to be fortunate enough to release a book at just the right time so that like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring it ignites the political fuel that prior to that was not obvious.
You ask the question of how we can break the stranglehold of corporate hegemony to reach “the people.” You duly note the many major social burdens that the U.S. has been unable to remedy – exclusion of more than 80 million Americans from affordable access to good quality healthcare; having to pay in lives and dollars for imperialist wars; and the massive closing of employment options as our collective wealth is concentrated in the hands of a small percentage of the population rather than used to create full employment. You note that the resistance to the corporate social and economic agenda seems so limited and that although across the nation you found examples of action to protect their health and the environment, a broad-based movement as was seen in the 1970s has not emerged. Like V.I. Lenin asked nearly a century ago, you pose the question “What is to be done?”
Personally, I think that we would do well to build and establish a national “People’s Party” that would work to elect candidates at the local and state levels and create the foundation for gaining control at the level of the federal government. The barriers against this in the U.S. are enormous and I won’t go into them or even propose how they can be overcome, because frankly, I don’t know. I do believe though that a party that brought together the movements of labor, women, civil and human rights, public health, environment, peace and justice, and all the rest of the progressive forces in the country would be able to establish a new progressive era for this country. That party would need to be internationalist in its orientation and welcome those who have emigrated to the U.S. and work and live here without benefit of legal protection, usually taking on the hardest and most dangerous jobs that help sustain the nation’s still high standards of material living. And that party would need to have a platform that supports primary prevention of chronic diseases through pollution prevention and a transition to sustainable and democratic modes of production and consumption.
You also ask how we can create the charged activism of the 1970s. I teach at a public university. I see in students the beginning of a new era with that charge. We may see a new kind of new and old left divide emerge – the younger generation’s activism may look a bit different from what the older generation thinks is needed. On the other hand, as Linda Rae Murray said several years ago at an APHA meeting – there are a lot of former organizers who are going to retire soon and have lots of time on their hands to be organizing again. If we join with the young, we can become quite powerful.
But, aside from that, the environmental activism of the 1970s created a mainstream movement that remains strong and in place, even though bureaucratically challenged and far too removed from what used to be its grass roots. It also established the foundations for today’s blue-green alliances. Your book points to the local environmental justice efforts in Port Arthur, TX. That kind of work is going on in communities across the country in an environmental justice movement. The EJ movement needs much stronger support from the mainstream, and we on the labor health and safety side need to work to bring in a work environment justice movement by uniting with the emerging network of workers’ centers. There is grass-roots environmental activism in place throughout the country. It is fighting air pollution in Detroit and Los Angeles, among countless other places, and herbicide use for power line ground maintenance on Cape Cod. There is an exciting green economy movement growing throughout the U.S. that is developing small projects to combine green jobs with poverty eradication and growing local fresh food.
A note in closing this, a network of COSH and environmental groups is working with scientists and a worker health and safety training group at the University of Massachusetts Lowell to develop and deliver training that can establish a network of green chemistry advocates in Massachusetts and Connecticut. Federal stimulus funding for building a green economy is supporting this (from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences Partnerships for Environmental Public Health program). The project will tie in with green jobs efforts in California and in states where the United Steel Workers union is providing similar training to its members. The projects are limited in scope and duration, but they build on existing blue-green alliances. The curriculum will be available for free download by the end of Summer 2010.
Thinking about this, I am reminded of Tony Mazzocchi’s steady call for a union “cents-per-hour” fund to support independent union health and safety training that could build a strong health and safety movement. Regardless of the many obstacles to bringing workers to training and education programs, labor history provides us many examples of successful efforts here and in other countries where popular education has led to successful progressive action. I’d love to see the unions and large environmental groups in the Blue Green Alliance commit to taking dues money to support a national blue green education program. Who knows what could come from that? But, it would be exciting to find out. And, maybe the Shabecoff’s excellent book could be an important resource for that effort.
Craig Slatin
Editor, New Solutions, A Journal of Environmental and Occupational Health Policy
March 10, 2010 at 11:25 am
david egilman
The companies do not have organizers. They have culturally dominant hegemonic ideas and that is how they win.
This is no random occurrence. Rush Limbaugh & Grover Norquist cite Gramsci & Lenin. The think tanks of the right push ideas and use PR not organizers. We have no resonant framing & we do not work together to develop a framing.
We do not have a tobacco institute or society of the plastics industry. We do not have a Burson-marsteller or Hill & knowlton showing us the way.
Even on health care the opposition repeats simple statements – gov control, death panels, shove it down our throat – over and over again. There is nothing comparable on our side. We use complex constructs and intellectual arguments (books – no one reads books or articles). I and others have reviewed some corporate techniques. we must copy the ones that do not involve lies.
http://www.ijoeh.com/index.php/ijoeh/article/view/275/236
March 16, 2010 at 12:11 pm
Paul Morse
A colleague of mine mentioned that one of the frustrating aspects of cleaning up hazardous materials like asbestos, lead and PCBs in buildings is that each usually gets dealt with separately in terms of regulatory action. I think that Alice and Phil touch on this in a bigger way when they list the myriad of major problems facing people in our world today. We often get divided by the individual struggles we wage to get by in this society, to care for our families, and to secure our place in a troubled world. The enormity of injustices hammering down upon us is overwhelming.
I would posit however that there is a movement of diverse movements happening that is making a significant difference in promoting meaningful change at all levels of society and across the globe. It often does not seem that way because the obstacles can be so great, the problems so pervasive and the levels of corruption in the media, politics and industry eternal.
I took time one evening to read over about 6 articles that I’d printed off progressive blogs over the previous week that I hadn’t yet got to reading. The titles are interesting: Rise of the Superbugs: Why We Are Increasingly at Risk from Anti-biotic-Resistant Diseases, Finance Superstars Talk About the Massive Fraud in Our Economic System, Are Veterans Being Given Deadly Cocktails to Treat PTSD?, GE’s Dirty Green Jobs, and finally Les Leopold’s Why Are We Afraid to Tax the Super-Rich?
I think that this small sampling of articles is indicative of our diverse struggles and they should induce a constructive rage in all of us. Les’ piece which raises fundamental issues about our collective need to radically address the devastating shift of wealth over the last 50 years leads us to an answer. He states that the “400 people who do so well on tax day have a combined net worth of nearly $1.37 trillion” (an average figure of $343 million each) and probably paid a lower tax rate than most of us reading The Pump Handle. Yet their wealth rose 16% over the past year while 29 million people in the U.S. are without work or forced into part-time jobs. Representatives of the industries profiting from the problems cited in the four articles above (industrial food production, banking and finance, pharmaceuticals and big energy) are no doubt among the 400 who make up that $1.37 trillion figure.
“If we had progressive taxes that reduced their wealth to a trifling $100 million each, we’d have enough money to set up a trust fund whose interest could provide tuition-free higher education for students at every public college and university in perpetuity. Imagine that,” Leopold adds.
It is critical that we all embrace the concept of shifting the discussion of our federal budget process from expenses to income. The prevailing ideology in the U.S. over the last fifty years has put people who care about the well-being of the majority on the defensive; as if we are all utopian and naïve. But, the consequence of not doing this is that we continue to fight separate struggles over the crumbs that get allotted to further the causes so important to us. The time is right. We can all continue these struggles but it has to be tied to an overarching campaign for fair budgets and a more equitable distribution of wealth. If each person who is active on the particular issues of his or her individual concern added their voice, vote, activism and economic decision-making to a coordinated campaign for economic justice, our advances would be extraordinary.
March 16, 2010 at 3:53 pm
Mara Kardas-Nelson
David and Paul–
Thank you so much for your comments. You both touch on the very important question–one that is central to The Drawing Board–of how do we actually build a sustainable movement that positively affects the world? David, you posit that we simply do not have the tools at our disposal that “big interests” such as business and right-wing campaigns have learned to harness so effectively. Given that these methods do have such a profound impact on the American population at large, what specifically can we learn from them, other than to recognize that for the most part “our side” isn’t there? Given that environmental and occupational health movements are primary made of organizers, researchers, and community members–and not, as you say, big industry PR–what can we do to work against such powerful interests?
In the same breath, how do we follow Paul’s suggestion of forming a more cohesive, comprehensive movement that focuses on the economy, environment, health, education, and other important issues? Can we learn from these other tactics in order to do so?
Movements have long looked to one another in order to inform their own work. I’m currently reading Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King’s Last Campaign by University of Washington professor Mike K. Honey. Honey does a brilliant job of demonstrating the intersections and overlap of the labor and civil rights movements in the 60s, and how this partnership–while troubled at time–was also essential to the success of the Memphis strike. At the time of his death, MLK was intent on bridging the divide between the anti-war movement, anti-poverty movement, civil rights work and unions. Was he being overly ambitious, or dead on? Is the goal of such a broad, over-arching social justice movement attainable, or just a pipe dream, and one that could detract from each individual issue?
-Mara
Editor, The Drawing Board
March 17, 2010 at 3:47 pm
Richard Clapp
I was one of the people who reviewed Poisoned Profits when it came out. My review was included in a Pump Handle post dated Sept. 30, 2008 and updated Oct. 2, 2008. In response to the Shabecoff’s call for dialogue on the lack of “uptake” I’d offer the following: First, the book came out in the middle of the Presidential campaign which took precedence over most other issues that Fall and into the next Winter. Then, the economic issues began to swamp all other concerns (including global climate change, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and practically everything else). And currently, the Tea Party movement is the dominant social movement and the health care debate is grabbing the attention of lots of health-oriented activists. As the saying goes, “timing is everything,” and I think the Shabecoffs were the victims of events beyond their control and beyond the ability of anyone to re-focus or re-prioritize. I said before in 2008, and I still say that the book was about important issues in child health and the corruption of science in this country.
My thoughts, as of today,
Dick Clapp
March 24, 2010 at 5:52 pm
Alice and Philip Shabecoff
An intriguing trio of letters to the editor in today’s Boston Globe is really relevant to the question we raised in our letter to The Drawing Board which many of you responded to, mulling over the public’s interest in and willingness to do something about the devastating environmental pollution in our daily lives.
One letter writer tells us that, according to Paul Hawken, there are millions of active good guy groups; in contrast, the second chides us that only a Tea Party view of America will energize; and the third writer says “most Americans have been taught to identify America so closely with capitalism that when capitalism turns pathological, they have no answer.”
So you and we are not the only ones struggling with this question. Another analysis of what’s happening concludes that a whole lot of people have become “emotional bystanders” who “cannot feel the pain of others,” and so are left with “a propensity to do nothing.” That quote is from a remarkable book, Healing Through the Dark Emotions, by psychiatrist Miriam Greenspan. The book examines why it’s so hard to face and deal with the havoc of today’s world including environmental destruction. Martha Herbert, who researches the morphology of childhood mental illnesses at Massachussettes General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, has her own take on this, saying people “have run out of emotional bandwidth.” How does that analysis feel to you?
In any event, Alice has organized a session at a conference coming up at the end of May, bringing together a few activist parents of children with different chronic illnesses, to see if they understand their commonalities and might start to work together across illnesses.
We’re looking for your advice: Do you believe that some national parent-led activism is worth working toward now? If you were there trying to get something like that going, what would you say?