Philip and Alice Shabecoff: Environmental Toxins and Our Children

On the Trail of the Truth

For many years, Philip Shabecoff has been dri­ven to help save the envi­ron­ment. As a New York Times reporter for 32 years, he strove to cover impor­tant aspects of the environment—and was fought most of the way by edi­tors who con­sid­ered top­ics such as labor, the national econ­omy and the White House more of a pri­or­ity. Inspired by the very first Earth Day in 1970, Philip cov­ered envi­ron­men­tal issues for the last 14 years of his career with the New York Times.

Upon his retire­ment, he founded Greenwire, a daily online digest of envi­ron­men­tal news, which is still going strong today. He also began his career as an envi­ron­men­tal author and has recently released his fourth book, co-written with his wife, Alice, a free­lance jour­nal­ist and for­mer exec­u­tive direc­tor of the National Consumers League.

Poisoned for Profit came about as an obser­va­tion made in the couple’s very own day-to-day life. “When our grand­chil­dren were being born, we hap­pened to notice a high rate of dis­ease around their neigh­bor­hood,” Alice Shabecoff told Organic Connections.

“A quar­ter of the male kids in the neigh­bor­hood of one of our grand­sons alone had some sort of neu­ro­log­i­cal behav­ioral prob­lem,” Philip said. “So we started look­ing into it. We saw that it wasn’t just neu­ro­log­i­cal prob­lems but also a huge increase in asthma cases, in birth defects, and cer­tain types of can­cers were ris­ing as well. I was an envi­ron­men­tal reporter for many years and I had known that there was an increase in a num­ber of chem­i­cals being pro­duced by indus­try and put into the envi­ron­ment by com­merce. When we began look­ing deeper into it, we saw what to us was an inescapable cor­re­la­tion between the tremen­dous expan­sion of toxic sub­stances in the environment—chemicals, met­als and radioac­tive pollution—and the ris­ing num­ber of sick chil­dren. When we came across star­tling data that one of every three American kids today has some sort of chronic ill­ness, we decided we’d bet­ter really look into this in depth. And that’s how we came to do the book.”

Their research led to some shock­ing rev­e­la­tions. Of America’s 73 mil­lion chil­dren, almost 21 million—nearly 1 out of 3—suffer from one chronic dis­ease or another: 58,000 are threat­ened by can­cer; nearly 2.5 mil­lion live with dis­fig­ur­ing or debil­i­tat­ing birth defects; 310,000 are poi­soned by lead; approx­i­mately 6 mil­lion suf­fer from asthma; and 12 mil­lion have some form of devel­op­men­tal dis­or­der, from autism to ADHD and seri­ous learn­ing disabilities.

These epi­demic sta­tis­tics can be viewed along­side the mas­sive tox­i­fi­ca­tion of our envi­ron­ment. According to Dr. David Wallinga, direc­tor of the Food and Health Program at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, “We’ve cre­ated a soci­ety with around 80,000 indus­trial chem­i­cals, most of which have not been tested for safety. Many of those chem­i­cals end up in the food chain one way or another, through drink­ing water or because they are inten­tion­ally put into food pack­ag­ing or because they are pol­lu­tants that accu­mu­late up the food chain. Being at the top of the food chain, we often get the most expo­sure to these pollutants.

A Question of Values

The Shabecoffs not only report facts and fig­ures but ana­lyze the prob­lem down to an assess­ment of core values—on gov­ern­men­tal, cor­po­rate and per­sonal levels.

On a cor­po­rate plane, the wide­spread use of chem­i­cals has been moti­vated by the bot­tom line. If a cor­po­ra­tion can max­i­mize its prof­its by using cer­tain toxic or ques­tion­able chem­i­cals, it will, until expressly stopped from doing so. Unfortunately, the cur­rent sys­tem allows for chem­i­cals to be “inno­cent until proven guilty”—meaning that unless a direct threat is shown to exist, a fac­tory or plant can con­tinue releas­ing them into the envi­ron­ment. And as the book clearly shows, it most cer­tainly will.

“Economist Milton Friedman pro­claimed some years ago that busi­ness has no social respon­si­bil­ity other than to increase its prof­its,” Philip and Alice write in Poisoned for Profit. “Unfortunately for our chil­dren, and for all of us, this is the prevailing—although by no means universal—ethos in cor­po­rate America at the begin­ning of the twenty-first century.”

The Shabecoffs pro­vide an exam­ple of General Electric (GE), which oper­ated a fac­tory com­plex in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, until the 1980s, when the com­pany pulled up stakes and moved out of the area. Up till the 1970s, GE (as well as many other man­u­fac­tur­ers of elec­tron­ics and elec­tri­cal goods) used PCBs (poly­chlo­ri­nated biphenyls) in their processes. PCBs are fire resis­tant and are good insu­la­tors and were widely in use from the 1920s through to the late 1970s, when the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) barred their fur­ther manufacture.

While PCB man­u­fac­ture ceased in the 1970s, they are highly per­sis­tent in the envi­ron­ment. They are clas­si­fied by the EPA as a prob­a­ble human car­cino­gen and a cause of dam­age to the liver, kid­neys, thy­roid, stom­ach and skin. They have also been found in numer­ous stud­ies to cause intel­lec­tual impair­ment in children.

GE left the Pittsfield area—but also left behind an envi­ron­ment badly pol­luted with PCBs. The Housatonic River that flows through the town is one of the most con­t­a­m­i­nated in the nation. A local res­i­dent inter­viewed by the Shabecoffs described the high num­ber of res­i­dents in the town still suf­fer­ing ill­nesses, and the grossly pol­luted state of the town’s groundwater.

The end of the story is that GE (after years of nego­ti­a­tion with the EPA) agreed to clean up some of their for­mer prop­er­ties as well as the river—but has still never acknowl­edged the seri­ous health effects asso­ci­ated with its PCB wastes.

The Shabecoffs argue that a change is needed in order to bring these types of sit­u­a­tions under con­trol. “There’s only one entity that is strong enough to stand up to cor­po­rate power and that is gov­ern­ment,” Philip said. “And it can’t be gov­ern­ment that is really an exten­sion of indus­try. What is needed is sort of a veto-proof Congress and a pres­i­dent who is will­ing to fight, to take on the cor­po­ra­tions and do all kinds of things in terms not only of leg­is­la­tion that would restrict the activ­i­ties of pol­lut­ing cor­po­ra­tions but also of chang­ing cor­po­rate gov­er­nance in this coun­try, which is almost nonexistent.”

Green Chemistry

In the long term, man­u­fac­tur­ing meth­ods will have to change. One solu­tion offered in the book is a process that is for­tu­nately already start­ing to take hold—that of “green chem­istry.” This means replac­ing the toxic chem­i­cals with envi­ron­men­tally friendly ones.

“We know that there have to be ways of mak­ing indus­trial types of prod­ucts,” Alice said. “We’re not going to go back to can­dles and pro­duc­ing every­thing from scratch. So green chem­istry and alter­na­tive energy are ways to save kids’ health, with­out all the byprod­ucts of the kind of fuel that is dri­ving our econ­omy right now. There are a num­ber of uni­ver­si­ties that have fab­u­lous green chem­istry ini­tia­tives. I’m not sure whether the cor­po­ra­tions have begun load­ing the amount of money into those ini­tia­tives that they should, but we do point out in the book that this would be an awfully good way for America to spear­head a new eco­nomic rev­o­lu­tion, which we would be lead­ing for a change instead of following.”

Changing Personal Values

Of course, it comes down to all of us as well, on a per­sonal level, chang­ing our system.

According to the book, “Most Americans would not dream of expos­ing their chil­dren to poi­so­nous chem­i­cals or crit­i­ciz­ing neigh­bors who were try­ing to pro­tect their chil­dren. Their val­ues would not per­mit it. But it is prob­a­bly safe to say that, by and large, peo­ple run­ning the daily marathon of life and work give lit­tle thought to the dan­gers that sur­round their children.”

“Parents have to become edu­cated con­sumers,” Philip said. “They can’t believe that what they buy in the stores is safe because some­body is tak­ing care of it—you know, the gov­ern­ment or the companies—because that’s not true. Therefore, they have to look at what they’re buy­ing and make sure that it is safe for their kids. Our book has an appen­dix that addresses this—some things par­ents can do.”

In the end, con­sci­en­tious par­ents will also have to take on some kind of role in steer­ing the government—through their votes. The Shabecoffs point out that gov­ern­ment rep­re­sen­ta­tives are elected and must lis­ten to their con­stituents. “People really need to empower them­selves,” Alice advised. “We did it in the civil rights move­ment. We did it in the women’s move­ment. The Tea Party peo­ple are fig­ur­ing out how to do it with their issues. It’s in the hands of the par­ents next. If we would really pull together parent-led groups, we could pos­si­bly get some kind of a national move­ment of active par­ents under­way. If we end up with a hun­dred thou­sand par­ents on the Capitol mall, they’re going to have to listen.”

Depth of the Problem

Part of the prob­lem in clean­ing up our toxic envi­ron­ment is that unless direct cau­sa­tion can be estab­lished link­ing a cer­tain chem­i­cal to a par­tic­u­lar dis­ease, the com­pa­nies and their legal teams won’t take action.

“As we point out, it’s almost impos­si­ble to prove that a par­tic­u­lar chem­i­cal caused a par­tic­u­lar dis­ease at a par­tic­u­lar time, in a par­tic­u­lar indi­vid­ual or group of indi­vid­u­als, in that place,” Philip said. “That’s what the industry—the perpetrators—use as their line of defense.”

The Shabecoffs point to the town of Dickson, Tennessee, in which 19 cases of chil­dren born with cleft lips and palates occurred within two years. Under nor­mal cir­cum­stances, 2 such cases might be expected with that pop­u­la­tion sam­ple within that period of time. Other birth defects were occur­ring there also—brain mal­for­ma­tions, inverted ure­thras, heart defects and leukemia. One of the par­ents research­ing the prob­lem actu­ally placed the cases on a map and dis­cov­ered that most of the fam­i­lies with cleft-palate babies lived near the Dickson County Landfill. The land­fill had vio­lated rec­om­men­da­tions by the local depart­ment of pub­lic health and had accepted liq­uid chem­i­cal wastes over a period of sev­eral years. The pol­lu­tants included trichloroeth­yl­ene (TCE), a sol­vent known or sus­pected to cause sev­eral forms of can­cer and birth defects. There is even lim­ited evi­dence that it can be a spe­cific cause of cleft palates.

Unfortunately, no one could trace any of the dis­eases to spe­cific chem­i­cals beyond a rea­son­able doubt—and, accord­ing to the Shabecoffs, this has been the prob­lem with vir­tu­ally every such case that ever

comes to court. Due to pub­lic­ity, com­pa­nies tend to set­tle with vic­tims’ families—but such set­tle­ments never amount to an admis­sion of guilt required to set prece­dents for the over­all scene to change.

The Shabecoffs argue that the rules of evi­dence in such cases should be turned around to be made sim­i­lar to what is used in crim­i­nal cases, in which cir­cum­stan­tial evi­dence is allowed. “You can’t prove it but you have a huge weight of evi­dence sug­gest­ing that that is the case,” said Philip. “It only makes sense that, when there is such evi­dence but no direct proof, you should go with the weight of evi­dence and pro­tect the kids rather than the companies.”

Plea for Change and Action

In their book, Philip and Alice make it clear “The first line of defense for the chil­dren is, of course, their fam­i­lies. Parents can do much to shield their chil­dren, includ­ing pro­vid­ing them as toxic-free an envi­ron­ment as pos­si­ble. They can remove poison-containing prod­ucts from their homes and not use them on lawns or gar­dens. They can give their kids a nour­ish­ing, bal­anced diet of unadul­ter­ated food, start­ing before they are conceived.”

There are a num­ber of books con­tain­ing pre­cau­tions par­ents can take to min­i­mize toxic threats. Poisoned for Profit also includes a healthy list of such actions; within the appen­dixes, there is advice on choos­ing a clean com­mu­nity and how to get many chem­i­cals out of the home envi­ron­ment. In addi­tion, there are plenty of rec­om­men­da­tions on choos­ing foods.

“But given the over­whelm­ing momen­tum of our technology-based, consumption-driven econ­omy, our indus­trial agri­cul­ture, the sea of chem­i­cals already out there, the new ones pour­ing into the envi­ron­ment every day, and the dearth of infor­ma­tion about the nature of threats to the chil­dren and how to deal with them, there is only so much par­ents and local com­mu­ni­ties can do on their own—and that is not remotely enough,” Philip and Alice write.

“We will have to change the way the world now works, and this will be an immensely chal­leng­ing task. But if we lift our eyes a bit, we can see that our man-made envi­ron­ment was once, not so long ago, a much safer place for our chil­dren to inhabit. As a demo­c­ra­tic soci­ety, we have it within our­selves to make the nec­es­sary reforms in our sci­ence, our med­i­cine, our indus­try, our eco­nom­ics, and our pol­i­tics to re-create a safer, health­ier, fresher envi­ron­ment. The effort will be met with deter­mined resis­tance. But we believe it can be done.”

Poisoned for Profit is avail­able at the Organic Connections book­store.