Living Downstream: A Scientist's Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment

One of the biggest dangers facing the war on cancer is silence, as it allows the development of cancer-causing agents in their many forms and promotes an increasingly deadly epidemic. Steingraber carefully navigates the paradox of silence by examining her own battle with bladder cancer as well as her campaign to bring much-needed attention to the war on environmental contaminants.

Periodically, the author recalls the peacefulness of her home: “Silence is comfortable here. The river embraces silence. The Illinois River seemed to me, as a teenager, not so much dangerous, or even endangered, as reassuring” (191). The silence that she experiences and remembers from her childhood is void of the many details about carcinogenic dangers she comes to recognize as an adult. The river’s silence represents an innocence—a reassurance that nothing is wrong. She again references silence’s peace and innocence when, in Chapter 10, she turns her car around and drives directly to a cornfield slated to become the site of a garbage incinerator: “The image of a giant incinerator sitting out in the silence of Pleasant Ridge cornfields, fleets of ash trucks and refuse-filled railcars forever coming and going, was disorienting, virtually impossible to accept” (222). Here, the innocent silence of a cornfield is at risk of becoming an image of the environmental contamination about which Steingraber warns.

Silence, however, is not always reassuring or easy. The comforting silence of nature, undisturbed by industry, is different than the silence that accompanies the news of a potentially fatal disease. Steingraber reflects on the moment she revealed her own bladder cancer diagnosis: “‘I have cancer.’ There was silence—and then some kind of awkward talking, but no one really acknowledged what I had said, including myself” (27). She again refers to the awkwardness of silence in Chapter 2 when she discusses her friend Jeannie’s major recurrence of cancer. She reminisces about when she and Jeannie took a trip to an Illinois marsh: “I think back to the sunlit oak grove and the salt pannes where language was so easy. How sure I was then that I could be depended on to push any situation, no matter how dire, into the bright daylight of human speech” (27). Beyond the awkward, emotional silence that discussing cancer invokes in many people is its physically silencing those who fight it. Steingraber writes, “I think back to Rachel Carson. […] Tumors in her cervical vertebrae caused loss of functioning in her right hand, the writing hand” (27).

The paradox of silence isn’t just centered on one’s emotional and physical response to cancer. Steingraber contends that a world of silence mimics the government’s lack of information on or acknowledgement of environmental contamination and its link to cancer. Steingraber places Rachel Carson at the center of this argument. Carson’s Silent Spring reveals a variety of “silences.” First, Carson was concerned that arguments related to important ecological issues never reached the public. Although as a government scientist she had access to confidential documents that admitted unexpected results from using pesticides to control insects, many individuals within the government denied the allegations. Second, the government underfunded follow-up research on the effects of pesticides, thus allowing their poisoning of wildlife and human beings to continue. Additionally, scientists aware of the chemical poisoning of the environment continued researching and publishing but failed to speak out publicly for fear of losing government funding.

Although Carson confronted the government about its silence on environmental contamination, she wasn’t without fault. Steingraber contends that Carson worked to break the silence in the public arena but created silence instead. Carson kept her own cancer diagnosis secret from the public, citing concern that her research would be viewed as biased. Steingraber refers to personal letters readily available among Carson’s papers at Beinecke Library at Yale University. In correspondence to her friend Dorothy, Carson forbade her from publicly discussing or revealing her illness. Steingraber writes, “Reading again the collected letters between these two friends, I see an elaborate dance of silence” (27).

In addition, a notable silence exists among residents of small towns known to be contaminated with carcinogenic chemicals. A questionnaire distributed by town officials to residents of the of Normandale, Illinois, was designed to ascertain how many community members had cancer (or were in remission)—but most questionnaires weren’t returned. Without face-to-face interviews, it’s impossible to know why these individuals remained silent: “How can silence be statistically evaluated? How can such a flawed, limited response to a questionnaire lead to an assertion that there is no problem?” (86).