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Taking pollution personally
Green Goes With Everything: Simple Steps to a Healthier Life And A Cleaner Planet, by Sloan Barnett (306 pp. Atria Books. $19.95)
Reviewed by Ken Cook, President, EWG
They’re out there in the audience in droves wherever my colleagues and I travel to present EWG’s “10 Americans”, our lecture on toxic chemicals and health. Their hands pop up right after the talk, or they crowd around afterwards with questions or comments that commonly begin “I never thought about pollution and the environment very much until. . .”
. . . Until a sister, a wife or a mom was diagnosed with breast cancer. Until a severe allergic response to a home cleaning product made it impossible for them to tolerate perfumes or chemical scents of any kind. Until a grandson, healthy, happy and bubbling one day, was cruelly imprisoned by autism the next.
It’s the husband and wife who come up to say bravely that they, too, have tried and tried but cannot conceive a child or carry a baby to term. It’s the teacher who laments the terrible toll of an ever-increasing number of children in his classroom who struggle with a range of learning disabilities. It’s the pediatrician who sees the girls in her practice developing breasts or menstruating at an earlier and earlier age each year.
Or it’s someone whose toddler has joined millions of others in America who one day suddenly and literally cannot breathe. Someone, in a word, who has come to take pollution personally—very personally.
Someone like Sloan Barnett.
Sloan’s three-year-old son Spencer has a coughing fit one day, the story goes, and that damned cough just doesn’t quit. Then his heart begins racing out of control. (As the father of a four-month-old, I found that just reading this passage got my heart racing, too.)
The next thing Sloan knows, she and her husband Roger, terrified, are rushing little Spencer to the nearest emergency room. He’s given oxygen. He’s given steroids. He’s in intensive care for days. It’s another variation on every parent’s nightmare.
Fortunately, the Barnetts got Spencer back on his feet. And when they did, Sloan went searching for answers, with the determination and persistence you would expect from a former Manhattan assistant district attorney (Motto: Don’t get mad, get subpoenas!) turned consumer reporter.
Green Goes With Everything is the result. And take it from somebody in the business of vetting the risks pollution and toxic consumer products pose to our health: this is a smart, breezy, deeply informative book you want at your fingertips. And unlike so many sources of green advice, Sloan’s book is an easy, well-organized read, and, in lieu of any preaching or hectoring, you get humor, nuance and the humility of an author who is learning all this herself for the first time, with refreshing dashes of sass throughout.
Sloan learned pretty quickly that chemicals in some cleaning products have been shown to trigger exactly the kind of asthma attack that gripped her little guy (“reactive airways dysfunction syndrome”).
“That stopped me cold,” she writes. “The cause of my son’s asthma may have been me. I may have been poisoning my own son.”
She readily found safer substitutes for those nasty cleaners under her sink. Then she systematically took the same approach—research, toss, replace—for basically every product category in her household, from the groceries that came into the kitchen to the personal care products in the bathroom cabinet. That’s more than most of us might do. It was just the beginning for Sloan Barnett.
Her training and experience as a prosecutor and career as a columnist and consumer reporter have given Sloan the tools and drive to dig deeper and nail the story and the “bad guys,” who in this case comprise a motley assortment of toxic chemicals, needlessly dangerous products, corporate green-wash artists, toothless government laws, self-regulated industries and ingrained personal habits and cultural norms that inhibit both individual action and societal reform.
I don’t know about sweat and tears—but Barnett literally gave blood -- 17 vials of it -- to write this book. Laboratory analyses revealed that her blood was polluted with dozens and dozens of toxic chemicals: bisphenol A, the synthetic estrogen and endocrine-disrupting chemical in polycarbonate plastic and epoxy can linings; PFOA, the likely human carcinogen used to make Teflon; PCBs, DDT and other compounds banned 30 years ago; flame retardants; triclosan, the “anti-microbial” agent that through the miracle of modern marketing has come to displace good old-fashioned soap.
It was quite a witch’s brew of multiple carcinogens, neurotoxin and chemicals that can cause birth defects and hormone disruption.
Some people might have stopped there, with a mournful blast at those who have polluted the planet. But Sloan Barnett is positive person who is convinced that if we understand what we’re doing and take the time to do it right, we can begin to change the world back to the way we want it. Her book tells us how to reduce our exposures to toxic chemicals, with chapters titled “Clean Body”, “Clean Baby”, “Clean Food” and so on through water, air and energy.
I can’t recommend Green Goes With Everything enough. My wife and I find ourselves consulting it constantly, whether we are pondering a new appliance or wondering about a safer way to clean a bathtub. “What’s Sloan say?” we ask.
Buy her book and find out.
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