EAST PEORIA -- On the 40th anniversary of Earth Day, author and activist Sandra Steingraber is calling for an environmental human rights movement, to ban the chemicals poisoning our planet and its inhabitants.
Steingraber's powerful new film, Living Downstream, based on her book of the same title, received a free screening to a large audience on April 17 at Illinois Central College. It closes with the call for an environmental human rights movement.
One of the chief chemical villains for Steingraber is the farm chemical atrazine, which coincidentally takes its licks in a April 17 Chicago Tribune story that should be a 'must read' for every politician and citizen. We're unwittingly drinking this cancer-causer, the story reveals.
Steingraber gently covers the familiar environmental concerns -- chemicals in mother's milk, in marine mammals, on farm fields, together with increased incidences of cancer including her own bladder cancer at age 20. She grew up in Pekin, where many in her family, the family that adopted her, also had cancer.
She's been called the new Rachel Carson, whose book Silent Spring led to the banning of DDT then PCBs in the US. There is more evidence of atrazine's harm than there was evidence against those two chemicals, Steingraber says. But that was then.
The Tribune story reveals that executives from the atrazine manufacturer met with the Bush administration 50 times. So nothing was done. Now the US EPA is taking another look, it says.
Atrazine already has been banned in Europe.
Steingraber's pleas are effective because they are done so quietly, so gently. She's a committed activist but not strident, just quietly insistent. She makes a courageous and powerful statement in a riveting film.-- Elaine Hopkins
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