lot of people—including people in communities where Superfund sites are
present. (Superfund sites are the nation’s
worst toxic-waste sites. There are 1,305 of
them, and they are named for the “super”
fund of money put together by Congress
in 1980 to clean them up, a trust that
went bankrupt >ve years ago.)
I was recently invited to Rockford,
Illinois, to speak about toxic chemicals.
That seemed appropriate because Rockford
is the site of a longstanding Superfund site.
Solvents used by former businesses had
drizzled into drinking water wells. Rockford is famous within toxicology circles
because of the bladder-cancer cluster that
was discovered here and because it was
here where researchers >gured out, in the
1980s, that the level of solvents in human
blood is predicted not by the amount of
water drunk from the tap but by the
length of “shower run times.” In other
words, inhalation is a bigger route of
exposure to solvent-contaminated drink-
ing water than drinking it, and showering provides the biggest dose. And yet
only two people in my college audience
knew about these studies—or even knew
that Rockford had a Superfund site. Even
the local emergency-room physician
hadn’t heard the news.
What’s inducing this epidemic
of environmental amnesia? Maybe one contributor is the long silence of the federal
government on environmental catastrophes
of all kinds. In the breach, activist groups
have tried to protect the public. In need of
positive messages and deliverable results,
they focus on individual solutions. Don’t
microwave in plastic. Buy organic. There
is no place in that discussion for the
barrels of waste buried atop the aquifer.
The very mention of them >lls a room
with paralyzing despair.
Or maybe we’re now spending so
much more time with consumer objects
than with our natural environments that
we have forgotten how to
think about them. Sport
water bottles are real to us—
polycarbonate? or stainless
steel?—but creekbeds are
fuzzy concepts.
Or maybe our unremembering is a wall against grief.
My own elementary school—
along with the >eld, playground, and wooded path
to the crosswalk—was razed
years ago to make way for
discount shopping. I have
steadfastly refused to frequent that part of town. But
when my son needed a haircut for my father’s funeral,
I found myself driving my
old walking route to school,
in search of a salon open
on a Monday. It was supposed
to be in here somewhere.
While navigating the service
roads, I tried hard to forget. But while my
son was being pumped up in his pneumatic chair, I saw re?ected in the mirror a
retaining wall at the edge of the parking
lot. I know that pattern of stones. I looked at
them every day during math. I was standing
in my >fth grade classroom. And the
military recruiting center next door
would have been the lunchroom. And that
drive-through over there was the >eld
where, every recess, my sister and Danelle
and I ran, circling and whinnying like
wild, wild horses. a
Sandra Steingraber lives in Ithaca,
New York, where she is busy exploring
the 2006 Toxics Release Inventory data,
recently released by the U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency. As an antidote to environmental amnesia, she recommends entering your zip code into www.scorecard.org
and then visiting the Web-based public-art
project Superfund365, launched by digital
artist Brooke Singer.
