Bill Moyers: A Mother's War Against Toxic Trespassers

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http://www.alternet.org/activism/bill-moyers-mothers-war-against-toxic-trespassers



***SNIP


BILL MOYERS: We met for this conversation the day before she was to be sentenced to jail. It's quite a story. At the age of 20, Sandra Steingraber was diagnosed with bladder cancer. Several other family members also had the disease, but it couldn't be genetic because she’s adopted. So Steingraber suspected something toxic in her Illinois hometown’s drinking water and that led to an unusual wager. She talked about it in this 2010 documentary:

SANDRA STEINGRABER in Living Downstream: As a college undergraduate, I made a bet. I bet that my cancer diagnosis had something to do with the environment in which I lived as a child. And I think I was right about this. Ten years ago, in the fall of 1998, I gave birth to a child. I became a cancer patient at twenty and a mother at the brink of forty, which I know isn’t how most people’s lives are ordered, but that’s how mine worked out.

I am betting that in between my children’s adult lives and my own, an environmental human rights movement will arise. It’s one whose seeds have already been sown. I am betting that my children, and the generation of children that they are a part, will by the time they are my age – they’ll consider it unthinkable to allow cancer-causing chemicals to freely circulate in our economy. They will find it unthinkable to assume an attitude of silence and willful ignorance about our ecology.

BILL MOYERS: Sandra Steingraber wouldn't stay silent, today she is at the very heart of the environmental human rights movement that she prophesied. She's fighting to identify and eliminate carcinogens in our air, water and food, and to stop fracking, that controversial extraction of natural gas from deep beneath the earth.

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1. I watched the program last night at this link:

http://billmoyers.com/episode/the-toxic-assault-on-our-children/


Apologies if the link appeared on alternet...I didn't flip through all
the pages.

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2. +1