EARTHFUTURE.COM by Guy Dauncey

It all started in Philadelphia in April of 2002 when I attended the annual Assembly of the United Methodist Women as a guest speaker on global climate change. There was a lot of singing and a lot of sisterhood, but, alas, not a lot of interest in global warming. There was an amazing conference bookshop, however, where I bought a copy of Sandra Steingraber’s book Living Downstream: An Ecologist Looks at Cancer and the Environment.
Without knowing where it would lead me, I holed myself up in my hotel bedroom and read it from cover to cover. Sandra is a poet, scientist and ecologist diagnosed with cancer as a young woman – a disease that had afflicted other members of her adoptive family. In her book, she uses her poetic imagination and her scientific research to deeply explore the polluted nature of rural Illinois where she was raised, and the world in general. She writes: “In 1950, less than 10 percent of cornfields were sprayed with pesticides. In 1993, 99 percent were chemically treated,” including with atrazine, suspected of causing breast cancer and ovarian cancer in humans.
My book Stormy Weather: 101 Solutions to Global Climate Change had just been published; I had just dreamed up The Solutions Project, and I was casting around for the next big topic that I would focus on while continuing my work on climate change and sustainable energy. Sandra had me hooked; it had to be cancer.
Over the next five years, I immersed myself in learning everything I could about cancer’s environmental origins. My trail led me to Liz Armstrong, a cancer activist from Erin, Ontario, and then to Anne Wordsworth, a cancer researcher from Toronto. Together, we completed Cancer: 101 Solutions to a Preventable Epidemic, published by New Society Publishers in May of this year.
We are very proud of our book and its challenge to the widespread belief that cancer is overwhelmingly caused by our personal lifestyle choices, including diet. There is so much evidence that points in a different direction, linking cancer to the pollution of our bodies by chemicals and radiation in our homes, schools, workplaces and the environment-at-large, combined with the absence of healthy organic local food, which is now getting more of the attention it deserves.
It was a privilege to be able to lay out the evidence, along with so many solutions. The cord blood of a baby born in North America today is contaminated with 230 industrial chemicals, 190 of which have been linked to cancer. How can this be cause for anything but anger – then action? It is not just humans, either. During the 1990s, one in four of the beluga whales in the polluted St. Lawrence Seaway died of cancer – the same rate as humans, even though the belugas didn’t smoke, eat junk food, or tan themselves in the noonday sun. The belugas that swam in the open Atlantic remained healthy.
The evidence was overpowering, and our book called for activism, but here in Canada there was little happening. So Liz and I decided to form a non-profit society called Prevent Cancer Now to build a Canada-wide movement to eliminate the preventable causes of cancer. We drew together a board of directors and poured our attention into organizing a big conference that took place in Ottawa in May of 2006. Liz also organized an annual Run, Walk and Roll for Cancer Prevention, since every new society needs funding.
Prevent Cancer Now is small, but our ambitions are big. Last month, we held a retreat at Liz’s home in rural Ontario where we planned ahead. We want to tackle lindane, a very toxic pesticide and a suspected carcinogen that is banned throughout Europe, but still allowed for use in Canada as a treatment for head lice on children. We want to do more public education. We are lining up a project to awaken teenagers to the need to eat organic food and avoid toxic products.
We also need more members to help us eliminate the preventable causes of cancer. Will you join us? Will you donate to us? Will you help us with this all-important work, so that we can grow, and take on greater challenges? Will you make this a Christmas gift to yourself, and your friends?
We start these things on faith, but faith needs friends, for we cannot do it alone. See www.preventcancernow.ca. For information about the book, visit www.earthfuture.com/cancer

Guy Dauncey is co-chair of Prevent Cancer Now, executive director of The Solutions Project and president of the BC Sustainable Energy Association. He lives in Victoria.
www.earthfuture.com