I was speaking with another expectant father this morning, and our conversation turned to decision-making during childbirth and the almost inevitable need to tell some health-care professional to stick it in their ear…
–Read about the B.R.A.I. N. from Jon at Boyd’s Nest News
I think that many people who are ready to become parents know that life will change drastically when that little person (or persons) arrives on the scene. I am guessing that a woman realizes it very soon into pregnancy, as her body begins to change and respond to carrying her baby. Upon visiting a doctor or nurse-midwife, she is given a list of things to avoid; and with each pregnancy, the list gains new additions and changes. Each change requires new choices about how to manage–what to eat, how much–and these choices often require sacrifices. But what of those things we cannot choose? And what about those who may sacrifice the health of their babies, or their own, by choices that were not theirs to make. This week I was struck again with the hard things we wrestle with as parents; not just food choices, but sacrifices that require life changes.
For Steingraber and her husband, Jeff, such sacrifices are unsettling. “Why,” she asks him, “is there no public conversation about environmental threats to pregnancy?”
Why does abstinence in the face of uncertainty apply only to individual behavior? Why doesn’t it apply equally to industry or agriculture? …It’s pregnant women who have to live with the consequences of public decisions. We’re the ones who will be raising the damaged children.
Reading Steingraber’s sixth chapter, “Rose Moon,” this week, I had a chilling realization. Living in Madison, I think I have a false sense of peace when it comes to environmental issues. Madison is continually listed in this or that “top ten” list–the top ten best places to raise a family, the top ten bike-friendly cities, etc. It is the nature of this small city (in contrast to a metropolis like Chicago) to let the environment–and our human activities within it–loom large over everything. Environmentalists, both the activist and academic varieties, are common here, and environmental issues come up naturally–they are “in the air,” so to speak. When I read Steingraber’s discussion about coal, I thought of the huge mound of coal on the University campus that we walk by routinely. That coal powers a large chunk of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the UW Hospitals, and more; how much pollution is poured into the air and water of this family-friendly town? Do people think of that when (or if) they make choices to move here? Or do they rely on a progressive, “green” image? Our “green” air and iconic lakes are filled with toxins produced by one of the prides of our city! The coal “mountain,” the second-largest source of pollution in Dane County, is walking distance in Madison from the hospitals where my daughters were born and from the church we attend each week. On the way there from our home, we pass the county’s largest source.1
When I spoke to my husband about this, he said that the coal at the UW plant is being phased out due to a Sierra Club lawsuit, and that there are real changes in how Wisconsin is planning to handle coal-generated power. I was pleased, but I still wonder about the conditions now. Our society can’t change in an instant; both the UW (which produces reams of environmental research and invaluable leadership) and MG&E (from whom we purchase wind power for our home) still burn massive amounts of mercury-bearing coal–and it has been a long, cold winter. Does the coal phase-out do anything for those who may suffer unknowingly, because of the unavoidable pollution of coal?
Steingraber’s dilemma doesn’t have to to with the local power plant, but with her husband’s job. A sculptor and artist, Jeff works in old lead-painted houses, doing restoration work and decorative painting to pay the bills.
Jeff is more at ease with a paintbrush and a sander in his hands than anyone else I have ever met, which is one reason (among others) I fell in love with him…. His blood lead levels are double that of the average American male…. He’s paying the price for reckless decisions made three generations ago.
They decide that he must quit his job because of the lead that he would bring home on a daily basis. They decide to stay in their historic neighborhood, with under-layers of lead paint and contaminated soil, but question that decision later. “In ignorance, abstain,” runs the principle of doing no harm, but Jeff wonders:
“Don’t grow our own root vegetables. Quit a job I like. How come we’re the ones that have to do the abstaining?”
His job and their garden are not the only casualties of pollution. Both Steingraber and her husband have a family heritage of fishing, but what happens to that tradition when the fish are too contaminated for their daughter to eat? What pollution requires them to avoid is not a few mere conveniences, but the context of their own lives. “In a mercury-poisoned world,” Steingraber asks,
what happens to the knowledge that Jeff has, handed down from his father and his father before him, about how to clean and gut a bass? About what kind of water pickerels like to hide in? About how to hang trout over an open fire?
I also learned about fishing and hunting in my family; I know the seasons for trout, deer, pheasants, and ticks. I know the stories deer hunters tell, and I’ve eaten blueberries and raspberries in the woods. This kind of knowledge is not the kind that is bought and sold in packages in the marketplace, or stored on a shelf or a file for when you need to look it up. This is the kind of knowledge that we live with, that we inhabit with each other. If we cease to inhabit it, this kind of knowledge is diminished or lost. It is tradition, handed down from parent to child in the daily practices of human communities in a world we must share; and when the world is poisoned, broken, we share that brokenness as well.2
Do we even know how much we’ve lost, how poisoned we are, how far away we’ve been driven from the land? By connecting the science of toxic materials with our human knowledge of childbirth in Having Faith, Steingraber gives us new knowledge; what would it mean for us to inhabit it? What daily practices grow from this knowledge? Will we eat a locally grown meal once each week? Will we be frightened away from the dirt in the yard and the water at the beach, or will we count it all the more vital for our families that we garden and swim? Will our lawn-care be part of our lake-care? Will we look up sources of pollution, and talk about them with our neighbors and legislators? Will we insist that new ways of doing things be found, so that the old ways are not poisoned to death? If necessary–and it may be necessary–will we march on Washington?~~~~~
Checking Facts
The weekend of Earth Day, 2007, marked the grand opening of the Aldo Leopold Legacy Center. The building, on the Leopold family land in sandy Sauk County, Wisconsin, is a marvel of “green” building, LEED Platinum level certified, more than carbon neutral, and actually producing more energy than it consumes! The day’s agenda included lots of time to show off the construction & engineering marvels that make this building sit lightly on the earth:
Our family went to see the beams. The famous Leopold pines, immortalized in A Sand County Almanac, had been harvested from the places where Aldo himself had planted them, working with his five children to restore the land of the worn-out farm that served as his family’s weekend retreat. That was sixty-odd years ago; last year my three boys and I were among the volunteers that stripped the bark from those same pines, and now they graced the new building as pillars and rafters. So although it was really just an empty building on a not-quite-done construction site, and the event wasn’t really geared for kids, we were there to see what had become of the trees we’d read about, and to touch our place in the story.
Bare as it was, the new Legacy Center did hold one preview of it’s intended educational use: an exhibition of photographs mostly by Aldo Leopold’s son, Carl. He stands, in one of the early prints, a strong young man, thirteen or fourteen, shirtless, a spring-flood fish speared on a stick and hoisted over one shoulder. Other photos show flowering prairie grasses, the Wisconsin River, the old ex-chicken-coop shack; the Leopold land and family in their various times and seasons. And at the end of the gallery, something else: an image of Aldo Leopold himself, by woodcarver Homer Daehn, gazing out the window of the Shack, cast in bronze.
My boys swarmed over the sculpture, running their fingers over its curves and crevices, beginning the first bronze shine along the edge of Aldo’s shirt pocket. I was afraid they’d pull him off the wall. Around us, admirers of the Leopold family and its legacy walked the gallery, talking in hushed and reverent tones. The attendees included some of the best and brightest in the land–leaders, writers, professors, builders. Many of them had played their own roles in the environmental history of the United States, or had their names inscribed on plaques at the center. Aldo Leopold is (deservedly!) a figure of mythic proportions here in Wisconsin, and would probably not have been out of place in such a gathering.
We, on the other hand, are not particularly great or heroic people. I don’t have any great works or deeds attached to my name. I have not been a tireless advocate for the environment. Very often, it seems to me, I struggle just to live up to the role Leopold described for Draba: “Altogether it is of no importance-just a small creature that does a small job quickly and well.”
I’m just beginning to learn about the Leopold family, and about history and social change and how to make a difference in the world; but one thing I think that Aldo Leopold did to become great was find, and use, his voice. His family was in many ways similar to mine and to thousands of others here in Wisconsin; his famous shack seemed completely familiar to us–just like Grandad’s place up north. But he made a difference in the world by figuring out what he had to say that was worth saying, and saying it wisely and well.
As mere Leopold readers and bark-peeling volunteers, we had our names on a paper print-out thumbtacked to the wall. It wasn’t much, but it was a start. Last night my youngest boy Charles, just learning his letters, climbed up in my lap with a notebook and pen. “How do you make Once,” he wanted to know. “Can you help me write a story?” And in a little while, patching letters of unfamiliar shapes together with those he already knew from his own name, he had made a beginning: Once there was a boy…
During my first pregnancy, I lived on a truck route.
My pregnancy manual, the ubiquitous and sometimes disturbing What to Expect When You’re Expecting, said that unless I was living in a bus terminal or a tollbooth, “breathing in the big city…isn’t as risky as you might think…. Even in the 1960s, when pollution was at its worst levels in such smoggy places as Los Angeles and New York, no damage to the unborn was documented.” Then it listed seven different strategies for avoiding exposure to air pollution.
As a newly pregnant woman, expecting for the first time, I was concerned. So I asked my nurse-midwife, who looked at me as if I were a bit loony and then basically gave me the same answer as the book, but in a more patronizing tone. But after reading the fourth and fifth chapters of Sandra Steingraber’s Having Faith: An Ecologist’s Journey to Motherhood, “Egg Moon” and “Mother’s Moon,” I am beginning to wonder.
In “Egg Moon,” Steingraber walks us through the process of amniocentesis. It’s a beautiful portrayal of a medical procedure; I loved the inter-weaving of bird-migration and song, the signs of the seasons, with her waiting for the results of her tests; the parallels between searching for a glimpse of the birds and waiting for a glimpse of her child.
What gave me pause as I read, though, was that the amniotic fluid is “re-cycled” to the baby from the mother, passing between them over and over. By delivery-time, this happens once every hour. Holding a tube of her own amniotic fluid, Steingraber says:
I drink water, and it becomes blood plasma, which suffuses through the amniotic sac and surrounds the baby–who also drinks it.And what is it before that? Before it is drinking water, amniotic fluid is the creeks and rivers that fill reservoirs. It is the underground water that fills wells. And before it is creeks and rivers and groundwater, amniotic fluid is rain….When I look at amniotic fluid, I am looking at rain falling on orange groves. I am looking at melon fields, potatoes in wet earth, frost on pasture grasses….Whatever is in the world’s water is here in my hands.
I am a huge fan of the listener-essay series, This I Believe, on NPR. With the tagline, “a public dialogue about belief–one essay at a time,” this reincarnation of a 1950’s radio show is a deep trove of thoughtful and beautiful writing, as well as a great resource for teaching and learning to write.
If you are lost or ill, [receiving a gift] is easy, but most days you are neither, so embracing extreme generosity takes some preparation….We are no good at being helpless, humble, or indebted. Being needy is not celebrated on day-time TV shows, or in self-help books. We make lousy kindees.
–Kevin Kelley, on the “eternal offer” of Christmas in, The Universe is Conspiring to Help Us
I can’t solve the problems of my community or the world, but I can mend things at hand….I see mending as a preservation of history and a proclamation of hope.
–Susan Cooke Kittredge, on the difference between mending and fixing in We All Need Mending, which reminds me of an earlier essay by Angie Carlson, Garments of Faith.
Feeling inspired? Contribute your own essay to This I Believe!
This week as I read, I was filled with emotion: Anger. Frustration. Sadness. Hope.
“Sap Moon,” the third chapter of Having Faith, brings us case histories of four prenatal harms: rubella, thalidomide, methylmercury, and DES. Steingraber moves through each of these tragedies, telling us the stories of the people who were there and pulling out common threads of knowledge & denial, responsibility & negligence, hubris & suffering.
In each of these histories, knowledge that could have been used to prevent harm to children was ignored or withheld from the public. Individuals gathered and reported evidence, but their words weren’t taken seriously; or the evidence was left ungathered. In Minamata, Japan, the Chisso company actually hired “experts” to report that their factory’s mercury waste products had not caused horrible nervous-system poisoning in local residents, though their research had already yielded evidence to the contrary. Read More
