Living Downstream. An Ecologist Looks at Cancer and the Enviroment.

Thirty-five years after Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring warned of the impact of chemicals on the environment, Steingraber offers us an urgent critique of current thinking on cancer and its causes, bringing us the alarming message that we have wilfully ignored the evidence and are still poisoning our environment. Throughout her study of truly shocking scientific research she weaves two stories – of Rachel Carson and her battle to be heard and of her own moving story of cancer of the bladder, which she traces back to agricultural and industrial contamination. The connection between our bodies and the ecological world in which we eat, drink, breathe and work have rarely been so eloquently and passionately recorded. ‘A very accessible book both for the uninitiated, the sceptic and the converted thoroughly inspiring and provoking’ – Helen Lynn, WEN