You might find it peculiar that a PhD biologist such as Sandra Steingraber is curious about playground equipment. She offered a simple explanation.
“My daughter is 3 years old,” said Steingraber, a visiting research professor at Cornell University’s Center for the Environment in Ithaca, N.Y.
Steingraber is focused on playground equipment made with pressure-treated wood, a common building material. The wood is treated with arsenic to ward off insects. Arsenic is a known cancer-causing agent in humans, Steingraber said. Although adults can process arsenic out of the body through the liver and urinary tract, children don’t have this physiological capability.
“There is no safe level of arsenic in kids,” Steingraber said.
She is heartened that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has halted sales of pressure-treated wood beginning in 2003 and equally encouraged that many large home-improvement retailers have already stopped selling the material.
Even so, Steingraber knows there is lots of work to do–many playgrounds made with the wood are still in use.
“One problem is even if you tear down the playground, the wood ends up at a landfill, which can cause an even bigger public health risk [by seeping into the ground and, potentially, the water supply],” she said. “If you seal the wood with a polyurethane coating, the arsenic can still infiltrate underground.”
Steingraber is one of the experts interviewed on this Friday’s special edition of the “NOW with Bill Moyers” show on PBS (9 p.m. on WTTW-Ch. 11). The hourlong program spotlights kids and chemical hazards in our environment.
As part of the filming, the Ithaca play lot where Steingraber’s daughter plays regularly was tested for arsenic. The results showed “high exposure,” Steingraber said.
This is far from Steingraber’s first public experience as both expert and affected citizen. She wrote a highly acclaimed 1997 book, “Living Downstream: An Ecologist Looks at Cancer and The Environment” (Vintage, $14), which chronicled her successful battle with bladder cancer (“the quintessential environmental disease”) diagnosed at age 20.
Steingraber grew up in rural central Illinois. The book celebrates the “great mysteries” of the land while suspecting its “dark secrets” of too many pesticides and other chemicals.
Maybe because of Steingraber’s published accomplishments as a poet or simply her passion for the subject, the book is both fabulously written and deeply troubling.
It belongs on the same personal library shelf as Eric Schlosser’s 2001 best-selling “Fast Food Nation” (HarperCollins, $13.95).
No one should hesitate to mention Steingraber in the same breath as the late Rachel Carson, whose 1962 book, “Silent Spring,” is a bible for environmentalists everywhere.
“One of the legacies Rachel Carson left us was the Environmental Protection Agency,” Steingraber said. “It was her vision.”
What Steingraber sees these days is more organizations forming to explore the possible links between children’s health and the environment.
“There are number of old groups such as PTA and 4-H with the original mission of child welfare who are concentrating efforts on environmental health issues,” Steingraber said. “The PTA is concerned about the rise in learning disabilities and the growing need for special education.”
Connecting environmental toxicity to kids is likely to motivate federal policymakers and conscious parents.
More Top Picks Education
“It worked with pressure-treated woods,” Steingraber said. “We have raised the issue before about the health of sawmill workers and other laborers working with the wood. But nobody was moved to action until kids’ playgrounds were part of it.”
Steingraber’s newest book, “Having Faith: An Ecologist’s Journey to Motherhood” (Perseus, $26), continues her no-holds approach to everyday toxicity. She delves into how chemicals make their way into the amniotic fluid that surrounds a fetus and into the mother’s breast milk.
She talks about timing of exposure as a critical matter (“you want to avoid exposure during the fifth month; it’s vital for brain development”). She revisits as a mother approaching 40 what she explored as a cancer survivor in her 20s: PCBs, dioxins, thalidomide, mercury, the synthetic hormone DES.
“The mother’s body is truly the first environment for humans,” said Steingraber, who has an infant son. “We all have something at stake in making sure there are fewer contaminants in a mother’s womb. Being pregnant has long been an intimate and private matter. But it needs to be considered at a wider society level.”