She also serves on the Clinton administration's National Action Plan for Breast Cancer. Her writing, painstakingly researched, helps readers understand the strong links between the integrity of our planet and the health of our own bodies. And she writes from personal experience, having grown up in a heavily polluted, agro-industrial area of Illinois and survived bladder cancer in her early 20s. From DDT in human breast milk to cancers found in the beluga whales of the St. Lawrence Seaway, Steingraber clearly shows that pollution knows no bounds. E spoke to Sandra Steingraber in California last spring, shortly after her keynote address at the Beyond Pesticides Conference.
Air pollution is the most elusive of all routes of chemical exposure.
The major way we are exposed is by breathing, of course. But we are also exposed by eating food. When industries put pollutants in the air, when automobiles emit exhaust, or when farmers put pesticides on our crops, these contaminants become airborne. But sometimes our main route of exposure is not through inhalation. Instead, these contaminants fall to the ground and land on plants, and we eat those plants directly from our garden or from the farmers' fields.