However important the call to move beyond the cancer paradigm, the fact remains that the link between cancer and environmental pollution remains hotly contested in U.S. society, due largely to the efforts of multinational corporations to downplay or conceal such links. In fact, over three decades after publication of Silent Spring , a recent segment of ABC's Prime Time assembled an impressive array of corporate scientists to argue that there was little or no evidence to support a link between cancer and environmental factors. In fact, as sociologist Troy Duster has observed, the dominant research paradigm is now one that emphasizes genetic rather than environmental factors. Although the authors of Our Stolen Future rightly criticize the current scientific obsession with mapping the human genome as a form of genetic determinism that denies the role of environmental factors, they are more than willing to indulge in a kind of hormonal determinism, or unfounded speculation about the role of hormone-disrupting chemicals in producing various social problems with no attention to the social and economic context in which such problems occur. Our Stolen Future clearly fuels the forms of masculinist panic that are epidemic in U.S. society.
Scientific research is framed once again within blatantly sexist parameters.
Saal discovered she was significantly less attractive to males than the pretty sisters who had spent their womb time between other females. Like so much popular scientific and environmental writing, Our Stolen Future presents its arguments in a political and economic vacuum. Nor, in the sections on male infertility or even general ill-health, is there mention of how increasing global poverty may exacerbate the health effects of chemical contaminants, not to mention ensuring that certain communities are more at risk of exposure. In the end, like the Democratic line on the environment, Our Stolen Future collapses around the question of action. Perhaps because the book itself is a protracted call for further research, it gives its readers little in the way of practical advice.