Our Stolen Future by Theo Colburn, Dianne Dumanoski, and John Peterson Myers, Dutton, $24.95, 306 pages.




The News & Observer

June 26, 1996


Is our environment safe?

By Phillip Manning

In 1962, a 55-year-old biologist with a talent for writing, changed the course of the environmental movement when she warned the public of the dangers of DDT and other manmade pesticides. So persuasive was Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" that the government banned the use of DDT in the United States. In some ways, "Our Stolen Future" is a sequel to "Silent Spring," but the issues it raises are grayer, the remedies less certain.

Theo Colburn, a former Colorado sheep rancher and the principal investigator in "Our Stolen Future," is Rachel redux. Colburn was a 58-year-old grandmother when she got her Ph.D. in zoology from the University of Wisconsin. She is now a senior scientist with the World Wildlife Fund, and she believes that synthetic chemicals are harming -- sometimes killing -- wildlife and humans all over the world.

To back up this claim, she and her coauthors have compiled a litany of disasters -- from deformed seagulls to dying seals, from dropping sperm counts in men to higher-than-normal rates of clear-cell vaginal cancer in women. The book attempts to link these problems to hormone-disrupting chemicals, such as dioxin (a byproduct of certain manufacturing processes), PCBs (a widely used family of industrial chemicals), DDT (a pesticide), and DES (a synthetic estrogen).

Some of the 51 known hormone-disrupting chemicals are now banned in the United States. The use of herbicides likely to be contaminated with dioxin was suspended in 1979; the manufacture of PCBs ended in 1976; DDT spraying was stopped in 1972; and DES is no longer prescribed as a fertility drug.

Nonetheless, many of the banned chemicals are still with us. They degrade slowly and travel freely across the planet, in wind and water and fish and birds. Consequently, they are worrisomely ubiquitous. PCBs, for instance, are everywhere, in our soil and air, in our lakes and oceans, in fish and birds and people. Since PCBs adhere to fat, the highest concentrations are found in predators with high-fat diets -- such as polar bears, seals, and people. It was heartbreaking to learn that some of the highest levels of PCBs ever measured in humans were found in Inuits living above the Arctic circle, more than 1,000 miles from the nearest smokestack.

The authors contend that these persistent chemicals foul up our hormonal systems. Natural hormones are produced by endocrine glands -- the testicles, the ovaries, and the thyroid, among others -- and they are our bodies' messengers. When, for example, a woman's ovaries produce an egg, they also generate estrogens, hormones that travel in the bloodstream to the uterus where they trigger the growth of the tissue lining the womb in anticipation of pregnancy. Hormone disrupters mimic or block the action of hormones, scrambling their messages.

Hormone disrupters are especially devastating to the very young. Mothers pass them to developing fetuses and, later, to infants through breast feeding. In experiments performed at the Environmental Protection Agency's laboratory in the Research Triangle, Earl Gray gave tiny doses of dioxin to pregnant rats and hamsters. The mothers were unaffected, but their pups had sharply lower sperm counts and malformed reproductive tracts. Dioxin may have also caused the terrible deformations found in the chicks of herring gulls in Lake Ontario, and many Vietnam veterans believe that dioxin-contaminated Agent Orange caused health problems for them and their children. One study linked dioxin-contaminated herbicides to Hodgkin's disease and other cancers.

PCBs and DES are bad actors, too. Scientists suspect that high levels of PCBs caused the depressed immune-system response that allowed distemper to kill thousands of seals in the North Sea in 1988. The daughters of women who took DES while they were pregnant have an increased risk of developing clear-cell vaginal cancer. And though no one knows why human sperm counts have dropped 50 percent since 1940, several .past studies have reported that infertile men have higher levels of PCBs than fertile men.

But DES, dioxin, and PCBs are only a few of the potentially harmful synthetic chemicals loose in the world. Indeed, nobody escapes them these days: "Virtually anyone willing to put up the $2,000 for the tests will find at least 250 chemical contaminants in his or her body fat . . . . " Unfortunately, the number of these contaminants creates such a chemical snarl that researchers have a hard time figuring out which one does what to whom. Unlike "Silent Spring," which focused on DDT, the problems addressed in "Our Stolen Future" are not simple -- nor are the solutions.

How can we protect ourselves from hormone-disrupting chemicals? We can't simply ban them as we did DDT; many are already banned, yet they still surround us. To minimize exposure, the authors advise us (among other things) to shun pesticides, to test our drinking water and to switch to distilled water if the results are unsatisfactory, and to eat a diet that is high in organically grown vegetables and low in animal fat. They also advocate more research on the risks of breast feeding.

I probably won't take many of the book's suggestions, but pregnant women and mothers with infants can't afford be so cavalier. After reading the book, they may choose to be more cautious.
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