Devra Davis - When Smoke Ran Like Water: Tales Of Environmental Deception And The Battle Against Pollution

"Wrenching.... Davis writes with the authority of a battle-scarred veteran.... Impassioned and rich in anecdotes about campaigns she has fought and scoundrels she has encountered."

-The Washington Post Book World

"One of the things that makes When Smoke Ran Like Water...so powerful is that Davis hasn't merely studied the data, she's lived them."

-Newsweek

"Finally, a scientist who speaks to all of us and gives clear answers about what we know, what we need to find out, and what we can do now!"

-Senator Barbara S. Boxer (D-Calif.)

"Devra captures our imaginations and makes us think differently about the environment and health."

-Andrew Weil, M.D.

"As fascinating and engrossing as a well-written detective novel, yet as accurate and enlightening as the best scientific literature."

-Chemical & Engineering News

"When Smoke Ran Like Water is the best book on public health and environmental pollution of the last 30 years. Davis is a powerful voice calling from the wilderness."

-America

"Well-researched, well-documented and well-written.... Davis is a remarkable stylist, mixing anecdotes and anecdotal evidence with science. Her dry wit, rather than dour doom-and-gloom ranting, serves well to present some sad truths."

-Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

"When Smoke Ran Like Water is probably the most readable expose of the hidden costs of pollution since Silent Spring."

-The Globe and Mail

"When Smoke Ran Like Water is a clear-eyed wake-up call that blows away the usual arguments for `tolerating a little industrial pollution.' It is an environmental masterpiece."

-Rep. Edward J. Markey

"Authoritative, gripping and courageous."

-David Suzuki, Emeritus Professor, Sustainable Development Research Institute, University of British Columbia

"The beauty of this book is its ability to describe the business of epidemiology while keeping the human stories of the victims at the forefront."

-New Scientist

"Davis clears away the cloud of muddle that industry-backed scientists and their public relations cohorts have conjured around the question of how much harm air and chemical pollutants are wreaking on society"

-San Diego Union-Tribune

"After reading this riveting analysis of the state of the environment and its catastrophic implications for human health, you might find yourself tempted to run out into the street, grab the first strangers you see and tell them to wake the hell up."

-Time Out New York

"The book is a passionate statement, but the details undergirding that passion are the stuff of sophisticated science. Sometimes, though, the passion is highly personal, and haunting."

-St. Louis Post-Dispatch

"A remarkably readable and moving journey.... [A] valuable and disturbing book."

-Raleigh News & Observer

"An enlightening and engrossing read...which should be on the shelf of anyone who cares about the environment and wants to learn more about policy, health and politics."

-Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Important.... While science, industry and government dicker, lives are being lost."

-San Francisco Chronicle

"Davis has done a superb job of interweaving narrative from her own experience with a scientific analysis of pollution, and with our sad history of political opposition to doing anything to ameliorate it.... A uniquely excellent book."

-Robyn M. Dawes, Carnegie-Mellon University

"Davis's engrossing book chronicles pollution's hazy history, from Dickensonian sooty London to car-crazed 1970s America and on up to the present. She is an epidemiological Agatha Christie."

-On Earth

DEVRA DAVIS

CONTENTS

FOREWORD

I FIRST MET DEVRA DAVIS nearly a decade ago when I heard her speak at the Strang-Cornell Cancer Prevention Center, where I was director of medical oncology. Her talk opened my eyes. She provided detailed documentation of the damaging impact on living systems from dioxins, dusts, pesticides, solvents, and other toxic materials. As Chief Medical Resident at New York Hospital, Cornell Medical Center, and in my later clinical work, I have continued to work on the front lines with patients struggling with cancers, most of which cannot be explained. I will never forget the question with which she concluded her talk: "What if the same environmental exposures that have been shown to affect fish, turtles, polar bears, snails, and deer-have also damaged the human gene pool?"

This question continues to haunt me. I see more and more younger and younger patients with newly diagnosed cancer. It has also largely focused my integrative oncology practice at Weill-Cornell Medical College, as I work to come up with ways to prevent recurrences and to ensure that fewer people ever become cancer patients.

When Smoke Ran Like Water will surely be attacked by those industrial polluters who claim that we lack sufficient proof that the environment is harming humans. Nothing could be further from the truth. Over the past three decades, Devra's numerous scientific papers have outlined many of the current health issues associated with environmental pollution in a highly thoughtful, carefully considered manner. Underlying this book is a voluminous scientific literature giving abundant evidence that many pesticides and industrial pollutants and their by-products cause significant numbers of cancers and other diseases in the United States and throughout the world.

The battles against environmental degradation have often been waged by lonely figures, far from the public eye, against those with a multi-million-dollar stake in having us believe that there was no crisisthat smog and soot do not induce heart and lung disease, that lead in the air does not diminish children's I.Q.s. All the tales of environmental deception relayed in this book remain sadly relevant today, as recent disclosures of corporate deceit in many spheres makes clear.

Today the battleground over pollution has shifted to activities that put us all at risk, including carcinogens and other toxic agents, which can leave permanent but secret scars. The human body, like the planet itself, accumulates many known and suspected toxins.

We live in an era when one in three Americans will hear, at some point in their lives, the words "you have cancer" I have had to say these words myself many times, and it never gets easier. I see the suffering cancer causes every day. We wasted fifty years debating the role of cigarettes in causing cancer, and we cannot afford to waste another fifty years before we develop strategies to prevent environmental cancer and other avoidable diseases.