Interview with CHE Partner, Heather Sarantis

Women's Health Program Manager, Collaborative on Health and the Environment

Steve Heilig: Tell us your own background - how did you come to your work?

I grew up in New England in the 1970’s with a backdrop of the Seabrook nuclear power plant’s construction. Right in our backyard, the Clamshell Alliance was galvanizing the anti-nuke movement in the U.S. While my family isn’t generally politically active, I knew that my mother was cheering for the thousands of people protesting the construction. By age six or seven the seed was planted that I had the right to oppose things that I felt were wrong. At some level, I probably even felt like I had a responsibility to do so. So a life of being politically engaged is really the only one I have ever considered.

The question, then, is what do you address? U.S. foreign policy? Deforestation? Hunger? Oil spills in Alaska? When I was 20 I had the energy to work on everything that offended me. Over time I have found that it is better to pick one or two topics at a time and give it my best. I have been blessed with a varied professional life—leading a boycott against Mitsubishi for its logging practices while working at Rainforest Action Network, organizing vigils at executions for the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, working cooperatively with large companies on natural resource issues at The Natural Step, and freelance photography, to name a few.

When I was working at Natural Step I started to see possibilities that I hadn’t witnessed before. Large, multi-national corporations wanted to ride the wave of providing healthier products for people. Organic and natural products sales were skyrocketing. Green marketing was coming into its own, and some of it was even legitimate marketing. There are plenty of challenges with these trends, but I also think it indicates a deep and lasting shift that is happening in the American psyche. People from a wide range of backgrounds are coming to the conclusion that they are sick of being sold things that are bad for their health.  

Around the same time my thoughts were crystallizing about environmental health, I met Janet Nudelman and Jeanne Rizzo of the Breast Cancer Fund at a social gathering. These ladies charmed me, and I immediately made the leap to working with them and the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics.  

I started working with CHE in October of last year on the Women’s Health and Environment Initiative, primarily focusing on launching a new website and developing a toolkit on the science and the tangible actions women can take to make a healthier environment. The response has been great, and I think we are helping to feed a real hunger for scientifically-sound yet easily understandable information about health and the environment.


What is your primary mission in your work?

To end suffering and to enjoy the people I come in contact with.


What are the most important recent developments in your work, scientific or otherwise?

There is a growing interest from people who work on women’s health and the environment to work together better—both behind the scenes and more publicly. There is a tremendous amount of good work going on in a wide variety of organizations, and the science that justifies people’s concerns about how the environment can affect people’s health is only becoming more robust. We have a strong foundation to act from, and many of us believe that if we work together we can reach a much greater audience and start affecting larger-scale change than any of us could do alone.

Michelangelo said that every block of stone has a statue inside it and the task of the sculptor is to discover it. The people who are grappling with and defining what the Women’s Health and Environment Initiative is are in a similar process—of seeing the potential of new collaborations and trying to bring out the beauty that exists between us.    

What successes have most encouraged you in your work recently?

Media coverage of issues related to health and the environment seems to have expanded considerably in recent years. With this has come a great deal of interest in the general public of the ways we are all exposed to environmental contaminants. This level of awareness makes the success for many organizations possible—for example, there is great momentum with state policies to reduce exposure to contaminants. California passed biomonitoring legislation, Washington passed a ban on flame retardants, and many other successes like these exist. I find it heartening to see this wave of positive change.


What have been some of the greatest recent challenges?

People working on environmental health will only be as successful as our ability to address health disparities. I live in San Francisco where you can find both organic manicure salons and a Superfund site (and you can guess the economic status of who lives near each of those). I fear the rapid development of healthy products and services is giving the impression that we can leave it to the marketplace to solve these issues. Even though there are lots of affordable, healthy products available, if we can’t get the power plants and diesel trucks out of the neighborhoods and replace them with healthy grocery stores and green jobs, if we can’t reduce farmworker’s exposure to harmful pesticides and increase occupational safety measures, then I don’t think we can claim to have solved our public health problems.

I am also very concerned about the long-term stability of news coverage in this country. The San Francisco Chronicle, LA Times, San Jose Mercury News, Boston Globe and many other news outlets are laying off scores of people (some of them in the range of 25 to 50 percent of their staff). For all the legitimate criticism people might have about the media, these papers have all provided meaningful coverage for our issues. And because credibility is so critical to our work, we need these publicly trusted institutions to be messengers of the issues we work on. The flip side is there are plenty of ways for us to work with new media—blogs, multimedia web features, etc. And we should grab the opportunity with enthusiasm. It’s critical to be able to evolve, but I still think something very important is being lost.


What would you regard as the most significant potential future developments in your field?

We need a conversion of all the people who want to shop for healthy products into people who want to be advocates for more systemic change. It is great to want to make changes in our personal lives, but with thousands of unregulated chemicals and other environmental contaminants surrounding us, we really can’t expect to shop our way out of the problem.


What or who continues to inspire you in your work?

At the broadest level, it is just wrong to allow society to knowingly do things that are harming people’s health. Our health is a deeply intimate realm of who we are and sets the foundation for so many other factors that affect our quality of life. So, I am inspired to be a part of reorganizing our culture to make protecting health a priority.


Any thoughts about CHE?

Viva CHE!

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