| Log in - Help - May 16, 2012 | |
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PARTNERSHIP EVENTS
Partnership call: Advancing Risk Assessment: Progress and Ongoing Obstacles
4/26/12: MP3 recording available: CHE Cafe call: Designing Healthy Communities: a conversation with Richard Jackson, MD, MPH
CHE WORKING GROUP EVENTS
CHE Alaska call: Little Changes: A Discussion with Author Kristi Marsh on How to Avoid Chemicals in Food and Everyday Products:
May 30, 2012
CHE Fertility and Reproductive Health and CHE EMF working groups call: EMF and Reproductive Health Risks:
May 21, 2012
Cumulative Impacts Working Group Strategic Meeting:
May 22, 2012
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CHE Partner Douglas Abrams  As CHE Partner Douglas Abrams explains it, the idea for his new novel, Eye of the Whale, sprang from an unexpectedly provocative sequence of events. One evening, he read his twin daughters a children’s story about a trapped whale. Later, a visiting scientist friend related some “astonishing” facts about environmental threats to human and animal health. “I asked myself, what if these events were connected? What if whales and humans were threatened by the same dangers?” A Stanford graduate, Abrams did not write Eye of the Whale just to tell people about endocrine disruption. He starts every novel “with a question, not an answer.” In this case, he says, the questions he asked were both universal and deeply personal: Can we survive the threats we have created – climate change and chemical pollution being two of the most severe – and what might be stronger than our greed, our fear and our denial? “I needed an answer to this question,” he says, “and there is no better place to ask questions about human nature than in the fictional world.” *** One of Abrams’s childhood English teachers told him he would never be a writer. He had “always dreamed of being a novelist” – his parents were publishers – but dyslexia made reading and writing a struggle. Mastering those skills and becoming a writer, he says now, was “the hardest thing I could do. But that, I think, is part of what attracted me to it. It was my North Face of Half Dome.” He certainly managed to summit. His first novel, The Lost Diary of Don Juan (Atria, 2007) was a national bestseller. The motto on Abrams’s website (www.douglascarltonabrams.com) is “Fact-based fiction for a wiser, healthier, and more just world.” Abrams once worked as a book editor at the University of California Press, and says he has “a real respect for science and for getting the facts right.” To make sure he got the nuts-and-bolts of endocrine disruption right, he read books like Our Stolen Future and consulted top physicians, journalists, nonprofit leaders, and scientists (“who inspired my work, and even inspired my characters”). Multiple scientists, including CHE Partner Devra Davis, PhD, MPH, vetted the manuscript for scientific accuracy. Also among those whose help Abrams enlisted: Longtime CHE Partner Pete Myers, PhD, whom he met when Myers gave a talk at his wife’s annual medical conference. “Much of what [Myers] told me ended up in the book,” says Abrams. In fact, his slideshow was “so powerful and frightening” that an abbreviated version of it shows up in the book. The protagonists of Eye of the Whale are a married couple. She’s a marine biologist, he’s a neonatologist. As the story unfolds, they discover the realities of endocrine disruption and how environmental toxins are affecting the health of current and future generations – in humans and animals alike. That summary may suggest a grim polemic dressed up as a story. Not so, Abrams says. “In the end, as I heard from the scientists, this is a very hopeful book… So much human disease and suffering is actually manmade. If it’s manmade, it’s not inevitable.” *** When people read Eye of the Whale, Abrams hopes, in addition to being entertained, they will get a picture of “how all the individual puzzle pieces of environmental health fit together.” Beyond the story itself, they can explore his website, particularly the factual notes to the novel posted at www.douglascarltonabrams.com/main/index.php/facts. He lists a number of websites, including CHE’s, that inspired his work and his website. “People need to get involved with these organizations,” he says, “and take concerted political action, since lifestyle changes alone will not protect us. The Kid-Safe Chemical Act is one example of important legislation that we need to support fully.” He hopes that CHE and many other groups will use his novel “to help inform whole new constituencies of people about the dangers we face – and the solutions that are possible.” *** So did Abrams get an answer to the questions that spurred him to write Eye of the Whale? “I did,” he says. “There is indeed something that is stronger than greed, fear and denial. But I better not say more, or I may give away too much of the story.” Shelby Gonzalez is a freelance science and environmental writer. She welcomes comments and inquiries at shelbygonzalez@gmail.com. |
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