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PARTNERSHIP EVENTS
CHE Partnership call: 25 Years of the Superfund Research Program: Highlights and Hope
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CHE Partner Interviews
Building for Health How does where we live impact our health? It’s a big and complex question, but Richard Jackson, MD, MPH is leading the way towards answers--and interventions. Jackson is a longtime leading figure in public health. Trained in pediatrics at UCSF and public health at UC Berkeley, he is currently Professor and Chairman of Environmental Health Sciences at UCLA’s School of Public Health. Prior to that he has been California’s State Health Officer and Director of the CDC National Center for Environmental Health. He is a founding CHE partner who has participated in many of CHE's conference calls, meetings, and initiatives. Over the past decade much of Jackson’s focus has been on the "built environment" - our homes, cities, streets, institutions--affect our health. He has served on the Board of Directors of the American Institute of Architects and has written and spoken extensively in this arena. He has both recent books and a new television series titled “Designing Health Communities”, which premieres on PBS in February and is available on DVD. Episodes in the 4-part series include “Retrofitting Suburbia”, “Rebuilding Places of the Heart,” “Social Policy in Concrete,” and “Searching for Shangri-La.” Such titles might lead one to suspect Dr. Jackson is a man with his head in the clouds, but he remains a pragmatist who is able to retain lofty goals in terms of healthy futures.
Anne Fischel and Lin Nelson, faculty members at The Evergreen State College
What first brought you into environmental health work?
What first brought you into environmental health work?
What is your primary mission in your work? What first brought you into environmental health work?
I have always been interested in both environmental issues and health issues and, for me, environmental issues have always been about people. As a young mother, I was very conscious of my children’s environment and closely monitored their exposures through diet, clothing, air quality and toys. At that time it just seemed natural to me that chemicals would affect a child. Now I think about the world that my granddaughters are growing up in, with ever increasing numbers of chemicals and possible exposures. Years ago, CHE Partner Andrew Szasz, PhD – now professor of sociology at the University of California-Santa Cruz – moved from Wisconsin to New Jersey. When he went to the grocery store for the first time, he was amazed to see “shelf after shelf” of bottled water.
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. 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.” The hardest part of being a neurotoxicologist – someone who studies the effects of toxins on the brain – is not the studying-the-brain part.
CHE Partner Nena Baker, author of The Body Toxic, has always believed that journalists can make change. In high school, she felt inspired by what she had read about the Pentagon Papers and the work of Woodward and Bernstein. As an adult, when she felt ready to write her first book, she again drew her inspiration from reading. She had come out of a background of investigative newspaper reporting, mainly focused on politics and business. She wanted to find a topic for a current-affairs book that would allow her to “work in righting a wrong.” That wrong to “write” emerged when she read a short article in the New York Times about the Centers for Disease Control’s biomonitoring program. When CHE Partner Dr. Theo Colborn, President of The Endocrine Disruption Exchange (TEDX), first went to Washington, DC, she started “It bothered me,” Dr. Colborn recalled in a recent phone interview. “There is so much information out there about [the health effects of] chemicals that should have been regulated years ago. I kept thinking, ‘There's got to be a way to squeeze all this data into a computer and turn it into a simple picture.’” When Elise Miller, MEd, was growing up in the coal-mining country of
Later, when her family moved to Richmond, Virginia, the wind sometimes blew from the southeast, carrying the sulfuric reek of the paper mills in a nearby town. "The smell was just awful," she says. "I remember wondering, 'Is that right? Are things supposed to smell that much?'" That kind of questioning marked the germination of what became her lifelong interest in environmental health. Nine or ten years ago, I worked on several projects with colleagues -- some of whom are coauthors of the Environmental Threats to Healthy Aging report -- looking at the impact of environmental factors on children’s health and development. We became curious about how environmental factors might be influencing the health of older people. According to a new book by CHE Partners Philip and Alice Shabecoff, the U.S. now makes or imports 42 billion pounds of chemicals per day.
Most of these chemicals have never been tested for their potential effect on human health. I grew up on the plains of Nebraska, amid intensive agriculture and
Little did I know back then, as a teenager working a summer job in the corn fields, that I was being exposed without my consent to certain pesticides that could increase my risk of certain diseases, like Parkinson’s. This early life experience carved a space within my world view for environmental health issues. When the Oregon Environmental Council decided to do a small biomonitoring study of ten Oregon residents as a way of drawing attention to the issue of pollutants in peoples' bodies, the budget was too small to pay a lab technician to collect and prepare specimens.
When I was in second grade, we did a project where we were
n 1981, the California Department of Health Services (CDHS)
Technically, CHE Partner Mary Lou Ballweg started the Endometriosis
It was 1979. She was working in Washington, D.C. as a writer, editor, filmmaker and consultant – as she put it, she was “having a great time.” Her work centered on issues of race, culture and gender. Then something happened that would change the course of her life forever. “Suddenly,” she says, “I was ill with what we now understand as Chronic Fatigue Immune Dysfunction syndrome with endometriosis."
Environmental health became my priority when I worked for an
Tell us your own background and how you came to do the work you do.
In 1994 I was hired on at the International Indian Treaty Council where I was exposed to both environmental work as well as international work as it applies to indigenous peoples and from there my interests grew and helped me on my path to the Indigenous Environmental Network and Alaska Community Action on Toxics (ACAT) where I work now as the Environmental Justice Program Director. What first brought you into environmental health work?
I was pursuing a doctorate in chemical physics at the time the environmental movement was just getting going. It prompted me to stop working on my dissertation (too theoretical for the problems at hand). My first job was at the Scientists' Institute for Public Information (SIPI), which sought to make technical data on an array of environmental issues accessible to a wider audience. I eventually returned to graduate school, this time to study risk analysis and decision-making at MIT. I got a PhD in environmental policy and joined the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). It was there, while working on the regulation of toxic chemicals and genetic engineering, that I caught the electromagnetic field (EMF) "bug". The subject matter involved a mix of science, technology, politics and public health. It was as if all my training prepared me to take on this challenge. I soon decided to work on EMFs full time. In 1980, I left NRDC and started Microwave News. What first brought you into environmental health work?
I began my career studying mental health policy and the mental patients’ rights movement. During a two-year research leave in 1984-1986 at Massachusetts Mental Health Center, I was involved with the Program in Psychiatry and the Law. In our weekly meeting, psychiatrist Edwin Mikkelsen reported on his interviews for the lawsuit by Woburn families who were suing W.R. Grace Chemicals and Beatrice Foods for contaminating municipal water wells, leading to a large number of leukemia cases, mostly in children. The story went beyond medical interviews and exams, extending to a series of public health investigations prodded by local residents who had discovered this disease cluster. Tell us your own background - how did you come to your work?
I started my working life as a pharmacist, and it was the destruction of the ozone layer that finally threw me into hardcore environmental activism. I was at a loss to understand how other pharmacists seemed completely unperturbed to go on selling hair sprays containing CFCs. If health care was what we were supposed to be about, why did every pharmacy shop in the UK have about 6 square meters of shelf space devoted to selling products which would ultimately cause skin cancer? To cut a long story short, I ended up as senior research officer at Friends of the Earth in London, and some years later, helped prepare the FoE packs for delegates negotiating the Montreal Protocol. Tell us your own background - how did you come to your work?
In the eighties I believed that we needed more science and technology to improve human health. I worked for many years in the healthcare sector including Biogen and later Roche where I was responsible for their alfa interferon used in both oncology and virology. I became increasingly interested in the causes of cancer rather than therapeutics. The more I read the more I realized that environmental causes of cancer was a neglected area. 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. What first brought you into the environmental health movement?
In 1979, between my sophomore and junior years in college, I was diagnosed with bladder cancer. I was already a biology major, so I read a lot about my disease in the medical and epidemiological literature. It didn't take me too long to learn that bladder cancer is considered a quintessential environmental cancer. We have more evidence about the environmental contributions to this disease than almost any other form of cancer -- with data going back more than one hundred years. What first brought you into the environmental health movement?
I grew up in the Newark, New Jersey area. My grandmother Devine told me stories of her friends who died of cancer after their jaws disintegrated from painting radium on watch dials in nearby East Orange. My mother pointed out neighbors who came home covered in dye from working in local chemical plants. What first brought you into the environmental health movement?
I heard Dr. Helen Caldicott speak during the first quarter of my freshman year in college. At that time, she was talking about nuclear disarmament and the threat that nuclear weapons posed to the human and natural world. Her speech touched something within me, and I knew that I had to be part of efforts to rid the world of nuclear weapons. What first brought you into environmental health work?
As a toxicologist my initial research interest was on the neurobehavioral effects of low level exposure to lead and mercury. This work was motivated by a desire to see that all children have an environment in which they can reach and maintain their full potential, free from contaminants such as lead and mercury. More recently my work has focused entirely on policy related issues, in an effort to create more effective policy with the currently available knowledge. Tell us your own background - how did you come to your work?
I have a Ph.D. in physics from the University of California, Berkeley. My professional career was devoted to developing and applying laser remote sensing systems for the remote measurement of atmospheric trace species, primarily aerosols and ozone. In the early 1990s, I undertook a project for the Sierra Club to determine the effect of acid rain and ozone on eastern hardwood forests. What first brought you into the environmental health movement?
Andrea Martin, founder of the Breast Cancer Fund (BCF) recruited me to produce the San Francisco film screening premiere of Rachel's Daughters: Searching for the Causes of Breast Cancer in 1997 and then to orchestrate and produce a film about women with breast cancer and young women climbing Mt McKinley. "Climb Against the Odds: Mt McKinley" aired on public television stations and screened at film festivals around the country. It brought art and social change messages together. What first brought you into the environmental health movement?
I thought long and hard about this question. Was there a moment of awakening in my life when I made a deliberate decision to join the “environmental health movement”? I realized that the answer is no. This is who I am and this is how I have always lived my life. Tell us your own background and how you came to do the work you do.
I am a thalidomider. Since being a kid, I've worked on disability rights issues. When I became a biochemist I became aware of certain discourses around biotech, ethics and disabled people which lead to my involvement in bioethics and governance of science and technology issues - the latest being nanotechnology and synthetic biology. What first brought you into the environmental health movement?
Learning about homeopathy after realizing that allopathic medicine could not help many conditions. Homeopathic philosophy immediately appealed to my sense of treating the individual and the cause, rather than giving a drug to masque symptoms. I became part of the resurrection of homeopathy, helping bring George Vithoulkas to the USA, becoming his assistant, and preparing some of his writings for publication. What first brought you into the environmental health movement?
I started down this path in 1974 as co-counsel in a law suit filed against Shell Oil because its refinery was polluting the surrounding Martinez, California neighborhood. In the mid-1980’s I worked as a volunteer for local groups concerned about environmental impact reports regarding the pollutants in San Francisco located developments. What first brought you into the environmental health movement?
A chance meeting in San Francisco at the San Francisco Medical Society in March 2002 sponsored by Commonweal...where the nexus for what would become the Collaborative on Health and Environment [CHE] had its roots. I was then State President of the California Learning Disabilities Association and was invited since our national president at the time, Dr. Larry Silver, was a guest panelist. Tell us about your background and how you came to do the work you do.
I have a master’s degree in chemistry and microbiology. I worked for a research institute for 14 years after completing my master’s degree. Over and over again as the research institute performed investigations and evaluations of environmental stressors causing human health impacts, there was a lack of ability to provide the developed information directly to the impacted communities. The community members were not the clients for the studies and investigations. What first brought you into the environmental health movement?
A deep spiritual connection to nature; a serious concern about the directions and methods of medicine and its handmaiden biomedical ethics; a frightening sense that our species is rapidly destroying its own nest and that of other life forms and that the health consequences will be enormous. What first brought you into the environmental health movement?
I have a long-standing interest in environmental contaminant impacts on reproductive health that began with my patients with infertility and our lab studies on steroid hormone actions in endometrium and endometriosis. My key research interests include endometriosis, implantation and ovulatory disorders and infertility. What first brought you into the environmental health movement?
As an undergraduate at the University of Auckland in New Zealand in the early 1970s, I learned that benzene was especially toxic. One undergraduate summer, I worked for a refrigerator manufacturer. I found the entire production process fascinating and got to know fellow workers in many areas of the plant. One day at lunch, I learned that some workers were experiencing habitual headaches and nosebleeds. Tell us your own background and how you came to do the work you do.
My goal in college was to collect enough science degrees to start an environmental sciences consulting firm. Growing up in a rural area of Southern California in the 1960’s, I watched with dismay the haphazard and inefficient urbanization of a lovely agricultural valley where I could ride my horse to elementary school, tie her up in a neighbor’s pasture, hop the fence and go to school. What first brought you into the environmental health movement? What first brought you into environmental health work?
During the mid-1970s energy crisis when our western valley was selected as a sacrifice area because it holds one of the largest lodes of low sulfur high BTU coal. Our already marginal water resources (quality and quantity) were at extreme risk. Tell us your own background and how you came to do the work you do.
I am an African American public health physician specializing in preventive medicine. I spent 6 years as deputy director of the health department of Kansas City, MO, and then served as the director at the Hartford Health Department in Connecticut. Initially drawn to the public health field because of the discriminatory practices I experienced as a youth, I chose preventive medicine as my specialty because it was supposed to bring social justice to medicine. Tell us your own background and how you came to do the work you do.
I acquired my environmental ethic at summer camp in northern Wisconsin, where I spent twelve summers as a camper and counselor. I have a BS in Natural Resources from the University of California at Berkeley, an MS in Natural Resources from the University of Michigan and an MPP in Public Policy from the University of Michigan. Tell us a bit about your own background and how you came to do the work you do.
I got my first job in public health in New York City and worked in public health there and in Massachusetts for twenty years. During the period 1980-1989, I was the Director of the Massachusetts Cancer Registry where I became interested in the patterns and causes of cancer. I received two degrees in public health and became a professor at Boston University where I have taught for the last fourteen years. Tell us your own background and how you came to do the work you do.
I am trained as a bench scientist, but had an interest in exercise so I worked at ways to blend the two. I stuck to animals and effects of ozone on the lungs for my dissertation. I then studied exercising humans and ozone for my post-doctorate. I went to Louisiana State University in New Orleans and started working with tobacco exposure and primates and brought that to Eastern Tennessee. Tell us your own background and how you came to do the work you do.
I started my work life as a Registered Medical Technologist. This is a disappearing field, which is the laboratory version of being a registered nurse, except with more rigorous science training and an emphasis on diagnosis rather than treatment. I specialized in microbiology and worked in the labs of major hospitals for a number of years, doing diagnostic testing and teaching college seniors. Tell us your own background and how you came to do the work you do:
When I was a teenager, my family lived in Richland, Washington, the town closest to the Hanford nuclear facility where the fuel was enriched for the first atom bomb. It made me think about who’s in charge of technology and who decides what’s safe. |
