Harriet A. Washington On Environmental Injustice & Creating A Less Toxic World

I've been interested in the topic for a very long time. In the 1980s, I managed a poison control center in upstate New York and learned a great deal about poisonings. I was frankly fascinated by them: There are so many that are exotic and interesting and don't have a straightforward effect.

And then I studied public health as a fellow at Harvard School of Public Health, and that renewed my interest in them. But it wasn't until after I finished my book Medical Apartheid, and more recently, Infectious Madness, that I began thinking very specifically about the cognitive consequence of poisoning.

It didn't differ greatly from my process for other books. Some might say I over-research books—but I'm more comfortable with that than not knowing enough.

First, I talked to toxicologists who were focused very heavily on the cognitive effects of poisoning. After talking to them, and getting from them a good sense of how extensive the problem was (which was incredibly extensive!), I needed to quantify these exposures. It's not enough to say, "People of color are more exposed." You need to quantify it. Are we talking about a dramatically different risk or a more subtly different risk? I did that by speaking to these researchers and by reading the relevant literature.

I'm frequently asked that question, and the truth is I can't answer it honestly because there were so, so many things that happened on so many different spheres. I won't say it's the most shocking aspect, but I will say that the two things I found the most dramatic were the extent to which corporations will go to deflect scrutiny and to basically demonize people who call the safety of their products into question. One of the themes of the book is that there's a great deal of blaming the victims going on. The victims tend to be powerless people, invisible people. And the corporations sometimes demonize these poisoned people, basically telling them their sickness and their children's sickness is their fault.

There are a few things that need to happen. And one of them is very simple, but it's not very popular among industry. As I point out in the book, in the European Union and other places, chemicals that come in contact with humans have got to be tested for their effects on humans before they are released. In this country, we don't test anything until someone gets injured, in most cases. So we've got 60,000 chemicals, roughly, that have never been tested for the human health effects.

Quite a few of those have been indicted by scientists—including scientists in prestigious organizations—to be dangerous to health. And yet the industry is fighting testing. What happens is, when tests show that there are deleterious effects on health, they demand higher and higher standards of proof. It's almost impossible to satisfy them.

Well, there are quite a few. A lot more than there used to be. For example, Aaron Mair, who is African American, was the president of the Sierra Club a few years ago. Robert Bullard is an extremely important scientist, often called the father of the environmental justice movement.

But I'm also a realist. When you're 13% of the population, it's going to be hard if not impossible to get anything politically done without friends. Without other supporters.

A lot came up, and I actually had included that in the book at first, but it was going to be too long. Climate change is a bit more democratic in its origins, although not in its effects. I hate to say it this way, but if the government just used common sense, it's really apparent that climate change is going to have its worst effects among the people who are already assaulted by other toxins.

For example, I've been reading about these red tide poisonings that are becoming more and more frequent. Domoic acid is produced by some of these bacteria in these red tides. And domoic acid attacks the hippocampus in the brain. People who've had domoic acid poisoning by eating tainted mussels during red tide outbreaks have actually lost their short-term memory permanently. Some of them have died, and for the survivors, it's really, really horrible and tragic. Imagine that you suddenly lost your ability to make new memories.

With climate change, we are going to have more and more of these red tide outbreaks. Climate change is going to have a horrible effect on everybody—especially those who are already the victims of the worst toxic exposures.