Worrying about the rivers

WOOSTER, Ohio - Twenty years ago, as a young field biologist working in Africa, Sandra Steingraber interviewed an Ethiopian farmer driven from his home by civil war. He told her how a road built to accommodate tanks had cause an entire hillside to slide down into a river near his home, and how the silting of the river had driven away the fish.

As they spoke, he asked her questions in turn. What were the rivers like where she came from? How did the fish taste? Steingraber told him that back home in Illinois, pollution had made the fish unsafe to eat. The farmer pondered her answer for a moment, and asked,"Then why have you come halfway across the world to worry about someone else's river."

It was, she admitted, a good question.

On Tuesday night, Steingraber shared her insights from almost two decades of worrying about rivers much closer to home with an audience of students, faculty, staff, and local residents at The College of Wooster. Her talk, “From Raindrops to Amniotic Fluid: How Chemical Contamination of Water Threatens and Violates Human Rights, brought to a close this year's Wooster Forum.

Moving easily from developmental biology and fetal toxicology to farm and energy policy, Steingraber sketched out a complex web of connections between;the health of the planet and the health of the people who live on the planet.

Historically, Steingraber said, our regulatory system has not taken into account the 'special vulnerabilities' of pregnant women and their unborn children when setting acceptable limits for various airborne and waterborne contaminants. But PCBs and other chemical contaminants move all to readily from the environment, through the food chain, into the amniotic fluid of a pregnant woman, where their impact on fetal development can be profound.

Steingraber cited mercury, which has been shown to paralyze fetal brain growth, as an example. Released into the air when coal is burned, it falls back to earth with the rain and enters rivers and streams, where waterborne bacteria transform it into methyl mercury, a far more concentrated and toxic substance. The methyl mercury is consumed by fish and becomes concentrated in their fatty tissue. And so it comes to pass that the fish taken from all the rivers in Ohio are unsafe for children and women of childbearing age to eat.

And if you think drinking only bottled water instead of tap water offers a defense, Steingraber said, taking a 10-minute shower produces the same level of exposure as drinking a half-gallon of tap water.

"There is no substitute for understanding your watershed and acting to protect it," she concluded. "You can't opt out."

The College of Wooster is an independent liberal arts college, nationally recognized for an innovative curriculum that emphasizes independent learning. Each Wooster senior works one-on-one with a faculty mentor to create an original research project, written work, performance or art exhibit. Founded in 1866, the college enrolls approximately 1,800 students.