I used to laugh at environmentalists.
I joined the smirking crowd in labeling them tree-huggers and hippies. Pollution? I can’t see it. Pesticides? Whatever it takes to make mosquitoes extinct. Industrial waste in my drinking water? Whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.
But that last statement would prove false, at least for me. And it would change my perceptions about the environmentalist movement.
Let me explain. I have had Type I (insulin-dependent) diabetes since I was 10 years old, a fairly rare disease whose only known cause, doctors generally agree, is genes passed down from your parents.
My parents are not diabetics. Their parents are not diabetics. No one in my family is a diabetic. No one in my extended family is a Type I diabetic. Something was going on here, but we wrote it off as a freak occurrence.
Over the next 10 years, three more kids within a five-block radius in my town were diagnosed as Type I diabetics, a rate that stretches statistical averages, to say the least. Only 5 to 10 percent of the country’s 17 million diabetics have the more serious Type I, or about one in every 300 Americans, and the vast majority have a family history. In my five-block neighborhood, made up of far fewer than 300 people, there were four new cases within 10 years — and none had a family history. My suspicions were brewing.
It raised the suspicions of University Hospital, as well. The chief research doctor for Type I diabetes called all four of us last fall, asking for various environmental samples from the neighborhood for further examination.
His hunch was not unfounded. We all grew up in Stoughton, the home to three of Wisconsin’s 42 Superfund cleanup sites — which makes it arguably the most environmentally hazardous city in the state. Each of the sites contains buried drums of industrial waste from the city’s old Uniroyal tire plant. Among other chemicals, the drums contain THF — an industrial solvent known to cause disease and damage to the very bodily systems and organs in lab mice as diabetes affects in humans.
The link does not stop there. An Environmental Protection Agency study in the early 1990s found a threat that waste from one of the sites could contaminate groundwater, specifically a well serving residents several hundred yards west of the site. Several hundred yards west … our neighborhood, exactly. Diabetics’ Row.
This link has yet to be proven, but I’ll buy the hypothesis. Since diabetes is not contagious, it’s the most logical one out there — certainly more logical than freak coincidence. It took evidence that a lifelong disease, usually riddled with complications that eventually bring death, might be connected to pollution for me to join the ranks of the environmentalists.
I’m certainly not the first to suffer health problems from environmental hazards, nor are mine the most serious. Over the last decade, Iraqi hospitals have faced an onslaught of new leukemia cases — believed to be the result of exposure to the thousands of depleted uranium shells left behind by U.S. forces in the Gulf War. The same problems are arising in Serbia and Kosovo, where the same weapons were used. Many have linked the “Gulf War Syndrome” among veterans to this same exposure.
Every year, millions worldwide are diagnosed with relatively rare diseases like Type I diabetes, and most are attributed to natural, freak causes. Most of them probably are. But my experience leaves me wondering how long we can continue to use humans as lab rats before America will hunt down environmental threats with the same passion it hunts down terrorists.
The extraordinarily high level of panic surrounding biological and chemical weapons at this time offers hope that environmentalist fears are now widely accepted. If only we can maintain this same level of concern for biological and chemical threats that exist within our own borders — in the air, in the drinking water, or in 40-year-old industrial drums buried under our soil.
Matt Lynch ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in English and political science.
