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Our Stolen Future; a Book with its own Web Site

© Kenneth Friedman

Ever since Rachel Carson's classic book Silent Spring was published in the early 1960s, people in the United States have been concerned about chemicals in the environment. Love Canal, Times Beach and Bhopal are three of the most famous place names associated with chemicals in the environment. Chemical names you may remember are DDT, dieldrin, heptachlor, Alar, PBBs, PCBs, dioxin, furans, kepone, alachlor, chlordane, zineb, mirex and lindane — only a few of many names known to anyone who hasn't had their head buried in sand. Perhaps the heavy metals — lead, cadmium and mercury — are more familiar.

Although the subject of chemicals in the environment is never out of the news for long, the book Our Stolen Future (1996), by Theo Colborn, Dianne Dumanoski and John Peterson Myers, about endocrine disrupters, created a controversy that continues. Many knowledgeable people agreed with the book and loved it. Many knowledgeable people disagreed with it and hated it. The controversy and dialogue over the book was so great that the book got its own web site (noted above).

At the OSF web site, among other things, the webmasters have provided lists of press coverage of the book, hostile commentary and reviews, and favorable commentary and reviews.

The "bottom line," according to the book's authors, is that "some man-made chemicals interfere with the body's own hormones...and find their way into our bodies through a variety of pathways. They build up over time, often over years." And this isn't good for us; big time.

According to the OSF web site, after reviewing some 4,000 scientific publications, the authors concluded that when certain chemicals find their way into the body of a pregnant woman, they affect the "hormonal signals directing development and thus disrupt fetal growth." Some chemicals also "alter sexual development," "undermine intelligence and behavior," and reduce resistance to disease. Scary stuff.

The authors describe their first nine chapters as examining "a chain of evidence that extends from wildlife populations to laboratory experiments" and containing a good deal of controversial information. But, they claim, their book is not about "fringe science" because to avoid misrepresentation of facts they allowed the scientists they interviewed to read what had been written about what the scientists had said.

The authors argue that hostile commentary and reviews disparage the book by ignoring facts, failing to acknowledge that certain arguments were included in the book, failing to "do...homework," "misrepresenting the book's recommendations and underlying science," "missing the point," and being unaware or uninformed about some of the science chosen for criticism. Favorable commentary and reviews, of course, require no defense. You'll have to judge for yourself as best you can if you read the book.

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