LIVING DOWNSTREAM - Official Trailer

There was once a village along a river. The people who lived here were very kind. These residents, according to parable, began noticing increasing numbers of drowning people caught in the river's swift current. And so they went to work, devising ever more elaborate technologies to resuscitate them. So preoccupied were these heroic villagers with rescue and treatment that they never thought to look upstream to see who was pushing the victims in. This is a walk up that river. Dr. Sandra Steingraper is an internationally recognized expert on the environmental links to cancer. A cancer diagnosis is the beginning of an unplanned journey. There is a story behind each one. And this is my story. I left the lab bench for good and reinvented myself as somebody who writes about scientific evidence for the public. The disconnect between what we in the scientific community know about carcinogens and what cancer patients are told is huge. One of the difficult things with PCBs is not just what you were exposed to yesterday, it's perhaps what you were exposed to 20 or 30 years ago. Atrazine is the number one or two weed killer in the world and it is the number one contaminant. There's almost no aquatic environment, including rainwater, that's atrazine-free. It's not just the dose that makes the poison and it's not just the timing that makes the poison, it's who you are that makes the poison. When you have cancer young, your ability to kind of lay a plan is taken away. There are things in this world in which you need to presume longevity. We should become carcinogen abolitionists. These chemicals simply need to be phased out. When carcinogens are introduced into the environment, some number of vulnerable persons are consigned to death. I don't have time to put a happy face on cancer. Cancer is a serial killer. Here we have a population on the global web where we find cancer on a regular basis. There's no other cases like that in the world. Darnell's going to be famous. He's the first genetic male frog that's actually completely turned into a female upon exposure to atrazine. So you look at these animals and they actually also share the same environment we live in. You have to ask yourself, well, could that also happen to us? A few weeks ago, the phone rang while I was trying to meet a writing deadline. It was the nurse in my urologist's office. She was calling to say the pathologist had found in the urine collected from my last cystoscopic checkup abnormal cell clusters. What am I trying to say here? Are you fine or not, Sandra? What's the end of the story? Well, I don't know. I believe our grandchildren will look back on us now and marvel that our economy was once dependent on chemicals that were killing the planet and killing ourselves, and they will think of it as unthinkable. An environmental human rights movement is the vision under which I labor and which may, if we all work together in concert, become a self-fulfilling prophecy. May it be so.