Two cancer narratives compete for the president's attention - and for ours.

The Panel was particularly concerned to find that the true burden of environmentally induced cancer has been grossly underestimated.
- Letter to President Obama from the President's Cancer Panel, April 2010

On May 21,...

The new President's Cancer Panel report on the environment shows us where to begin a meaningful program of cancer prevention.

This government, the offspring of our own choice, uninfluenced and unawed, has a just claim to your confidence and support.
- George Washington (inscribed on the wall of the...

A recently released report from the President's Cancer Panel finds that the environment plays a much bigger role in the story of human cancer than previously appreciated. The Congressional briefing organized to discuss these results played to a full house.

The nation behaves well if it treats the natural...

In Canada, redefining the word trash may send engineers back to their drawing boards -- and keep dioxins out of the food chain.

Fatalism is a form of compliance disguised as realism.
- Eileen Crist, from "Beyond the Climate Crisis: A Critique of Climate Change Discourse" in Telos

The smell of lawn chemicals is as dependable a harbinger of spring as robins and lilacs. Not in big parts of Canada, where many municipalities and provinces have opted to abolish the cosmetic use of pesticides on the grounds that the links between pesticide exposure and childhood cancer are too...

The pesticide atrazine - with its possible links to breast cancer - is making headlines as the EPA opens a new investigation and a member of Congress calls for its outright abolition. What does the leading breast cancer advocacy organization say about atrazine? Nothing. It's busy peddling pink buckets of...

Living each day as if it were your last is not all it's cracked up to be. In fact, discounting the future and ignoring the past is how we've contaminated the earth with toxic chemicals in the first place.

Confine thyself to the present. - Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

In 1997,...

A funny thing happened on the way to making a documentary film about, among other things, my life as a longtime cancer survivor. With the cameras rolling, I received some unsettling medical news.

this is the dress rehearsal / when the body / like a constant lover / flirts...

With the Relay for Life season upon us, I am less interested in celebrating my own survival from cancer and more interested in abolishing carcinogens so that my own two children will never have to run the survivors' lap of honor.

As we pour our millions into research and invest...

Every spring semester, the great triumvirate of commemorative events - Black History Month, Women's History Month, and Earth Day - arrives on college campuses as predictably as the return of robins. As a woman scientist who is called forth to podiums across the nation during two of the three months...

Three decades ago, my adoptive mother and I both became cancer patients. The way we each reacted to our new identities was a study in contrasts, but growing public awareness of cancer's environmental roots has now brought us, unexpectedly, back together.

"The history of cancer is long, but our...