Circle M Farm

Today I returned a book to the library, surreptitiously in the drop box, that was due April 7th. Even though I couldn’t face our kind and patient librarian, who often renews books for our family without us knowing, I did tuck a nice apology note behind the front cover and a vehement encouragement to recommend the book to whomever she knows with interest in farming and the environment. Never have I taken so long to plow through a book, but it was worth the months of reading and whatever fine I incur.

I’ll let it be known that I’m an awfully fast reader. My daughter Maggie and I recently raced to finish the final Harry Potter, and I’m quite certain I won, though she disagrees. And with the exception of those interminable fight scenes in The Lord of the Rings, I don’t skim. My comprehension is such that I got into college exclusively on the merit of stellar verbal SAT scores, having perhaps ended up in the negative on math.

Steingraber nearly did me in, though, stretching my powers of comprehension pretty much to their limits. Nevertheless, Living Downstream: An Ecologist Looks at Cancer and the Evironment is a fairly successful attempt by a scientist to make a morass of statistics meaningful to a motivated lay person. Steingraber is a terrific writer, and a woman who’s had both bladder and breast cancer. As such, she’s able to weave a lot of personal stories into the numbers, and that helps a reader like me connect and make sense of information that otherwise would simply flow through all the spaces in my brain that reject mathematical representations. I still had to work darn hard to grab hold of the concepts.

It didn’t help that I started the book at the beginning of planting season. Or that it wasn’t the book I intended to read. I saw Steingraber speak at the Upper Midwest Organic Farming Conference in La Crosse, Wisconsin, this past February. Not only was I stunned by the research on agricultural pollution that she was presenting, I was tremendously impressed by her abilities as a writer. In her speech, she read long eloquent passages from one of her books. I generally don’t appreciate a speaker who reads out loud to the audience, but in her case the words were so elegantly put, I not only enjoyed hearing them read, I resolved to reserve the book at the library the moment I got home.

Unfortunately, the book she was reading from was Having Faith: An Ecologist’s Journey to Motherhood, but in my rush to take notes on her comments, I missed the title and only wrote down her name. This book, written during and after the birth of her first child, chronicles her research on the effects of environmental pollutants, especially from foods, passing through the placenta to unborn children. Steingraber’s comments from the book were of great interest to me both as a mom and as a beginning organic farmer.

But I reserved her previous book instead, and since I’ve been pouring over Living Downstream for six months, I haven’t read Having Faith yet. I’ll still recommend it, though, having heard those few sections read aloud. Here’s a plug from Publishers Weekly, and I can only assume their reviewer has read the whole thing: “Steingraber offers the commonest of stories—how she got pregnant, gave birth, and fed her baby—in a most uncommon way. A cross between the quirkily thorough detail of Natalie Angier’s science-writing and the passionate environmental advocacy of Rachel Carson… Parents to be or anyone concerned with environmental pollution will want to read and discuss this—and act.”

Living Downstream, in addition to being a terrifying chronicle of the dangers currently bombarding us through our environment, is also a hopeful call to action. In the final pages of the book, Steingraber leaves you contemplating a study of young female rats exposed “not to a single chemical but to a real-life, low-level mixture of substances derived from the dust, soil and air from a dioxin-contaminated landfill site.” In just two days, these animals exhibit abnormal changes in their livers, reproductive organs and thyroid glands. But then she concludes with the practical exhortation to exercise Your Right to Know what pollutants have been recorded in your area and tells you how to request that information from the state and federal government.

I had no idea such records were available, and it will probably be a long time before I exercise my right to know, frankly. That’s why I’m so thankful for talented writers and researchers like Steingraber who are out there getting information for those of us too intimidated by numbers to try. And I highly encourage those readers who are concerned about environment or the food supply to grab up her books. If I’ve put you off by confessing how long it took me to read one, just check out this relatively short article she wrote for The O’Mama Report:
www.theorganicreport.com/pages/318_the_ecology_of_pizza_entire_19_pages_.cfm

My winter reading list includes Having Faith, along with Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. I hope to finish them both before next planting season. Of course, right now I am literally Living Downstream, in Week Two of flooding here in our valley. With more rain predicted, I don’t anticipate being able to work much more in the garden this summer, and I’m enjoying getting back into books right now. I’ve just started The Covenant of the Wild: Why Animals Chose Domestication, by Stephen Budiansky, which was recently loaned to me by Circle M volunteer Natalie, an installation artist with an interest in animals from a drawing perspective, but with empathy for small farming and humane homesteading. Budiansky, former U.S. editor of Nature magazine and himself a smallholder, has some truly fascinating ideas about the symbiotic nature of animal domestication. Like Michael Pollan’s Botany of Desire, which explores ways that plants have enticed us to domesticate them or otherwise behave in ways that ensures their survival, this book takes a similar look at animals and pretty much turns the arguments of animal-rights extremists upside down. Fascinating reading as we head toward the autumn harvest of beef, pork and lamb here at Circle M.