I have come to believe that extracting natural gas from shale using the newish technique called hydrofracking is the environmental issue of our time. And I think you should, too.

I have come to believe that extracting natural gas from shale using the newish technique called hydrofracking is the environmental issue of our time. And I think you should, too.

I'm beginning to perceive motherhood as a long, slow letting go, of which birth is just the first step.

Indeed, the quantity of PCBs still in use plus the quantity still languishing in waste dumps exceeds the total amount that has already escaped into the general environment. Without a program to recall and contain them, semivolatile PCBs will continue to insinuate themselves into the food chain for decades.

We can change our thinking. Rather than viewing the chemical adulteration of our environment and our bodies as the inevitable practice of convenience and progress, we can decide that cancer is inconvenient and toxic pollution archaic and primitive. We can start seeing the creation of carcinogens as the result of outmoded technologies. We can demand green engineering and green chemistry. We can let our systems of industry and agriculture know that they are suffering from a design flaw.

Between the late 1950s and the late 1980s, more than 750 million tons of chemical wastes were discarded.

... we find ourselves facing a rising tide of biologically active, synthetic organic chemicals. Some tinker with our hormones. Some attach themselves to our chromosomes and trigger mutations. Some cripple the immune system. Some light up our genes and so enhance the production of certain enzymes. If we could metabolize these chemicals into completely benign breakdown products and excrete them, they would pose less of a hazard. Instead, a good many of them accumulate.