Living Downstream: A Scientist's Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment

One of the biggest dangers facing the war on cancer is silence, as it allows the development of cancer-causing agents in their many forms and promotes an increasingly deadly epidemic. Steingraber carefully navigates the paradox of silence by examining her own battle with bladder cancer as well as her campaign to bring much-needed attention to the war on environmental contaminants.

Periodically, the author recalls the peacefulness of her home: “Silence is comfortable here. The river embraces silence. The Illinois River seemed to me, as a teenager, not so much dangerous, or even endangered, as reassuring” (191). The silence that she experiences and remembers from her childhood is void of the many details about carcinogenic dangers she comes to recognize as an adult. The river’s silence represents an innocence—a reassurance that nothing is wrong. She again references silence’s peace and innocence when, in Chapter 10, she turns her car around and drives directly to a cornfield slated to become the site of a garbage incinerator: “The image of a giant incinerator sitting out in the silence of Pleasant Ridge cornfields, fleets of ash trucks and refuse-filled railcars forever coming and going, was disorienting, virtually impossible to accept” (222).