This seems to be my reunion season: the Michigan Mafia softball team, Rolling Stone magazine, now the Pesticide Action Network (PAN). PAN is now 25 years old, and what a dramatic quarter-century it has been.
Many people have asked me, over the course of my decades, why write? My answer has never varied: Because you never know who might be listening.
You may well think I have mixed my metaphors; after all, what does reading have to do with hearing?
Let me tell you another story. A long, long time ago, 37 years to be precise, we were Peace Corps Volunteers, my wife Alison and I. We were both quite good at languages; in fact we scored as the highest two in our small cohort trained in Kabul.
That meant that we got to choose where in the country we would be posted and we chose the farthest place from Kabul (and the American ex-pat community), a remote provincial capital called Taloqan.
This place was so isolated that for roughly three months a year, it was disconnected from the rest of Afghanistan, because the sole road that led there was washed out by the rains and snow.
In this place, we quickly consumed every piece of reading material we'd been able to bring with us. Every book, every copy of Ramparts, every copy of The New Yorker. Soon, the weather changed, and a dry desert heat transformed the area into the high Central Asian Steppe desert it has been since before the time of Marco Polo (whose description of the area was perfect 1,000 years after he wrote it.)
Though my mind continues to wander away from the main point, I must get to the reason for this whole story. One day, reduced to reading any scrap of language that came our way, Alison examined the ingredients on a packet of Kool-Aid we had bought in Kabul some months before.
I heard her cry. "This has cyclamates in it!"
A year or so before, the FDA had declared that the artificial sweetener Cyclamate was a cancer-causing drug, and therefore was banned from any further use in products sold within the U.S.
To make a very long story short, this incident led both of us to a long inquiry into how such an outrage could happen. It was a sordid story and it took many years to do the necessary documentation.
By then, I came to realize that any product banned, restricted, or heavily regulated by the U.S. government was somehow finding its way overseas to places like Afghanistan.
I won't bore you with the methodological details, but over half a decade after we returned to the U.S., I managed to publish my very first global environmental stories about this phenomenon (which I called the Export of Poison) in Rolling Stone and also through Pacific News Service.
Another half-decade later, my colleague Mark Schapiro and I published Circle of Poison, our book that eventually was translated into many languages and sold probably over 100,000 copies. Like many of the episodes in my career, the documentation of this underground best seller is no more than an approximation.
Regardless, a series of idealistic activists seized on the emergence of the book to create a movement, perhaps the first truly global environmental movement. Tonight, I met these inspirational people once again, for the first time in many years. Monica Moore, David Chatfield, Greta Goldenman.
You may never have heard their names but they belong in the pantheon of leaders who recognized early on how vulnerable our planet is due to irresponsible human activity.
For my part, I am only a simple writer. One who perhaps sensed the metaphor before it became popular. So I suppose my message tonight is write, write, write! Fiction or non-fiction, it matters not. Tell your own stories.
You never know who might be listening!
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