In our contemporary approach to cancer, we chase treatments to the near exclusion of searching for causation. I long for deep, thoughtful, scientific exploration of ways to prevent cancer before it ever starts, eliminating the need to find a cure.
Sandra Steingraber says it eloquently in a preface to Living Downstream, an Ecologist's Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment.
There once was a village along a river. The people who lived there were very kind. These residents, according to parable, began noticing increasing numbers of drowning people caught up in the river's swift current. And so they went to work devising ever more elaborate technologies to resuscitate the victims. So preoccupied were these heroic villagers with rescue and treatment that they never thought to look upstream to see who was pushing the victims in.
I want to walk up that river and find out what's going on.
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