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Newsletter #52–February/March 1999

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Silence Is the Sound of Money Talking

by Sandra Steingraber

In the October/November 1998 issue of this newsletter, we published BCA's corporate contributions policy and reprinted Judy Brady's column about public relations and cancer. To continue to focus on the issues raised by those items, we asked Sandra Steingraber author of Living Downstream: A Scientist's Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment and a member of BCA's Scientific Advisory Board to provide her analysis. We urge our readers to express their views on this very important subject.

The emerging debate about the corporate connection to cancer organizations raises important issues that activists ignore at their peril. My view is that only by understanding and exposing these connections will we ever truly be able to address the underlying causes of the cancer epidemic.

Chevron is the classic example of a company that donates funds to cancer organizations. Recognizing that there are many companies whose behavior is identical to Chevron's, I will use that example here for simplicity. When a cancer organization that is working to expose the links between cancer and the environment accepts money from Chevron, it provides Chevron the opportunity to use the work of that organization as a publicity tool if only because its name is listed in the organization's literature and therefore associated with the organization's positive work. No one reading the name of Chevron next to that of a "good-guy" organization knows exactly what that relationship is. In the end, a company that may pollute the environment gets credit for supporting work that focuses on making the link between environmental contamination and cancer.

Similarly, events that benefit cancer organizations sometimes convey a mixed message. Holding golf tournaments and driving cars to benefit breast cancer organizations are two currently popular examples. When a good-guy organization hosts a golf tournament, it implicitly endorses a sport which is under attack by all kinds of environmental groups for its threats to public health. Golf has a substance abuse problem in the form of pesticide dependency, and some public health researchers have argued that it may be contributing to the excesses in breast cancer among professional women golfers. Some researchers also argue that golf courses create risks of childhood cancers when pesticides from golf courses drift into lawns, homes and water supplies. I make a habit of pointing out that golf course supervisors are one of four groups suffering from excess rates of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma (along with Vietnam vets exposed to Agent Orange, farmers and pesticide applicators).

Sending women onto pesticide-saturated grass to raise money for breast cancer seems problematic to me when the sponsoring organization is one that is committed to addressing the environmental causes of cancer. While the commitment of the organization may be unshakable, the methods used to do its work and the larger social effects of those methods must be questioned.

For me, the issue is not whether the good-guy organization will eventually be corrupted by its association with petrochemical companies and golf course owners (though this question may arise: he who pays the piper calls the tune; he who takes the king's shilling does the king's bidding). The point, instead, is about public relations. By accepting funds from polluting, possibly carcinogenic institutions, good-guy organizations allow those institutions to burnish their public image and get credit for fighting breast cancer. Such an association deflects attention away from the ways in which companies may be contributing to cancer.

And there is another message that corporate funding of breast cancer organizations sends. It is a message to women with breast cancer in places like Richmond, Calif., who have been fighting Chevron for years because of its reckless disregard for public health: the good-guy organization is on the side of the polluters. However critical the good guy is of Chevron, trust and credibility with the grassroots is lost, and the women's environmental health movement is undermined. After all, when cancer groups accept industry money, how do we distinguish between those who claim they remain untainted by these donations and those that are little more than front groups for industry?

Groups that accept funding from the Chevrons and the golf courses of the world no doubt argue that meaningful social change can be brought about by cooperating with the forces that produce and use the chemicals that we believe contribute to the cancer epidemic. Unfortunately, I can think of no historical example where this strategy has worked. Martin Luther King and civil rights activists did not rid the South of segregation by accepting grant money from the Ku Klux Klan. Nor did they co-host a fundraising event with bus drivers in order to win the right to sit in front. In the end, confrontational non-cooperation, boycotts, sit-ins, force and appeals to public shame won the day. Similarly, many people were critical of the campaign to divest from South Africa during apartheid and argued that a more constructive dialogue with white leadership would instead lead to meaningful reform. It did not. Once again, nonviolent resistance and boycotts were the winning tickets. Likewise, workers did not win living wages by calmly convincing their employers of the reasonableness of their arguments at least, not without the threat of a strike behind them. (I only have health insurance now because the National Writers' Union, a UAW local, went to bat for me.)

I believe that true change will come about when the public is prepared to take action. Those concerned about the environmental links to the cancer epidemic have an important role to play in exposing those links. They can't do it by letting themselves be used as public relations fodder or accepting funding from polluters while urging them to "do the right thing."