Today I’m celebrating Rachel Carson’s birthday with my guest Patricia DeMarco PhD. In 1962 Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring, the book about toxic pesticides that laid the groundowork for the environmental movement and the establishment of the EPA. But she also wrote many other books and papers as a naturalist. Today we will be talking about what Rachel left us and what we can still learn from her work today. Patricia has been a Rachel Carson scholar since 2005, with service as the Executive Director of the Rachel Carson Homestead Association and as the Director of the Rachel Carson Institute at Chatham University. She writes and speaks extensively on the environmental ethic of Rachel Carson and her relevance to modern times. She is currently writing a book titled “Pathways to Our Sustainable Future.” www.rachelcarson.org/ | www.rachelcarsoncouncil.org | www.rachel_carson_homestead.myupsite.com
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
An Environmental Ethic for the 21st Century—Without Toxic Chemicals
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Patricia DeMarco
Date of Broadcast: March 27, 2014
DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And this is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic free. And we just had a long weekend. It’s Tuesday, May 27, 2014. And it’s Rachel Carson’s’ birthday. I’m so excited because, as those of you who have been listening now, I do love Rachel Carson and we talked about her on Earth Day—and you can go listen to that show too.
But today, I have one of my guests back who was here on Earth Day talking about Rachel Carson then. Her name is Patricia DeMarco, Ph.D. And she’s a Rachel Carson scholar. She’s going to be telling us today about—she’s actually writing a book called Pathways to Our Sustainable Future, which is about what she knows about what Rachel Carson has left us—her legacy—and how we can apply that today, what we can learn from that today to move forward in creating our toxic free world.
One of the things that I’m very interested in about—Patricia sent me her first chapter of the book. And one of the things that really was interesting to me is that, in my own life, I long ago made a decision that—well actually, I had a realization that the way to get out of living toxic is to live in harmony with nature. And I’m reading her chapter, and she says that Rachel Carson says exactly the same thing. So, great minds think alike.
And so, we’re here today to hear more about what Rachel Carson has to say about how we can move beyond our toxic world with Patricia DeMarco.
Hi, Patricia. Thanks for being here.
DR. PATRICIA DEMARCO: Hi, Debra. How are you?
DEBRA: I’m really good.
DR. PATRICIA DEMARCO: It’s my pleasure to be here.
DEBRA: Thank you. It’s a pleasure for me to have you. And let’s say happy birthday to Rachel Carson.
DR. PATRICIA DEMARCO: Happy birthday!
DEBRA: And I was just reading again your wonderful first chapter this morning, and two sentences are my favorites. The first one is:
“The planet earth operates on a set of natural laws, to the most extent ignored in the crafting of human laws that drive the economy.”
And then you also say:
“It’s our challenge to transition quickly from a fossil-dependent economy to an economic system operating on renewable and sustainable basis in harmony with the natural laws of the universe.”
And I just put a big star next to that last one and wrote, “Yes!” In the margin, a big yes.
But the thing that I ran into when I had my realization about that was, “Okay that makes perfect sense.” And for me it was a time when I was looking for some solution. If I’m not going to live according to the toxic industrial way, what can I use as a model? What can I use as a basis?
I was living out in a forest at the time. I just looked around and said, “Ah! Well, nature knows how to do it. If we weren’t doing these toxic things, nature would just sustain life.” And there are laws. And everything, even human beings, operate by those laws.
But then the question is, “What are those laws? And how can we actually apply them?”
Before we get into that though, I want you to tell us how did you get interested in this subject?
DR. PATRICIA DEMARCO: I was given a copy of Silent Spring by my Dad for a high school graduation present. And it just came out the fall before my graduation. So Rachel Carson was one of my heroes.
But I had lived all over the world by the time I was out of high school. My father was in the Foreign Service, so we moved every two years to a different country, which means I didn’t have the same kind of peer group that people get whenever they’re in first grade to high school—the same bunch of people from the same town.
So, similar to many people who travel all around during their growing up, I developed an interest in the natural life that was around me—butterflies in particular, and also creatures of the sea because we often lived on the sea shore.
And that really stayed with me as an interest in biology for most of my life. And I have my degree in biology in fact.
DEBRA: So then you have this interest. And then what made you decide to be a Rachel Carson scholar?
DR. PATRICIA DEMARCO: Well, I have been away from Pittsburgh for about almost 30 years, working in energy and environmental policy in both Connecticut and Alaska. I came home to Pittsburgh in 2005 partly because my parents have died, and I needed to be closer to my family. And Alaska is a long, long way from Pittsburgh.
So, it happens that Rachel Carson Homestead was seeking a director. And I took the five years contract to help them look at homestead, rebuild it and restore it to [programmatic] functioning—which I did between 2005 and 2010.
DEBRA: Well, you know what? Until yesterday, I didn’t actually know there was a Rachel Carson homestead. But I looked it up. I was looking for some links we could put on ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com that would lead people to more information about Rachel Carson. And I found the website for the homestead.
So, could you tell us a little bit about that? That’s exactly the kind of thing I love to go to when I travel.
DR. PATRICIA DEMARCO: Well, the best link for information on Rachel Carson is RachelCarson.org, which is Linda Lear’s website. And she is the biographer, the […] biographer of Rachel Carson. There’s a wealth of information there.
Also, if you go to the Fish and Wildlife Service, FWS.gov, they have preserved there all of her original papers—the conservation and action papers and much of her writings.
And so, those are both really good sources.
If you want to visit the places that were important to her, she was born in Springdale PA, on the Alleghemy River, which is where the way to Carson homestead is. And they are restoring it now to the four room farmhouse configuration that it held when the Carsons lived there.
Now, she was not there for very long. And when she graduated from college at what was then the Pennsylvania College for Women, now Chatham University, she then went on with her studies and her work outside of Pittsburgh and really didn’t come back until about 1952 when she received an honorary degree.
There also is a Rachel Carson Refuge in Maine nearby where she lived and wrote Silent Spring and where her family still has a little cottage in I believe Southport, Maine.
And then, in Silver Spring, Maryland, the house where she lived when she was working in Washington—and even until the end of her life—was in Silver Spring, Maryland. And you can find out about that in the Rachel Carson’s Council.
DEBRA: Yes. I’d put the links for RachelCarson.org, and the Rachel Carson Council, and the Rachel Carson Homestead on ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com next your interview. So people can go there, and also click through to get a copy of Silent Spring, if you don’t already have one and a copy of Rachel Carson’s biography, which I’m in the middle of reading. It’s very excellent.
So, can you tell us—one of the things that I noticed about myself actually is that I tend to think not the way the rest of society is thinking. It’s like I have my own thoughts. And I like people who have their own thoughts. I see that in Rachel Carson. I see it in a lot of people who are thinking differently ahead of their time, that instead of just following along with what society is saying, that they’re looking for themselves and observing the world from themselves and making their own conclusions.
Can you speak about her? What was it about her that she could, not only observe life differently, that she could see what was going on, but then speak out about it?
DR. PATRICIA DEMARCO: Well, there are some interesting things about Rachel Carson. First of all, her mother was in the [Nancy Comb] arena of children’s education. And she believed that nature was the best teacher.
DEBRA: Wow!
DR. PATRICIA DEMARCO: So, during the time that she was growing up, they had about 58 acres of undeveloped land in their immediate neighborhood. They lived on a graveled road. And it wasn’t built up the way it is now. So, Rachel and her mother would have many, many times where they could just roam the woods and fields—
DEBRA: I need to interrupt you for a second. I want you to continue your story after the break. But we need to go to the break because the commercial’s going to start.
You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And we’re here with Patricia Demarco. We’re talking about Rachel Carson on her birthday. Sorry I had to interrupt you, but I was listening to you. I’m so engrossed that I forgot to look at the clock. But we’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And my guest today is Patricia Demarco. She is Rachel Carson’s scholar. And today is Rachel Carson’s birthday.
So, we’re celebrating Rachel Carson’s birthday by talking about her, and what she has to say about living in harmony with nature. So, go ahead with your story about her childhood.
DR. PATRICIA DEMARCO: Okay. So because she was a child of the fields and woods, she learned to become a very astute observer, which is one of the most important criteria for being a scientist as you know.
She also was encouraged from an early age to write because her mother was hoping that she would be a writer. And she was published in St. Nicholas Magazine for Children at the age of 10 and was an honor author (meaning she was paid) by the time she was 14.
When she went to college, to the Pennsylvania College for Women, she began with a major in writing, and then converted to a major in science because she decided that now she knew what she was writing about. So, she really was in tune with the natural world from a very fundamental level all the way from the beginning.
DEBRA: Yes, I can see that. And I can see that in her writing. I think too, at that time in history, when she was a child, I think that people had more of an idea of being in harmony with nature than we do now. Do you think so?
DR. PATRICIA DEMARCO: …especially when she was beginning to work on Silent Spring. She realized it was after the second world tour and science had won domination over the […] and all of these medical discovery happened as a result of the changing of the industrial might of the country from ammunition to chemical fertilizers, pharmaceuticals because they needed to put that factory production to some commercial use.
DEBRA: Yes.
DR. PATRICIA DEMARCO: So really, it was […] chemistry. And she was the voice of caution in the face of a predominant perception that nature was there for men’s benefit and amusement, and we can control it. She was arguing that the natural systems know more than any human invention could come up with, and that we may be had become too arrogant for our own good in technology would save us.
And I think this is one of the important messages that are still relevant to us today. I’ll give you some of her words about this.
DEBRA: Good.
DR. PATRICIA DEMARCO: “In spite of the truly marvelous inventiveness of the human brain, we are beginning to wonder whether our power in the face of nature should not have been tempered with wisdom for our own good and with a greater sense of responsibility, welfare of generations to come.”
DEBRA: I can completely agree with that.
DR. PATRICIA DEMARCO: She was concerned about what was going to happen as a consequence of some of the things that we were rushing into forthwith.
DEBRA: Well, I’m thinking back, I’ve done a fair amount of study like the history of industrialism. And when I said earlier that I thought that when she was born, she was a child, at that particular time, there was still some awareness of the idea of living in harmony with nature. And then you described what happened post World War II. That was really a time when there was a big shift.
So, those of us who were born after World War II, like myself, we were not raised with the same ethic that she was raised with. And even in Silent Spring, the title of Silent Spring comes from her having listened to the birds sing in the spring time. And then she went through this period that we all went through of having pesticides being sprayed, and then having some of those pesticides killing some of those song birds to the point where the spring time was no longer the spring time that she was accustomed to.
And so, for her to have that observation was the result of her being aware of those birds in the first place, and then having there be a change and her continuing to be aware and seeing that there was a change. Not many people have that level of awareness of nature.
But I think we all should be having that level of awareness of nature—and particularly, those of us who were born, as I’ve said, post World War II. We weren’t raised with that. And I think that that lack of that awareness, I know in my own life that it was like a rebirth for me to start being aware of that and to not think that I just had to live in industrial consumer culture, that there was this whole world of nature out there that I really belong to as a living being, a species like any other species.
And on that level of existence, somehow, we know that we need to be living in harmony with nature according to natural laws. Just as a tree does, or a butterfly, or all the other living things, those laws apply to us as well.
DR. PATRICIA DEMARCO: Well, I think what Rachel Carson’s gift to us was the understanding of systems and the interconnectedness of the living things. She understood from her years of study of the connections between the land and the sea, and the creatures of the estuary, how we are all connected and the smallest, little creature has a role in the web of life. We cannot perturb one part without perturbing the whole.
That concept of interconnectedness is really essential for understanding why we need to act on a broad scale to address the problems that are eroding our life support system.
And she was very aware, and very effective at communicating how the systems of the world work. And if you look at her book, To See Around Us, where she described the origin of the wave, and the origin of the ocean and how the movement of water and the difference between the salt and the fresh water drives the climate of the planet, these concepts are so relevant today as we’re trying to understand what’s going on with climate change and warming through combustion of fossil fuel.
So, I think because she understood the system so well, and was an excellent communicator, to the public, she had a great deal of credibility and a great deal of influence.
DEBRA: We’re going to take another break. And when we come back, we’ll keep talking about Rachel Carson and her gift to us through her works, and how they can be applied today.
Patricia’s going to tell us about some specific things that we can be doing to live according to natural law in our own lives and in the world. And we’ll find out what Rachel Carson has to say about this.
I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. And my guest today is Patricia Demarco. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And my guest today is Patricia Demarco. She is a Rachel Carson scholar. She’s writing a book about Rachel Carson’s legacy, what she’s left to us from all her observations and writing and how we can apply that to live more according to natural law.
So, let’s talk about natural law. You’ve told us about systems. What are some other points that we should be aware of.
DR. PATRICIA DEMARCO: Well, the biggest problem we have is the ecosystem services that the Earth provides us for free are not reflected in our economic computations directly.
So, when you compute gross domestic product—which is what everyone uses to determine whether we’re doing well or not—you don’t count things like wetland degradations. You don’t count things like loss of pollinators. You don’t count the services that the living systems provide like filtration, the wetness of water, like sequestering of carbon dioxide in trees, like the purification of our air. We tend to ignore those as given. They’re just there.
DEBRA: Yes.
DR. PATRICIA DEMARCO: We don’t see a need to compute the value. So when we destroy them, they are not reflected in that market computation.
And these are not easy to ignore. When you have lost a wetland, it costs a great deal to restore it. And I’ll give you the example. The nine mile run in Pittsburgh ran through a slag pile and was—we called it Stink River when I was growing up. It was put in a pipe and ran into the river.
Now, in 2006 they finally completed a five year effort of restoring that wetland to a functioning wetland. They daylighted the stream. They cleaned it up. They put filtration in to get the slag contaminants out. And it is now a park and a wetland that actually helps to purify the watershed of that whole community. And it has also raised awareness to the whole community.
It cost $7.2 million to just restore that three and a half mile stretch.
Now, all over the country, we have 3 thousand miles of acid mine damaged rivers in just Pennsylvania. When you blow off the top of the mountain to get the […] clean out, you inevitably ruin the watershed—and the neighborhood, and the people who were living in the mountains, never mind the animals as well. So, there’s no cost to the destruction of that ecosystem.
When you tear down a forest in the Amazon, which is the lungs of the earth, it generates 50% of the free oxygen that we depend on to breathe, they don’t reflect the cost of replacing that function. You can’t replace an Amazon rainforest just by replanting it. It took years and years to grow.
DEBRA: Right.
DR. PATRICIA DEMARCO: So, we have a flaw in how we compute the value of our economy. The essential life support system—fresh air, clean water, fertile ground, the biodiversity of species—don’t have any specific value in the way we compute our economic merit.
DEBRA: Well, I think that—yeah I agree with you on this. I thought that I’ve had in the past—because I’ve thought all of these things that we’re talking about—is if people don’t have an awareness that nature is even there, and they don’t understand the free services that nature is providing to us, and that as far as they can look as going down to the mall or going shopping or what movie they’re going to see this week—
But also—I mean, fairly I’ll say—people have a lot of attention on how are they going to pay their bills. But the thing that struck me was that we have our attention on what we need to do to survive in the industrial world. We have pretty much zero attention on what nature is providing to us in order to suppress, to survive at all—that if we don’t have air to breathe, if we don’t have water to drink, then we can’t do any of the other things that we do within our society.
DR. PATRICIA DEMARCO: Right.
DEBRA: And our awareness of this being there, it stuns me when I look around in the world how few people think that broadly. But I had to look back to earlier in my life when I didn’t have that awareness either.
DR. PATRICIA DEMARCO: When you look at what people see in the mainstream media, and there is not a good way to learn about things like wetland restoration and the value of pollinators by watching TV. You don’t hear news stories about, “Oh, the pollinator population crashed,” and everybody’s running around ringing their heads. They don’t go back and say, “Good heavens! Is it possibly because we’re using RoundUp on everything, so that the spaces between the fields that used to have wild flowers are now gone” or, “Good heavens! Maybe because the pollens have become toxic from breathing into the plant a pesticide that was going to diminish the pests, but is now also killing the pollinators. Who would have thought?”
So, I think we need to start thinking about the implications of what we’re doing. And it’s important that we do that before we have tipped over to the point where the ecosystem services cannot be restored.
DEBRA: I completely agree with you. And so, for me at this point in time, after having become aware of these things, for me, the first thing is where are the ecosystems, what are they, where is my local ecosystem that I live in, what kind of condition is that ecosystem in, what needs to be restored, how is it maintained?
There’s a word for this, I think it’s Megalopolis or something of where cities grow into each other, and so there’s no space between the cities anymore. And then there’s whole stretches of land where there are no ecosystems because they’re all cemented over—or parking lots or all of these things.
I’ve lived in everything from living in downtown San Francisco to living out in a forest to now I live in suburbia. And in each of those places, the natural ecosystem environment has been more or less saved or damaged.
I’m looking at the clock. We have to go to break, but we’re going to continue when we come back. Oh, no wait, wait. I still have a few more seconds. So I’ll finish my thought.
But his whole idea of where is your ecosystem, and what is your ecosystem, and what is the nature of your ecosystem, and what kind of plants and flowers and things, everything about it, the first thing that should be of concern to everybody is maintain the ecosystem; and then how can humans live within it in a way that all the flows, and the animals, and the plants, and everything that makes that ecosystem alive, how can that be maintained?
We are going to go to break now. But we’ll be right back. You’re listening to Toxic Free talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Patricia Demarco. She’s a Rachel Carson scholar. And we’re talking about the laws of nature and how to live in harmony with them. So stay tuned and we’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And today is Rachel Carson’s birthday. We’re talking about what she left to us that we can apply in life today to make the world a better place.
Patricia, I wish we have a five hour show. We’re already to the last segment. It goes by so fast. So, I’m just going to not ask you more questions. I’m just going to let you talk—not that I might not interrupt you, but just go ahead and talk about more things you’d like to say about living by natural law.
DR. PATRICIA DEMARCO: So, I think people need to be aware that they’re a part of the living earth and develop a sense of things like, “Where did my water come from? Where does the food come from?”
DEBRA: Yes.
DR. PATRICIA DEMARCO: And I give an exercise to my energy policy students. I make them list all the things they use in a day, and identify where it comes from. Everything! You get up, you take your blankets off, you turn off your alarm clock, all of that stuff. Where do those come from? And how big is your footprint on the resources of the world.
The average American—although we’re only 6% of the world’s population—we use 34% of the resources of the world. If everyone on earth lives the way we do, it would take 5 ½ planet. So, we need to become more aware of what we do ourselves, use some judicial exercise and understand the problems that we’re facing—the climate change with endocrine disruptors and toxic materials in our food chain.
The answers are not more technology. The answers are a value judgment, an ethical judgment that we will make choices that will preserve the living earth.
And I think that is a good barometer to use when you’re making decisions about things. If you need practical things that you can do yourself, especially at summer time, don’t deliberately put poison in your own face.
You don’t need fertilizers, and herbicide, and pesticide in your own yard. You don’t need toxic materials to clean your property, and your house, and yourself with. You need to think about the fate of the things that you use yourself everyday and try to reduce your own toxicity.
Another thing you can do is to support the move for more responsible production of materials. There has been nine different attempts to reform the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1996. The burden is really on the customer to try read all those labels down to the small type and figure out what to avoid. When the business is computed by how much of the poison we’re allowed to put into the air and water by permit by law, it’s now 3.2 billion pounds a year of toxic material that’s released legally.
We can change that to do what some other countries have done, and say we should prevent the production of materials that have toxic products and by-products by design. So you put the burden on the producer to produce things that are safe rather than the consumer to try to put the genie back in the bottle once it’s already distributed.
And the other we can do is to really get serious about the implication of continuing to burn fossil fuels. I know there are places—in Florida, for example—where they’ve tremendously interesting progress in linking solar and wind to the existing electric grid. If we decided to do this on a policy level nationwide, we could make a tremendous effect on the fossil footprint of this country. And then, export that technology broadly to other people who need it.
I think we have to take this seriously as a way of preserving our living earth. And I would like to leave Rachel Carson’s word with you. She said that:
“Underlying all of these problems of introducing contamination into our world is the question of moral responsibility—responsibility not only to our own generation, and to those in the future. We are […] genetic damage to generation now alive, but the threat is infinitely greater to the generation unborn, to those who have been born in the decisions we’re making today. And that fact alone is our responsibility—a heavy one.”
She asked it this way:
“Who has the right to decide for the countless legions of people who were not consulted that the supreme value of the world without insects, even though it also be a sterile world, ungrazed by the perfect wing of a bird in flight?”
We have to apply our wisdom to the application of technology. Just because we can do something doesn’t mean that we should.
DEBRA: Well, I think that that’s where—it’s not that technology is necessarily bad, but it’s not tempered by good sense. What’s missing is this piece that says we live in a natural world that our lives are continued to be alive because of the planet and what it’s giving us, all the gifts that are there, and that we need to acknowledge and respect, and do whatever is necessary to protect that or we’re not going to be able to live at all.
I know that that is an old statement, but it really is true. We really have to be aware that air is there and we’re damaging it.
I started out during my work because of toxics—toxics in my own home, and my own health, being affected by them. But then I went into a phase where I started being aware that there was something beyond the four walls of my house. I was living in the forest. And I went, “Oh, there’s the natural world” and I suddenly realized that not only could I make choices about toxics in my house, but I could make choices about toxics in the environment.
I became interested in all kinds of different environmental issues, and nature, and how to live in harmony with nature, and all these things.
Toxics were not so interesting for me for a while because I was interested in all these other things. But a few years ago, I came back to really just focusing in on toxics again because of the fact that toxic chemicals, pesticides, cleaning products, solvents, all these things, are in virtually every household in the world unless you have intentionally removed them.
Toxics are the biggest enemy to life. And whether we’re aware of it or not, toxic chemicals are out there reducing the quality of life, killing off species, making people sick, increasing healthcare cost, all these things.
And we have a choice. There are non-toxic alternatives already for virtually everything that’s toxic. All we have to do is choose them. All we have to do is choose them.
And there are varying degrees of being toxic-free, everything from making a less toxic chemical out of petroleum is a step all the way to living as completely in harmony with nature as you can. Any step you take is a movement in the right direction.
But we have to do it, we have to do it because this is the enemy of life in my opinion. Anything else could be wrong in the world, but this is the thing that literally is killing us.
DR. PATRICIA DEMARCO: I think one thing that we need to remember is that much of what we’re talking about here will require policy change on both the state and the national level.
DEBRA: Yes.
DR. PATRICIA DEMARCO: And unless people makes their wishes known, and communicate the importance of maintaining a healthy world to our representative in the congress and the senate, and in the local government, they’re going to continue to listen to the loudest voice they hear—and that isn’t generally the public pointing they want public health. We need to re-establish the voice of the public interest in the public arena.
DEBRA: Yes.
DR. PATRICIA DEMARCO: And I think if you haven’t written to your congressman about, “I’m concerned about toxics in my environment,” and demand accountability, “What are you doing about it? I’m concerned about climate change. How are we going to fix this? And what are you doing about it? And don’t tell me we’re going to use natural gas by blowing up the […] under the farm.”
This kind of thing requires public diligence. And it’s an obligation of citizens to engage in this discussion.
And this is one of the things that Rachel Carson did. She was a scientist, and she was a writer, and a naturalist. But she went to congress. She was one of the first women who actually came there as an expert. She gave them recommendations. She gave them opinions about how we go forward based on the studies and based on the science.
And I think we need to do that. We need to have the courage to do that.
DEBRA: Well, that is what this country is about. It was founded on—I remember I went to Thomas Jefferson’s home, Monticello, when I went to Washington DC. And there, there was an exhibit of something that he had written about the necessity of educating the citizens of the United States, so they could understand the issues and have a voice.
DR. PATRICIA DEMARCO: Yes. Yes, exactly.
DEBRA: And that is what public education was about originally as described by Thomas Jefferson. He wanted the people who were voting to understand and create a good country.
DR. PATRICIA DEMARCO: Right. And you need to really take that obligation of citizenship seriously. I think it’s pathetic that, in this country, we have very low turn-out of voting and people are not engaged with the issues that affect their lives everyday—and their children’s lives. Our grandchildren and our children are being affected irreversibly by decision that we are making or that are being made on our behalf without our voice.
DEBRA: Yeah. Thank you so much for being with us. We only have just a few second left.
DR. PATRICIA DEMARCO: Thank you.
DEBRA: So, I so appreciate the work that you’re doing and that you’re with us today. And once again, happy birthday to Rachel Carson.
DR. PATRICIA DEMARCO: Happy birthday to Rachel.
DEBRA: And you can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, and check out the links and the books that we have there. This is ToxicFreeTalkRAdio.com. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Be well.
