I know a thing or two about doubt.  I know the feeling, as an environmental scientist, of second-guessing my calculations, the nagging paranoia that I’ve based important regulatory decisions on incorrect assumptions.  And as a writer, I am well-acquainted with the metallic taste of self-doubt — of sharing too much, or not enough, or misjudging my aesthetic.  To a certain degree, I think it’s healthy to second-guess.  Keeps one from settling too comfortably on their haunches, so to speak.  But sometimes, the tendency to be uncertain can be hijacked by others with thinly veiled agendas.

In February of this year, right before I was to deliver a reading of an essay from Creative Nonfiction’s The Human Face of Sustainability contest, I was alerted by CNF editor Lee Gutkind and someone from the marketing staff of Arizona State University’s Global Institute of Sustainability that there was some controversy regarding my piece.  Not to worry, they said, discussion is good.  But they wanted me to know in case something came up during my reading.  Then they shared what others had said.

For those who haven’t read the piece, “Acts of Courage” explores the increasing incidence of childhood cancers juxtaposed against our increased use of toxic chemicals — the evidence of which is documented by the presence of chemicals in our water, soil, food, and other consumer products (listen to the podcast reading of the essay here).  Many of these chemicals are known and suspected carcinogens, others have been released into the marketplace and environment without sufficient testing.  In the piece, I make no specific accusations about cause and effect; rather, I simply weave the facts together, shine a light into a dark corner and ask, “Shouldn’t we be looking here?”

The news of my essay winning The Human Face of Sustainability contest ruffled some feathers — a few scientists and scholars (whose identities I choose not to reveal in the interest of professional dignity) who read the blurb about my piece in ASU’s press release and responded with surprising disdain.  I will spare you the details, but here are some of the phrases that were being kicked around: “Of course this is junk… I don’t know of any science that supports this scare mongering.”  “We don’t need science becoming magic. Traces of this and that will kill you.”  And my favorite: “It would seem that any prize for creative non-fiction should be for something that is actually non-fiction.”

Ouch.  I was certain I was about to be ambushed.

The threat of attack sent me into a manic state of self-doubt, and I scoured my research to double-check the statistics and prepare for my reading as if it were a thesis defense.  These were scholars, after all, people with a helluva lot more academic credentialing than me.  At some point though, late in the night before my reading, when my anxiety had reached critical mass, I decided to focus my research on my attackers instead.

Sure enough, the special interests began to emerge — representatives of, and affiliations with institutes and organizations against chemical regulation, funded by petroleum, chemical, and pharmaceutical industries.  I had just experienced firsthand the strategic employment of doubt, the attack-via-uncertainty.  The defensive offensive.

This is a card frequently played in the environment-verses-industry game, the latest round evident in Steven E. Koonin’s “Climate Science is Not Settled” piece — which is, of course, being applauded by fossil fuel lobbyists (for more discussion, see Andrew Revkin’s blog post “Certainties, Uncertainties, and Choices with Global Warming” at Dot Earth).  Better not do anything about climate change… the science is still uncertain.  Score one for the status quo.

But here’s the thing we need to understand: while scientific uncertainty is a valid topic to wrestle and discuss, it is currently being (ab)used as a ploy to distract from the real issue at hand — by which I mean the ethics behind our culture’s approach to things like chemical regulation and climate change.  Ethical questions such as: Is it morally acceptable to burden future generations with providing the evidence of harm?  Or as Kathleen Dean Moore and Michael Nelson have asked in their co-edited book, Moral Ground: Do we have a moral obligation to leave future generations with a world as rich in possibility as the one that was left to us?  These are the questions that should drive our actions, and they are exactly the ones environmental opponents seek to avoid.  Why? Because their answers are less susceptible to doubt.

Despite the uncertainty, I do believe that the scientific evidence of human-caused global climate change is solid, as is the scientific argument for using the precautionary principle in chemical regulation.  The data glare at us like a mid-day sun, and the doubt cast by climate deniers and other industry loyalists is a tactic — just a moment in time when the sun is obscured by the moon.  There was a time when people were afraid of the solar eclipse.  Today we should know better than that.

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There was a silence at the table.

“That doesn’t sit right with me,” one of my friends declared.

And who could blame her?  She’d simply stated what everyone else at the table was thinking: Walmart honoring sustainability? Really?

To many of us, the thought of Walton money supporting environmental initiatives may seem as unlikely as a Hatfield marrying a McCoy, or these days, Democrats and Republicans playing nicely on Capitol Hill.  And for those willing to accept the possibility of unlikely bedfellows working toward a common good, they still might regard it with a healthy skepticism, chalking it up to an image-driven marketing plan performing at its best.

And that may be.  Corporations seem to behave a bit like children — egocentric and brash, often pushing their boundaries into the morally gray until someone shames them into better behavior.  Enter Greenpeace (corporate spanking, modified behavior, then cue the press release).  But what about positive reinforcement?  Can that yield desired results?

It’s been said that Walmart’s celebrated relief efforts in the wake of Hurricane Katrina rendered an ah-ha moment for its leadership — that they asked themselves: What if we used our size and resources to do more good?  What would happen then?  Hence the story behind Walmart’s partnership with the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) since 2006, where they have been working to reduce their carbon emissions and move toward a corporate goal of zero-waste in their daily operations.  It’s a tall order, so why are they doing it?  Corporate responsibility?  Paying it forward?  Ask yourself: why does Walmart do anything?

Retailers spend billions of dollars in market research to predict and influence the behaviors of their target audiences in the name of corporate profit.  If people are talking about pink slime in hamburgers and chemicals in cosmetics, you can bet that the retailers are listening.  And if there’s enough groundswell to impact the market, enough to register on the radar of our capitalist system, then action will likely ensue.  Meaning that if a critical mass of people care about the “eew” factor and the moral considerations behind the goods and services they buy, some retailer will invariably step up to take advantage of that shift.

But creating that shift —illuminating the ethical issues associated with supply chains and business models to cultivate the Informed Consumer— is up to us.  It’s our job as citizens and consumers to create (and remain loyal to) that market, to convey what we value, and for what we’ll take a stand.  That shift is what I had in mind when I wrote my essay for The Walton Sustainability Solutions “The Human Face of Sustainability” contest, and that shift is what I’m counting on to propel reform in our country’s regulation of toxic chemicals.

It seems that some retailers have been paying attention to the groundswell behind this particular issue: In September 2013, Walmart announced a new chemicals policy for suppliers of personal, pet, and household products — one that calls for expanded disclosure of ingredients and removal of certain toxic chemicals from their products to comply with Walmart’s new standards.  The move is being hailed by nonprofits such as the EDF, the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics, the Green Science Policy Institute, and others as fostering real change toward improving the safety of household and personal care products we bring into our homes.  Target Corporation quickly followed suit with announcement of a similar policy in October 2013, and other retailers are expected to adopt similar standards.

Of course I applaud Walmart’s groundbreaking chemicals policy move, and I am deeply grateful to the Walton family’s investment in The Global Institute of Sustainability to incubate sustainable technologies and entrepreneurial ideas.  Good things are happening there, and I expect that some of the work from this institution will help Walmart in its own sustainability efforts.  But let’s not forget all the ground-level work that went into making Walmart and other retailers realize that these efforts are worthwhile investments.  Let’s not forget all the work that goes into creating this market demand.  For that, I’m grateful to you.

Photo courtesy of www.mercurynews.com (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

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Mary Heather Noble is the winner of the $10,000 first-place prize for Creative Nonfiction’s The Human Face of Sustainability essay contest, sponsored by Arizona State University’s Sustainability Solutions Festival.

Mary Heather Noble’s prize-winning essay, “Acts of Courage,” uses a series of flashbacks from her youth and early scientific career to recall how cancer from contaminants intersected her life, unflinchingly using devastating statistics to show how carcinogens have so easily entered into daily life.

Noble will be honored at the Sustainability Solutions Festival in Tempe, AZ, February 17-22.  The festival is a program within the Rob and Melani Walton Sustainability Solutions Initiatives at the Global Institute of Sustainability at Arizona State University.

“The idea of sustainability can mean many things to different people, but it is clear through Mary Heather Noble’s brilliant essay, as well as by each of our other finalists, that there is a deep, human connection to sustainability, regardless of definition,” said Patricia Reiter, director of the Walton Sustainability Solutions Initiatives.

Read the full announcement at creativenonfiction.org and asunews.asu.edu.

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I recently finished reading Kristen Iversen’s book, Full Body Burden, and —even as a person familiar with the toxic secrets of government and industry— found the details of the Rocky Flats environmental legacy to be shocking.  Shocking, perhaps, because Iversen’s details are delivered so personally: her seemingly perfect hometown with room for children and horses to run and explore tainted by the invisible emissions of a secret nuclear weapons plant, rumors of covered-up contamination, and the cancer clusters to fuel them.  Woven into Iversen’s account of Rocky Flats is her own parallel tale of family erosion from her father’s alcoholism, shrouded in the stoicism of the family’s Norwegian heritage.  The dual narratives are powerful, delivering with unrelenting honesty the anxiety of knowing something deeply unsettling about your home, yet lacking the will or means to leave.

I do not personally know Kristen Iversen, but years ago, I worked with her sister, Karma, at the New Mexico Environment Department.  Our department was responsible for issuing wastewater discharge permits for all types of facilities: municipal wastewater treatment plants, dairies and food processing facilities, mining operations and other industrial facilities, including, among others, Los Alamos National Labs (LANL).

Neither Karma nor I oversaw any permits for LANL — she was a soil scientist who specialized in agricultural wastewater permits, and I was fresh out of graduate school, just getting my feet wet with permitting municipal and small-scale industrial wastewater discharges.  But I can recall the frustration of our more-senior colleagues who did manage permits for the Federal facilities, the secrecy shrouding activities at LANL and Sandia National Labs.  And I can remember talking with Karma about the rumors that floated around those sites: elevated rates of thyroid cancers, stories about dogs developing cancerous growths on their paws from their frolics in the adjacent canyons.

As a new State government employee, I was careful not to be blindly swayed by the hysteria of misguided risk perception.  There were always people with “too much time on their hands,” quick to bundle anecdotal tidbits with partial information to formulate wildly speculative conclusions about the dangers of site X or the devious intentions of company Y.  But after a few years of seasoning and a broadened portfolio of sites, I began to understand the paranoia.  I can recall thinking of more than a few of my sites that I could never live near there.  I could never live with the anxiety.  You know what they say about the restaurant business — once you know what goes on in the kitchen, you’ll be reluctant to eat out again.

My foray into the history of Rocky Flats via Iversen’s Full Body Burden prompted me to revisit Ellen Meloy’s The Last Cheater’s Waltz and her anxiety of place.In The Last Cheater’s Waltz, Meloy is wrought with the guilt and paranoia of inhabiting and loving a place as beautiful as the redrock canyon country of southeastern Utah, and knowing its role in the widespread violence of nuclear weapons development and testing in the American Southwest.  Like a betrayed lover, Meloy traces the path of uranium mined from her Moab-area home to the weapons development facility in Los Alamos and the Trinity nuclear weapons test site in New Mexico, seeking some kind of — what?  Understanding? Redemption for choosing to live there despite its tainted past?

Meloy’s journey is an attempted exorcism of the anxiety of place — a theme most intriguing to those of us with academic inclinations, but imagine what that must feel like in the first person.  Imagine what it feels like to live in a place, or be from somewhere where you have a high probability of developing some condition, some malaise, just because you call that place home.  Love Canal.  Rocky Flats.  Fukashima.  Or imagine what it must be like to love a landscape with a hidden history as as cursed with death as  Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  These are no ordinary betrayals.  To most of us, these are abstract places, places to consider in the large-scale debate about environmental degradation.  But to some of us, these places are home.

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