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Our Stolen Future - Theo Colborn, John Peterson Myers, Dianne Dumanosk
How man-made chemicals are threatening our fertility, intelligence and survival.
$20.00
Over thirty years ago, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring first warned us of the terrifying effects of man-made chemicals on life on earth. Only now, however, is the full horror of what is happening to us emerging in laboratory research and in the realities of our lives and deaths.
Our Stolen Future, by two leading environmentalists writing with an award-winning journalist, is the first book to put together the massive body of evidence of this grimly growing menace. For years, researchers have noticed disruptions in the breeding cycles of numerous animals, from fish and birds to otters and whales. These were accompanied by increases in birth defects, sexual abnormalities and reproductive failure. Relying on decades of research, the authors provide a gripping detective story that traces the cause of these aberrations to the pervasive presence in the environment of chemicals that mimic natural hormones and trick the reproductive system.
Humans appear far from immune to such destruction. Male sperm counts have dropped by as much as 50% in recent decades, while women have seen a sharp rise in hormone-related cancers, endometriosis and other disorders. By attacking the fundamental mechanism that allows any species to survive – its ability to reproduce – these chemicals may be insidiously altering the future of the human race. The authors show how laboratory studies link these and other phenomena to ‘endrocrine disruptors’ within common pollutants that trick the body into radically altering normal reproductive functions, and impair not only childbearers but offspring as well.
The conclusions are as ominous as they are inescapable. Unless we humans make vital changes in the way we manufacture and employ the artefacts of our ‘good life’, there will be no life at all. This riveting and immensely important work will shock you. But at a time when environment laws are under severe attack and talk of ‘cost effectiveness’ fills the air, the grim reckoning of the price of profits takes us to a bottom line seen in no corporate report. Before it is too late, it may actually scare us into doing something.
This hardcover volume was published by Little, Brown and Company in 1996. The book itself has a little bumping to the corners only, the dustjacket has a little more wear, the original price sticker is on the inside of the dustjacket.