Human to Humus: The Irish language says people are part of the earth. Literally.

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My parents were eager to achieve the American Dream. They believed their lives would be better with more material wealth. While my family was comfortable--we had a computer and went on family vacations--I grew-up near the largest landfill in the world, Fresh Kills, and near the industrial petro-chemical plants on the New Jersey coast. The consequences of living in this place became very personal to me when I turned sixteen and my mother was diagnosed with leukemia. I first became aware of the connection between environmental pollution and cancer in college when I read Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, a book she wrote as she was dying from breast cancer. Until I read Silent Spring, I just thought my mother was unlucky. In the years since Carson’s pioneering study, scientists have found that nearly ninety percent of cancers are linked to environmental exposure and lifestyle. My mother died two years after she was diagnosed, at age fifty-two. My mother’s mother, by contrast, grew up on a farm in Ireland, never ate processed food, breathed clean air and had little-to-no exposure to environmental pollutants. She complained about having to carry stones out of the field as a child until she was so tired she wasn’t even hungry, and the house she grew up in had two rooms to house herself, her parents and her ten siblings. My grandmother, however, lived until she was ninety-eight—never having been hospitalized. The morning of the day she died, she woke up and told my grandfather, “I’m going to die today. Get everyone together.” My family’s stories—impacted by colonization, industrialization and ecological ruination, poverty and the choices of societies to pursue growth models and of individuals to pursue material wealth—motivates my research. My personal experiences are shared by many people throughout the world as growth and wealth become increasingly embraced and more people see their loved ones die from environmental pollution and climate change. My research concerns the local narratives that tie people to place in a respectful co-dependence, with particular attention to stories and language. I am interested in the possibility of the ways we speak and the stories we tell offering creative ideas for how to change our society which is our best hope for a better future.

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