I have admired Dr. Tracey Woodruff’s work for at least twenty years, ever since I began delving into this area. Her accomplishments and publications are abundant, and she never seems to shy from a fight or balk when given a chance to speak up. She is Director and Alison S. Carlson Endowed Professor at UCSF’s Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment (PRHE). She was a Senior Scientist for many years at the EPA and did excellent work there but now has an inside/outsider perspective on the agency. Together with other illustrious scientists I have interviewed, she has founded the Center to End Corporate Harm. One of my contacts said, “Only Tracey could have called it that.” I share their vision: “We have a vision of a just, healthy, and democratic society where public health policies are built on unbiased science that prioritizes health for all, free of industry influence.” They tell it like it is, as it has been since Rachel Carson and other started calling out industry more than sixty years ago.
Industries that produce health-harming products, including fossil fuels, plastics, petrochemicals, tobacco, and ultra-processed foods, have waged a decades-long assault on government regulatory agencies and policymaking to rig rules in their favor at the expense of public health. At the same time, these health harming products have contributed to a rise in chronic disease. We are working to change that. (Center to End Corporate Harm)
Perhaps it’s obvious why these people are among my heroes. They are using their talents and positions at some of the most prestigious institutions in the world – let’s even call them elite – to make a difference in the lives of people like me – me as I once was – young parents who will see their children harmed or even killed by the unrestrained depredations of coldblooded industry titans, greedy golems who do not care how many innocents must be harmed so that they can live comfortably, nay, so that they can rack up the highest score in a $$$-tallied pissing contest that benefits nothing but their own fragile egos. But I digress.
Scientists like Tracey wouldn’t be that for the world – why? Because they understand that there are so many more important things than material possessions and vacuous score keeping – like fairness, like improving people’s lives, like preventing children’s deaths. It’s terrible to see the slashing of grants to UCSF and to many of the institutions in our nation, big and small, that are working to help both prevent and cure afflictions like cancer, diabetes, asthma, Crohn’s disease, ASD and lower IQs, birth defects, and infertility. Cuts like those currently being made by Trump & Musk et al. will lessen the good these stalwarts for human health can do. But I have no doubt they will do their best to cobble together enough resources to continue – especially if ordinary people show their support.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Figure 1: Dr. Tracey Woodruff, Director and Alison S. Carlson Endowed Professor at UCSF’s Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment (PRHE).
INTERVIEW
JMK: Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me. I know how busy you are. I just saw you quoted in the Times – was it yesterday?
TW: Yes – that was a quick one.
JMK: I ended up blogging about that article. It was an interesting juxtaposition on the front page of the New York Times to have that article – and then also, “have more babies.”
Figure 2: Irony in Action: Have More Babies for Us to Poison
TW: Oh, my God! You are not the first person to say that, which I totally did not even think about until our communications person sent me some memes – something like make babies that we can pollute.
JMK: That was the headline of my blog, actually!
TW: I was like, “Oh dang!” Every freaking day…. They are about ready to get rid of Environmental Health Perspectives.
JMK: Oh no! Gosh!
TW: Yes – you might want to blog about this one. They haven’t done it yet. But you knew they were going to get rid of it, right? How are they ever going to leave this online?
JMK: Yes. I want to thank you at the outset for all the good you have done for humanity and for children.
And I especially want to thank you for the Center to End Corporate Harm. It’s wonderfully and boldly named. People are saying, “Only Tracey could have called it that.”
Figure 3: The Center to End Corporate Harm
TW: Well, thank you. Sometimes we think, Hmm! Should we have done that? But, on the other hand, you can see what's happening. That's what the world is going to be. Well, maybe not the whole world, but at least the United States. Wow, it’s bad when David Brooks is saying we should have a revolution…. I'm like, “David Brooks, dude!?’
JMK: Right? I know. I make sure to say to my students that he's one of my favorite conservative commentators, because he is conservative, unlike the MAGA Republicans.
So I do have some questions I would love you to answer. I feel like you have especially amazing policy insights, but I wanted to start off by just asking how you got here. I know this work is not always easy or fun, and I know you worked for a long time with EPA. But I wonder if there was something early in your training, or childhood even, that got you interested in this path.
TW: I find this question perplexing. My dad worked in the nuclear arms industry, so kind of the opposite of what I am doing. But I feel like he approached this in a way that was about doing something to counter the cold war. Now I don’t agree with this approach, but for him at the time, it seemed like we needed nuclear weapons to stop what would happen if Russia had nuclear weapons – it was his version of participating in the greater good at the time. So maybe that’s how I got this.
I can’t explain it totally. I just don’t like it when things aren’t fair, when people take advantage of other people. Maybe it’s because my mother comes from immigrants. Her parents immigrated from Spain and were very poor. They worked in sugar cane – and even some of the farming fields here in California. I’ve always felt somebody should – that we should be doing things to improve people’s lives and not ruin people’s lives.
When I was in school, a graduate student, Stan Glantz was one of the mentors and was doing a lot of important work around tobacco companies, revealing how they lied to the American public and promoted their product and profits over health. He encouraged me and thought that the environmental health field was important. That’s how I stumbled into it.
JMK: I’ve talked to some people – like Brenda Eskenazi – who were coming into this field when it was scarcely a field.
TW: That’s true. When I started…. It was interesting. At the time, even though there were tons of new chemicals being made, people really only focused on things that were hot. Most of the studies were from occupational studies, which were about high exposures and adults. But the reality was, the chemical industry was influencing our ability to really see what was going on the whole time. So here we are.
JMK: For sure. You have such a storied past with accomplishments and publications. Would you highlight one thing of which you are proudest so far?
TW: That’s hard. One that I am really proud of is the work I did at EPA where I developed the first characterization of hazardous air pollutants across the United States. In collaboration with two other colleagues, it both highlighted how pollution was happening and that people didn’t know about it. They didn’t know about it because there was no data. We were able to use existing tools to produce that data.
Then EPA picked it up, and it became a program that you could use to identify, for example, the Denka facility as having excessive emissions of chloroprene – cancer-causing chemicals. It’s been used in many different studies that look at the relationship between hazardous air pollutants and disease. It was an important foundational piece of work in terms of understanding Toxic Air Contaminants and how there are different communities that have higher burdens of exposure.
I really thought that work was important – it both produced new information and also had longevity in being useful. The other piece that we did was when we developed – it sounds very technical, but it’s about improving the methods for how evidence is evaluated. We collaborated with other scientists to develop the navigation guide to the systematic review methodology. That was really important because it addressed a hole in the area of environmental health policy decision making in that people could not provide a bottom-line summary about the evidence. We developed a method that allowed for better transparency and more consistency in how science is used. We saw many, many more health effects than we could previously – where it was just opinion-based because their opinions were always influenced by those who didn’t want us to see anything from these chemical exposures. The method, while technical and tedious, is so powerful in holding industry responsible for these health effects.
JMK: Yes – I’m on the CHPAC [Children’s Health Protection Advisory Committee to the EPA] right now, and….
TW: Oh, you’re on the CHPAC!
JMK: Yes!
We are working really hard on a letter on plastics right now. I won’t go into the nitty gritty, but the industry arguments are all about causation and very dismissive of epidemiological research.
TW: Right.
JMK: And so, I think that the systematic review method is really important because it lays out how you establish causation in a way that is harder to fault. I mean, the industry doesn't have to have reason on their side, apparently….
TW: Our work to uncover and address how industry manipulates science in the public process is a really important area and addresses a lot of the problems we’re facing today.
JMK: Absolutely. That’s why your Center to End Corporate Harm is so great. It is also saying, this is all the same story. And you know, I talked to Laura Schmidt….
TW: Of course. Yes. Laura and I are working together now more closely. It’s pretty fun.
JMK: She seems awesome. And then, those arguments being made about ultra-processed foods are very, very similar to the ones with environmental chemicals.
TW: They are the same arguments, like they all get together….
Do you know the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis? There are places where they all get together and promote these lines of thinking. I think this work that we’re doing keeps ahead of what is happening currently and gets a much better grasp on addressing and counteracting their arguments, which are ridiculous.
JMK: I’m hoping to work on that in the book.
TW: That’s good.
JMK: This is where you're going to come in. I have a chapter provisionally titled Politicians and Policymakers. What are the issues, and how has this been batted about in the public sphere? What are these arguments? And how do we work against the fallacious ones?
This is such a tough topic. Do you have any advice about how best to present and treat a topic that is both essential to prevention and productive of anxiety?
TW: I get asked this question a lot, and I’m not sure I have the perfect answer. When I am talking to the press and the public, I like to emphasize – this is not your fault this happened – it’s the fault of these chemical industries, these corporations that are making products and stopping government from using the science or being able to regulate them. The change you have to make is much more long-term, and obviously, it is not a good time for that. It’s going to take some time to reverse that.
There are these things that your children are exposed to – and there are things you can do to mitigate that. We have recommendations about what to do about that. But if I’m talking to someone who is concerned about it, it’s mostly about listening and answering any questions they have to the extent that’s possible.
JMK: I think that it’s smart to do both because people feel hopeless if you tell them there is nothing they can do.
TW: Right.
JMK: But to not put it all on individuals because of course corporations want to put it on individual actions.
TW: And corporations promote a narrative of, this is all about you and your choices, but you know, how much choice do you really have? When you grow up low-income, your wages are deflated by whatever they have done, and you don’t live near a grocery store that has healthy food – if you even have a grocery store, it’s filled with government-subsidized, processed food. You send your kids to school – I know my kids went to school and ate a ton of bad processed food. It’s frustrating.
JMK: Yes. I was in one of your meetings once where you said everybody gets to share a guilty pleasure they know is bad for them, like Diet Coke or lipstick.
TW: I know. I don’t even drink Diet Coke anymore, except once in a while in the summer.
JMK: I just can’t have it around because….
TW: Some people think it’s yucky, but I used to drink a lot of it. And then when we had kids, I said, I don’t want my kids to drink this, so I stopped buying it. That was the end of that.
JMK: Yes – that’s the way to control temptation -- at the grocery store! [both laughing]
TW: But now, they are older….
JMK: Yes – my kids are all grown too.
The next question concerns policy. If you had magic powers, and I wish you did, and you could single-handedly recreate US policy regulating environmental chemicals and climate change, or whatever you'd like, what would that look like? And then the second part of the question is, how might we actually get to that kind of change?
TW: Campaign finance reform would be number one, taking corporate money out of the political process. I would reverse Citizens United and have public funding for campaigns. They do this in France. Lots of people run for office, and it’s perfectly fine, and they make plenty of decisions and can get good food there. That would be the number one thing.
Once you remove money from the process, that allows decision making to be based on facts and on what people truly value, rather than on those who are paying the people to be there and make decisions.
In terms of environmental law, I would restructure the law so that corporations had to pay a user fee for the good of the public – like a carbon tax. When I was at EPA during the Clinton Administration, they tried to institute a carbon tax, which is the most efficient way to reduce emissions. It would be a fee for the privilege of being able to operate in the United States, and then it would be used to fund studies. Every chemical would have to have information on it before it could be used or continue to be used in commerce. And then they would be removed if they were toxic. And companies would have to tell us where they are using all the chemicals.
JMK: Rather than putting in phthalates under “fragrance.”
TW: Oh my God! Or whatever. They don’t have most of the chemicals in TSCA (Toxic Substances Control Act). They don’t have to tell us where they are using them. There is no requirement. Government still has to ask them. And then they have all the CBI [Confidential Business Information] stuff.
JMK: Yes – it’s criminal. You were referencing your mentor who worked on the tobacco industry. At least there, there is some sort of choice for people who picked up cigarettes, whereas all of us breathing air….
TW: I know. There is no choice. That’s what I mean. They just put it out there. One of the big challenges we have, too, is that they have already thoroughly polluted the planet. I have just been finishing up a study where we’re still measuring DDT in people because it never goes away. So I would ban all persistent, bioaccumulative substances. That would be a good one too because they just never go away, or maybe they do, but certainly not in our lifetimes.
JMK: Yes. What do you think is the scariest newer story? To my mind, it might be microplastics and nanoplastics, but I don’t know. Do you have a horse in that race?
TW: We’re working on microplastics. It’s so hard to choose between all these chemicals. Definitely, the thing that is nice about working with microplastics is it aggregates all the chemicals together. So you don’t have to choose which one you dislike the most. [Laughing]
In the pesticide family, these quaternary ammonium compounds are something we’ve been looking at. They are so toxic – it’s ridiculous that they are allowed on the marketplace and in consumer products. And then I would also say in that family of other pesticides, I would tax the pesticide industry based on their toxicity and put that money into supporting regenerative ag, though I am not sure everyone agrees about what regenerative ag is – but basically organic farming or transitioning to a less toxic farming cycle.
JMK: My next book is going to focus on solutions. When you start looking at things like rewilding and regenerative agriculture – there are a lot of really amazing ideas out there. And one of the frustrating things is, why aren’t we implementing them? That is actually my next question.
TW: There is a reason why. Someone is going to lose money – the people who are making the pesticides. There are definitely these ideas, but you need to have a mechanism. In California, the whole agricultural resource system is all designed around how people use pesticides because that’s where they are getting all their money. But what if they got money from taxing whatever the funds are so it was devoted to helping people transition to regenerative ag in a way that was predictable? Farmers need to have a predictable crop situation. That’s what I would do.
JMK: Interesting. And that’s my big question, for my last book, this book, and probably all the writing I will do in the rest of my life. If we know we are Poisoning Our Children, and we know we are destroying the climate of the only planet that sustains life, and we know there are these solutions, why are we being this stupid as a society? You’ve partially answered this already.
TW: Yes. It’s all about financial incentives – people who would lose include the fossil fuel industry primarily – which makes all the pesticides and the chemicals. Moving to non-toxic chemicals means they would lose money, and they have a lot of money, so they will do everything they can to make sure that their profits stay up. It’s all about power. Money really equals power. Clearly, you can have a ton of money and still want more power. How much money do you need? It’s never enough. When you have an empty soul, it’s never enough.
JMK: No, it’s crazy. I teach Shakespeare, too, and it just seems like a morality play of some sort.
TW: Okay, which one?
JMK: Maybe Macbeth – we were talking about how it’s never enough for Macbeth. But The Tempest is the reverse because in the end, Prospero forgives his brother and voluntarily surrenders his power.
TW: That’s right – I forgot about that one!
JMK: Anyway, my students and I were slyly commenting on our current political situation without really saying it out loud.
TW: I’ll read Macbeth then.
JMK: It’s very, very dark.
TW: Have you read that new book, James? It’s by Percival Everett from the perspective of Jim, the enslaved man in Huck Finn.
JMK: Oh yes!
TW: I have it – My friend recommended I listen to Huck Finn first – so I have been and it has been excellent. You might work that one in. Trumpian ideas were prevalent at the time. James was enslaved, so the time period of the novel was before 1860. Anyway, it’s super interesting. There is a thread in the novel about people hating the government and education. People who are educated are considered elitist. It sounds so familiar. But I also want to point out that the courts were also considered effective at the time.
I was wondering when the backlash would come from the progress we had made– and it’s pretty hard.
JMK: Very hard, and the timing is just appalling. Honestly, I didn’t expect fascism in the United States so soon. I thought climate change would have to get a lot worse first. It’s terrible.
All right, where do you think this is going? What do you think the status of children’s health will be in the year 2050?
TW: It is really hard to say. I think the thing that is interesting – I don’t want to say hopeful because I’m not totally sure what I think about MAHA…. I don’t think the MAHA movement as defined by supplements and weird unproven medical things is good – that’s very Libertarian, anti-government.
But part of it is parents who are saying, my kids are sick, and the government has downplayed or dismissed concerns – and that is totally true and legitimate. This administration is the opposite of addressing those things. So that disconnect is weird.
It’s not like the food dyes are the worst things in the food, but they certainly are a problem – they are petroleum-based dyes. How is anybody in this administration allowing RFK, Jr. to say that?
Today he said sugar is terrible, which is true. There is too much sugar in food. So, I wonder – how long is this guy going to last? But he keeps going. The thing about the petroleum-based dyes is it’s going to be voluntary – they are not going to have a regulation. So you know what that means. Nothing is going to happen, right? They are just going to wait until he leaves and then just put it back in. It’s clear there are enough people who care about this that even this Administration has written a whole executive order on it with 80% of the language that we would use. I feel like if we could organize ourselves a little better, we could leverage what people really feel.
For us, we have to respond to what’s going on now. But we have to be thinking about the future. What do we really want this to look like? Clearly, the government wasn’t doing everything they were supposed to be doing.
JMK: You have really had that perspective from the EPA, that you were frustrated.
TW: Yes. And to be fair, the reason it is frustrating is because the chemical industry is in there all the time. There are a bunch of people at EPA just trying to do their job, and a lot of them think they are doing the right thing. But you’re getting such a weird view of what people think because you don’t actually hear from real people.
You’re on the CHPAC – you hear sometimes the craziest things people say. And they are just really scared.
JMK: There was one thing on CHPAC that sounded crazy, but that I actually thought was very good and smart, and that was, how do you value your children? How do you put a monetary value on that?
TW: That is a big, big deal because the value of statistical life is all based on adults. And actually, EPA has a huge value for a statistical life – the biggest in the world – it’s actually pretty good. But there is pushback to do children because it would be three times or ten times bigger. Economists would love to do that. I’m just saying political people don’t want to do it. I remember going to a meeting on the statistical value of life. Children is the biggest one where that would really change the value a lot.
JMK: I think they were using parents’ willingness to pay to avoid bad outcomes for their children, and it was a lot higher than productive value.
TW: Yes. But they don’t do productive value for statistical life at EPA.
JMK: I can’t remember what the default was. But that was one conversation where it seemed like it was crazy, but it actually wasn’t. I’m so sorry that they are being gutted right now.
TW: I’m mostly sorry. Of course, the ones I think should go are still there, and those who are going are mostly good people. The ORD (Office of Research and Development) are mostly good people.
JMK: Can I quote you on that?
TW: I think part of the problem – with the Democrats too – is that they are unwilling to acknowledge where they are failing to meet what the public wants. That’s what this whole election was about. People have jobs, but they are shitty jobs, and they don’t pay very much because there are no unions.
I mean, Trump’s solution is obviously stupid.
I thought Joe Biden was a great president who did a lot of things no one else had ever done – but to not acknowledge the pain of the middle class – your fate is obscurity.
JMK: The last question I have is, do you have any questions about my experience or the book project?
TW: Can you tell me the title of the book again?
JMK: Of course! It’s Poisoning Children. Johns Hopkins likes it and thinks we can get it past Amazon, who evidently might vet it. For the subtitle, I’m currently thinking something like, “How Industry Has Imperiled the Life of Every Child on Earth.” But that’s also pretty bold.
TW: Oh, that’s a good one.
JMK: Thanks! I’m happy to have your opinion.
TW: I think this whole thing about the Plasticene Age or the Anthropocene Age. I mean, you could make a legit argument that everybody is polluted – there is a layer of pollution everywhere.
JMK: Yes. As far as attribution for the kids, in my case there were real connections. But I still frame it by saying, “we have very reason to believe” that her leukemia was caused by her exposures to chlorpyrifos.
TW: Where do you think she got exposed?
JMK: We found out sadly, after her first bone marrow transplant, that all along they had been spraying chlorpyrifos for mosquitoes in my town. The timings worked out with acute illnesses we all had. The kids showed up with what looked like acute asthma, but of course you know that chlorpyrifos is an acetylcholinesterase reuptake inhibitor, and that was probably what was causing their difficulty breathing. It was only after I found that out that we put those pieces together. It could also have been due to chlorpyrifos sprayed in an apartment before I was pregnant – you know that the research shows a doubled risk for leukemia up to a year before pregnancy. And so I feel like I put pieces together quite a bit.
For asthma, how many asthma cases are not caused in some way by environmental exposures?
TW: Yes – that one is probably a little easier to talk about – but even cancer.
Kids are supposed to be healthy.
JMK: Kids are supposed to be healthy. Yes – I hope to grab them by the heart.
TW: Yes. I’m sure it’s very difficult. I admire that you can talk about it….
JMK: Thank you. Yes. It is difficult. But those are the facts of my life. And I really hope to change things in the future for other families. I do not feel free to desist, as Sandra Steingraber also says.
TW: Yes – I think that’s really important. And it helps other parents who have also had these challenges.
JMK: I hope so. Anyway, I am really grateful to you – for your sense of justice and motivation, to do the work that you do every day, and I just admire the heck out of you and the whole team there at UCSF.
TW: Well, thank you. I really appreciate it. It just feels like everyone should just do the right thing. But I’ve sadly learned people don’t always do that.
JMK: They don’t. But one positive thing from the book is the good people I am interviewing – and I do find all of you inspiring!
TW: Yes. Do you remember that silly book – All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten?
JMK: Yes – I remember that.
TW: It’s kind of clever. It’s so weird – you tell your children, don’t lie or cheat or steal, and then they grow up and do it. Not all of them – I don’t think my kids do. But obviously, some people do. They are in the White House right now. It’s just flummoxing.
JMK: It is. And civics: didn’t everybody take government or civics? Evidently not, I am learning. But I really thought one of the most basic lessons of my education was, don’t elect the Nazis. It seemed like a basic takeaway from nearly every history class I ever had.
TW: Right? Don’t elect Nazis. It seems so obvious. Yet, obviously not.
JMK: Well, I am glad to hear that you think there is some reason to believe we might get some good things out of RFK before they get rid of him.
TW: They are talking about getting rid of sugar, so I just can’t tell you what is up. It’s not funny because I am about to lose grants, but it technically is funny and horrible at the same time.
JMK: There is a lot of gallows humor going around right now.
TW: Yes. Or a punk rock song, which maybe I will record one day.
JMK: Thank you so much, Tracey, and I will at least see you at the next webinar you give.
TW: Oh, good! We’ve been so busy. They made an announcement that they are going to ban all NIH grants to universities that do anything related to DEI. And it’s like, well, I guess I technically don’t have anything I can do about that. It’s been a little – as you can imagine – hectic.
Are you on social media? BlueSky? LinkedIn?
JMK: I am – Substack, Wordpress – especially LinkedIn.
TW: LinkedIn – the interface is so ugly really, but I know everyone loves it.
JMK: I think it’s just because everyone is on there.
TW: Okay – you need some more followers. [Laughing.]
I am following you now. I think I am on Substack too, now.
Cool – this is great – thank you!
JMK: Thank you so much – have a wonderful day!
