Even if Kristin Shrader-Frechette's mother hadn't died of an environmentally-induced cancer at the age of 43, leaving seven children motherless in Kentucky, chances are the Notre Dame professor would still have grown up to be a dynamo researcher and scholar working for environmental justice.

Not only does she know her science-with degrees in mathematics and philosophy as well as post-doctoral work in biology, hydroecology, and economics-she is also well versed in Catholic social teaching.

She eschews the "fluff" image of environmentalists who care only about backpacking and spotted owls, instead arguing that the environment is a social justice issue as well as a prolife one. "What sense does it make to say we have a right to life if we don't have a right to breathe clean air?"

Shrader-Frechette holds dual professorships in the philosophy and biology departments. She is the author of more than a dozen books and hundreds of articles. She serves on the EPA's Science Advisory Board and has advised NASA, the United Nations, and governments of many countries on environmental issues. She is married with two grown children.

Do you think most Catholics see environmental justice as an important moral issue?
I suspect they don't. When you say "environmental justice," most Catholics probably think of the Sierra Club or backpackers. But environmental justice has to do with public health. It has to do with children, minorities, and poor people dying at higher rates because they bear more pollution.

The United States' infant mortality rate is the worst in the developed world, in part because many of our environmental standards are weaker than those in Western Europe. Most Americans think that because this is a great country our pollution standards and our health protections are the best, but they're not.


How are things different in the United States?
Well, the U.S. spends about 0.6 percent of its gross domestic product on pollution control, while Japan and many European nations spend double that. The average Japanese inhales about 2 pounds of pollutants per year, but the average American inhales 81 pounds. In Japan and many European nations, 15 to 18 percent of travel is on mass transit, but in the U.S., only 1 percent. One result: Citizens in about 30 developed nations have longer lifespans than folks in the U.S.

In some European nations like Italy and Finland, organic crops constitute 5 to 15 percent of their total agricultural output. In the U.S. they are one fifth of 1 percent. So there's less food available here that hasn't been grown with pesticides.

And those most victimized by pesticides are children because their systems are a lot more sensitive. For example, for infants a lethal dose of a pesticide like organophosphates is 1 percent of the lethal dose for an adult. The U.S. National Academy of Sciences has said that in the next 75 years, a million Americans will die needlessly from allowable pesticides. And a disproportionate number of those deaths will be among children. They really are the canaries in our environmental coal mines. That's why as a mother, and as a Catholic, I'm concerned about environmental justice.


What are all these children dying of?
In the case of pesticides, many of the deaths are from birth defects and cancer. Cancer kills more children ages 1 to 5 than any other disease. It kills four times as many children as child abuse, and twice as many as automobiles.

The leading cause of death for all of us under 85 is cancer, and 90 percent of those cancers, according to the World Health Organization, are environmentally induced and theoretically preventable. Now those environmental factors include smoking or other lifestyle variables, but that still leaves a sizeable number that can be attributed to pollution. It's uncontroversial that most cancers of children are environmental. They're not smoking or overeating.

A classic 2002 article in The New England Journal of Medicine studied 90,000 identical twins to determine whether their cancers were genetic or environmentally induced. Overwhelmingly they said virtually all the cancers were environmental.

It's also been clearly established that there is a massive environmental component in heart disease, with about one third of all heart disease associated with air pollutants. Using National Cancer Institute data, I can tell you that in Chicago alone, eight people die of heart disease each day just because of particulate pollution.


How much higher are those rates in minority communities?
I can give you the statistics for Gary, Indiana because I do a lot of work there. That community is about 50 percent Hispanic, 40 percent African American, and about 10 percent white. In that area nonwhites bear eight times the pollution of whites.

One reason is that low-income housing is built in areas where land is cheapest and tends to be more polluted. Companies also deliberately target low-income neighborhoods for dumping or noxious facilities because their residents are less likely to file a lawsuit or otherwise protest the decision. I can show you case after case where companies locate facilities not based on where their suppliers, their distributors, or their raw materials are, but based on where they're not going to have any problem with the community if they violate pollution laws.

African American children die of asthma at four times the rate of white children. Even when you control for income and health insurance, blacks have higher incidences of disease, often because of pollution. Racism is alive and well in our society.

Some studies say those higher incidences in minority communities might be genetic.
Those studies most likely come from industry-created front groups, like the American Council on Science and Health. It sounds respectable, doesn't it? But it's a chemical and tobacco industry-funded front group created to generate statistics conducive to their interests. We all know you can't always trust studies funded by the tobacco industry about whether smoking is dangerous. So why would you trust studies about pollution funded by polluters-who have obvious conflicts of interest?


So it seems the science gets politicized.
Yes. As a member of the Science Advisory Board for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, I've learned that three fourths of all scientific studies in the U.S. are paid for by special-interest groups whose agenda is often to show that some product or pollutant is not harmful.

So only 25 percent of scientific studies are done by more objective groups like the National Institutes of Health that use peer review and other safeguards. Of those, more than half are for the military. So about 12 percent of U.S. scientific research is done by people with no obvious conflict of interest.

Those special-interest groups are going to generate the science they want to generate. Most of their studies use very small samples of about 50 people and are very short-term. One by a famous cancer expert excluded all minorities from his studies.

The government never used to employ industry studies in setting pollution standards. But President George W. Bush changed that. And after he weakened many pollution standards, he knew that pollution-induced death rates would increase. To cover up the health effects of his policies, he dictated that every death of a person age 70 or older was to be counted as only 62 percent of a death. People need to know facts like these. This is not about Democrats and Republicans. It's about big people with money and little people without it.