Share, Don't Preach?

by Laura Wright  |  December 19, 2007  |  More By Laura Wright

My friend Dan sent me an email today to ask if I'd seen the story the New York Times ran on December 8 about the decision by Canada's largest outdoor goods retailer to remove Nalgene and other polycarbonate plastic bottles from its stores. You may have seen it by now. I had, so at first I thought it was old news, a bit of a yawn at this point. But I changed my mind this evening.

By way of background: polycarbonate plastic contains the chemical bisphenol-A (BPA)-a chemical that our bodies can mistake for estrogen, a hormone to which we ought to apply the Goldilocks rule for many reasons. Infertility, obesity, and sexual deformities in newborn boys are just a few of the ills that have been linked to exposure to BPA. Pregnant women and babies are at greatest risk from exposure to the chemical: it takes very little to subtly reprogram normal development. What's more, the stuff is everywhere: you encounter it all the time through that shiny plastic coating in food cans, among many other products. There are many chronic diseases today that we simply don't understand, and more and more scientists and public health professionals believe that the chemical soup we live in may be largely to blame. (I reported on this in the summer 2007 issue of OnEarth in "Looking Deep, Deep into Your Genes.")

The story of BPA raises all sorts of ethical questions for someone who fancies herself both a journalist and a human. (I sometimes think that the two are mutually exclusive.) It's my job as a journalist to report on emerging environmental health issues. As a human, I suppose I'd say it's my duty to share information that has the potential to adversely affect the lives of others. But as a human who likes to keep her friends, I'd also say that "share, don't preach" is a good policy to embrace. So what does a girl do when she's trying to warn her friends about something that may be dangerous and her friends don't want to hear it?

This happened to me not too long ago when I went to visit an old friend in Boston who had just had a baby. It was all very exciting when I arrived: Pheobe the dog was excited to see me, my friend was excited to see me, I was excited to see her and to meet her little girl-and then I caught a glimpse of a bottle warmer on the kitchen counter. She was heating a milk-filled polycarbonate plastic baby bottle. It couldn't have been more than a couple of weeks since I sent her an email about the research I'd been doing on BPA, the chemical found in the very bottle she was heating-the chemical that was probably leaching from the plastic into the milk before my eyes. I stood in her kitchen, smiling foolishly while my mind roiled: Who was I-a single Manhattanite with no kids-to tell her how to raise her kids? After all, she read how-to-raise-a-healthy-baby books, never ate a morsel of unprocessed cheese or so much as sniffed deli meat while she was pregnant, and treated the pediatrician's every utterance as the word of God.

I decided I had said my bit, that I suppress my growing urge to remove the bottle from the warmer and "accidentally" drop it in the trash. Perhaps it was not time to hand down the word of Science. I shut up.

Did I make the right choice? I don't know. What if I had pushed her on her choice? When do you cross the line and become the preachy green friend who thinks she always knows what's best for you and everyone else? And when does your silence make you a bad friend?