The Making of an Environmentalist
By Thomas Belton
It was 1971. The United States had just invaded Laos to shut down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, George Harrison had organized a benefit concert for starving Bangladesh—and I had just graduated from St. Peter’s College in Jersey City with a degree in classical languages. “Wonderful training for an archbishop or a college don,” my dad said sarcastically. But I was destined to be neither. Instead, I took what came my way: work as a telephone lineman for Bell Telephone.
My first day on the job I walked quickly through the Ironbound section of Newark, cruising over rusted railroad sidings and along the Passaic River, past abandoned factories with busted windows that welcomed pigeons’ whirl-i-gigging in the early sunshine. Brown-bag lunch in hand, I was off to pole school, where I would learn to strap gafters on my legs and shimmy up a pole like a demented monkey. From atop my perch, I worked heavy tools for ratcheting cables across backyards. I ate my lunch on the fly while dangling like a macaque, scanning the soiled landscapes of Newark like a hawk.
On that first day on a telephone pole above the Ironbound, I had no clue as to my impending transition from classicist into environmental scientist. That metamorphosis was a long way off—although the seeds for transformation were already germinating.
I first thought about the link between environment and disease when my brother Joe learned that he had leukemia. Joe wondered if he had gotten it from an extreme case of sun poisoning at the Jersey Shore. It was not until years later that I learned that ultraviolet radiation doesn’t cause leukemia. It can cause deadly melanoma or skin cancer, especially for us fair-skinned Celts who are more inclined to the foggy shores of misty isles than the steamy cities of hot-house America. Leukemia, though, can come from exposure to common chemicals such as benzene (formerly used in dry cleaning) and ionizing radiation, which was common from atmospheric fallout and atom bomb testing before 1963.
Growing up in Jersey City, New Jersey in the 1950s, Joe and I played with our older brother, Jack, in one wasted moonscape after another: scrap yards where giant magnets lifted junked cars and dropped them into crushers; abandoned factories with walls pitted from chlorine gas; and, of course, the empty lots where we made our ball fields—these were impregnated with hexavalent chromium given to the city by unscrupulous chemical companies as cheap fill that seared our sneakers with green acid stains whenever we slid into home plate.
“I first thought about the link between environment and disease when my brother Joe learned that he had leukemia.”
I still remember where freight trains rode slowly along a canyon blasted through granitic rock and overgrown with weeds as big as trees. The rail beds were immersed in boggy green water that we waded through before climbing the gray cliffs, our clothes covered with slime, as we pretended to be Army Rangers assaulting Pointe du Hoc at Normandy. There we would wait for some boxcars to roll by so we could jump aboard for a ride to the Hudson River, where the contents of open storm drains, sewers, and mystery pipes with steaming yellow cataracts were being absorbed into the universal solvent of New York Bay. The river was where my dad, Red, would take us to “recreate” on a hot summer’s day.
To Red, recreating meant hanging out with his police buddies at the Liberty Yacht Club, a 24/7 saloon on a barge in a dilapidated marina behind Ellis Island on New York Harbor, while my brothers and I explored the finger piers that jutted out a half mile into the swirling river current. We’d jump in and pull ourselves along the pilings, avoiding the crabs that nipped at our toes, all the while obeying Dad’s admonition: “Don’t open your mouths, boys! And definitely don’t swallow that black water!”
Black water was everywhere around the Liberty Yacht Club because of the nearby coal-unloading towers—monstrous devices some six stories tall, which clamped onto loaded coal cars, inverted them and dumped a black avalanche of bituminous into the open lips of waiting barges. Blue crabs in the harbor liked to converge and feed underneath these towers; Dad would borrow a rowboat from one of his nautical buddies and row us toward the thundering dust cloud, where we’d scrape crabs off the pilings with 10-foot-long netted poles. The coal dust was so fine it permeated every crease in our knuckles and eye-folds, till we all looked like raccoon-eyed miners.
To clean up before we went home, Dad would row us away from the coal piers and into the pulsing current of the Hudson. There he would set the oars down and we’d jump in and swim, following the drifting boat to Bedloes Island and the Statue of Liberty. We’d tie up our crab-filled boat and crawl ashore like drowned rats, our bare backs still striped with soot, as dad led us up to the snack bar in the statue’s base, past all the fine tourists in their holiday clothes, playfully tipping an imaginary hat as he said “Halloo!” and “Good day!”
“I remember looking up at my dad, the space between his smiling teeth still black with soot, and him saying: ‘It doesn’t get any better’n this, now does it, Tom?’”
At the counter, Dad would slap down a fistful of money to buy us all lemonades and hot dogs, then lean back and admire the view from beneath the protective shadow of Lady Liberty’s gown. I remember looking up at big Red, the space between his smiling teeth still black with soot, and him saying: “It doesn’t get any better’n this, now does it, Tom?”
Later Dad lay dying of lymphoma, and he asked, “Why is this happening? I’m still a young man.” I couldn’t answer that question, but I had this crazy idea that if the doctors would cut him open, they’d probably find some of that Hudson River coal dust floating around inside. Now, after years helping to close pesticide factories in the Ironbound and shut down coal piers to make way for Liberty State Park, I think about Joe and Dad.
After my college years, the 1970s brimmed with social upheavals: the Vietnam anti-war movement; Ralph “Nader’s Raiders” canvassing and protesting for consumer rights; President Nixon creating the National Cancer Institute and declaring “War on Cancer”; and the birth of the environmental movement and the regulatory establishment of the United States Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA), which sought to connect the environmental effects of pollution on human health including cancer.
While all this was going on I ferried my brother Joe back and forth to his chemotherapy sessions in New York City until he eventually died at 21. I was stunned by this, and with only my Classics degree to buoy me, I drifted from job to job. I worked as a seventh grade Grammar School teacher for a while, then a Social Worker for County Welfare helping mothers and children to get a leg up on a life choked by poverty or bad luck.
I decided to pursue a career in medicine with the jejune notion that I might be able to cure cancer. I also volunteered in the Emergency Room at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and worked nights as a Nursing Assistant for the US Veteran’s Administration Hospital while attending classes during the day. My desire to go into medicine was fueled both by my impotence at understanding why Joe had died so young, and why cancer struck so disproportionately in the city.
“My passion to become a physician was sidelined by my growing interest in marine biology and ecology…I realized that much more was at stake in the connections between the health of the environment and my own health.”
My first inkling of environmental work as a career came in the late 1970s when my new wife, Bernadette, and I were out of money again and out of food. I applied for food stamps, which also required me to register with the Pennsylvania State employment office. There I was offered a job as a public health inspector, or a Sanitarian, with the City of Philadelphia for one year under a federal grant using my few science classes as the entry requirement.
My Sanitarian on-the-job public health training was elaborate and detailed, including classes in foodborne diseases, vector control (rats, bats, and roaches), hospital and nursing home sanitation, as well as infectious disease epidemiology. Most of our work though was restaurant inspections where irate owners would try to bribe me by sticking stinky food in my pockets, twenties down my shirt, or threaten to break my legs if I asked them to repair a broken light bulb.
While I was taking courses in the pre-med program at the University of Pennsylvania, I found myself pulled in other directions. Having a few holes in my academic schedule, I took a Limnology course for fun (freshwater biology of lakes and rivers!) and Invertebrate Marine Ecology (the secret lives of crabs, worms and insects!). It struck me that my professors working in the woods or on an oceangoing boat lead a far more exciting life than being cooped up in a hospital all day.
My passion to become a physician was sidelined by my growing interest in marine biology and ecology. From these disciplines, I learned that the environment around us holds both pitfalls and promises of largess. I realized that the city, like the ocean, was a habitat. New Jersey was my biome, and both were filled with animals and people, as well as materials that flowed around us in an ever-deepening soup of air and waterborne molecules, some beneficial and others toxic.
I realized that much more was at stake in the connections between the health of the environment and my own health. It was not only about curing cancer; it was about preventing it in the first place, possibly through identifying and eliminating poisonous chemicals from our living space. Our relationship to the environment was everything.
“I’ve come to realize that the silver thread to my professional life has always been public service and the desire to help people and make life better.”
I received a master’s degree in Marine Biology from the City University of New York and landed a job at the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection in its Office of Cancer and Toxics Substances Research. In that office, with all the hubris and attitude of the X-Men, we were given the deceptively simple task of discovering the link between cancer and chemicals in the environment, rooting it out like a bad tooth, and then coming up with a cheap cure.
I designed and performed investigations of human impacts on the air, water, wildlife and forests of the state. I also performed source track-down studies of factories illegally discharging chemicals into the air and water; food fish contamination resulting in public health consumption advisories; and investigations into acid rain impacts from coal-fired power plants on sensitive forest ecosystems.
I did not see this particular career track when I graduated with my Classics degree, nor when my brother and father both died of cancer. Yet it makes sense now: I’ve come to realize that the silver thread to my professional life has always been public service and the desire to help people and make life better—for humans, and for all the environment that nourishes and sustains life on the planet.
As I move about New York Harbor in my work boat, netting fish for analysis, taking water samples or scouting out mystery pipes and midnight dumpers, I am sometimes seized by the vivid memory of that warm summer night in 1962. It comes unbidden, often spurred by some random reminder, like the scent of sweet honeysuckle across open water. I see Dad’s face once again, smiling as he rows my brothers and me home from Liberty Island in the darkening twilight. And when that happens, I look up at the gibbous moon peeking out from behind the New York skyline, shout “Halloo!” and tip an imaginary hat to its lunar grin.
Thomas Belton is an environmental scientist and author with extensive publications in fiction, poetry, non-fiction, magazine feature writing, science writing and journalism. His professional memoir, Protecting New Jersey’s Environment: From Cancer Alley to the New Garden State (Rutgers University Press) was awarded “Best Book in Science Writing for the General Public” by the New Jersey Council for the Humanities.