Today is an important day for me. It marks the halfway point of my radiation treatment for breast cancer. So far, everything is going fairly well. Last week, I had problems with fatigue—so bad I felt as though I could barely get through the day—but blood pressure medicine seems to have been a big help. (It’s been high ever since my diagnosis, and my doctor decided the time had come to do something about it.) I’m much better now, and I’m grateful to have some (if not all) of my old energy back.

Not surprisingly, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about cancer, and I recently read a terrific book called Living Downstream: An Ecologist’s Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment by Sandra Steingraber. In October, I had the opportunity to hear Steingraber speak at Bates College in Lewiston, where I learned that New England has one of the highest rates of breast cancer and prostate cancer in the country. Later in the month, I also saw the documentary Living Downstream at Railroad Square in Waterville.

Anybody who cares about personal health, family health, and the health of the planet should read this book and see the film. Steingraber, like Rachel Carson, with whom she’s been compared, is both a good scientist and a good writer, and she makes an eloquent, compelling case for how the West’s use of petrochemicals has so polluted our environment that cancer rates are going steadily up. Yes, cancer has always been with us, but there is more of it now than there ever has been, and it’s not all due to early diagnoses and to longer life spans. Steingraber wonders “why so much silence still surrounds questions about cancer’s connection to the environment, and why so much scientific inquiry into this issue is still considered preliminary.” (There’s a recent New Yorker article about cancer that asks the same question.)

Steingraber had bladder cancer when she was twenty and a college student. (She is now in her fifties.) It seems that cancer runs in her family. But here’s the interesting thing— Steingraber was adopted at a young age, and it is her adopted family, not her birth family, that has the high incidence of cancer. After her own struggle with the disease, Steingraber turned her attention to the environmental causes of cancer, and, she eventually decided to devote her professional life to spreading the word about cancer and the environment, about how DDT, dioxins, and other endocrine disrupters harm our health.

This, of course, is a complicated subject, and while Steingraber tells stories from her own life to illustrate her point, she also gives readers plenty of science, data, and statistics. (I admit that my eyes glazed over from time to time.) The book made me sad and angry. It also made me determined to do what I could to help, to join the symphony, as Steingraber would put it. At the end of Living Downstream, she asserts, “I believe we are musicians in human orchestra. It is time now to play the Save the World Symphony. It is a vast orchestral piece, and you are but one musician. You are not required to play solo. But you are required to figure out what instrument you hold and play it as well as you can.”

So here is what one musician is going to do. It’s a song I’ve been playing for a while, but I’m going to play it louder and stronger than ever by writing, by eating as much organic and local food as I can, by not flying unless it is absolutely essential, by driving as little as possible, by recycling with a vengeance, by carrying my own cup and silverware wherever I go so that I don’t need to use disposable ones.

Small actions, small song. Right now it is what I can do, and I hope to do more as time goes by.