The Sensitives

The Sensitives: The Rise of Environmental Illness and the Search for America's Last Pure Place, by Oliver Broudy,  Simon & Schuster 2020

Sure, we have heard about the Woburn toxic waters featured in the movie A Civil Action.  And long before that there were the pioneering environmental activism stories from Love Canal and Three Mile Island.  But nothing you have read or watched comes close to this very personal book -  crazy? far-fetched?  political?  Let's just give the author Oliver Broudy a chance to unveil his Big Idea:  our environment is not only toxic to people he names "The Sensitives,"  but it could be construed that we all have a bit of "The Sensitives" in us - cancer, allergies, unexplained chemical reactions.  Think the Roundup ads on steroids, streamed right into your pandemic living room!  

To develop his story Broudy takes a journalist's approach.  He identifies a subculture of "sensitives," people living with puzzling symptoms seemingly related to exposure to chemicals, materials, fragrances, etc.  According to Broudy, these reactions have little impact on the "normals;" consequently they have been largely ignored by the medical establishment.  This wide-ranging and devastating condition is called EI - Environmental Illness - and it is calculated to affect over fifty million Americans.  

But here are a few more frightening statistics.  We deal with over 85,000 chemicals in the environment, including 9,000 food additives and 17 pesticides, although the author says his research shows that just one interaction with a problematic chemical can set off a whole stream of debilitating reactions.  He meets up with Brian Welsh, an EI icon, and follows him out to an EI community;  along the way he befriends other sufferers trying to find a bearable life, and shares their stories.  Headed west to L.A., Broudy drives a new EI friend clear out to an EI doctor, a victim himself who injects the friend -  J  - with a series of anti-EI drugs.  Broudy disengages, and our closing scene finds him walking the Santa Monica pier, struck but still questioning the complicated "other world" of EI.

This is a challenging book, not just for its complex chemical themes, but for the human side of it that Broudy inevitably covered.  Its hard for a "normal" to understand this other world of EI - not all characters end up with the same lives, not all feel understood or even tolerated for their differentness.  But the environmental toxins and dangers don't seem that hard to follow - polluted water, plastics, fertilizers, industrial farming will remain in our news scope.  These long-term threats, however, have all been surpassed, however, by our new daily protocols to control airborne contaminants.  Given the current pandemic, Broudy's deep look into an extreme world of EI  is worth reviewing.  

Patricia E. Moody

FORTUNE magazine  "Pioneering Woman in Mfg" 

IndustryWeek IdeaXchange Xpert

A Mill Girl at Blue Heron Journal, on-line resource for business thought-leaders and decision-makers, pemoody@aol.com, patriciaemoody@gmail.com, tricia@patriciaemoody.com,