Canadians are suffering the adverse health effects of everyday exposures to common chemicals in their homes, workplaces, and communities – how are current political and social structures enabling these chronic health risks?
Description
Everyday exposures to common chemicals found in homes, schools, and workplaces have devastating long-term and inter-generational consequences on human health. At the same time, the risks associated with these exposures (and the burdens of managing them) rest disproportionately on the shoulders of women. Written by leading researchers in science, law, and public policy, the chapters in Our Chemical Selves critically examine the system that manufactures the chemicals as well as the social, political, and gender relations that enable harmful chemicals to continue being produced and consumed. This book demonstrates the urgent need to revise existing approaches to the regulation of toxic substances in Canada.
Reviews
The strength of this work lies in its success at bringing recent developments in science together with legal and policy analysis and recommendations. For anyone interested in women’s environmental health issues, it is a must-read … This book will help to provide researchers, policy-makers and advocates with tools to understand and address links between social inequity, environmental health and gendered differences in chemical exposure and effects
- Kaitlyn Mitchell
The book... provides a wide variety of scholarship on chemical threats from a feminist political economy perspective. It is particularly effective at arguing for both extended producer responsibility for potentially harmful substances and the precautionary principle as a policy adoption strategy when dealing with uncertainties in the science of chemical pollution.
- Angela Cope
Our Chemical Selves is a fascinating book that raises important questions about the impact of chemicals on women’s health in Canada … This book should be read by environmental historians or anyone concerned with the impact of chemicals in our world. Not only do the contributors highlight important issues regarding women’s health, but they offer useful solutions to change our collective indifference toward the intensification of chemicals in our world.
- David Kinkela, State University of New York at Fredonia
[U]nique and valuable for its focus on gender and environmental justice.
- M. Gochfeld