Air Date: March 14, 2025

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EPA Under Attack


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The Trump administration has announced plans to roll back multiple environmental regulations, cut EPA spending and push back environmental justice programs. Christine Todd Whitman served as the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency under President George W. Bush and she’s the only woman who has served as the governor of New Jersey. She joined Living on Earth’s host Steve Curwood and Paloma Beltran to discuss recent federal actions end her centrist approach on environmental regulation. (14:48)

Plastic Containers Linked to Heart Failure


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Plastics can contain thousands of chemicals like phthalates and PFAS which are harmful to human and animal health. A new study published in the journal Ecotoxicology and Environmental Safety, found that higher exposure to disposable takeout containers, was linked to a higher risk of congestive heart failure in both humans and animals. Dr. Leonardo Trasande the director of the NYU Center for the Investigation of Environmental Hazards joined host Living on Earth Steve Curwood to review the study. (15:38)

Wild Girls: How the Outdoors Shaped the Women Who Challenged a Nation


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From abolitionist Harriet Tubman to novelist Louisa May Alcott, some of the country’s most important women trailblazers shared a connection with the natural world in their girlhood. According to author Tiya Miles in her book Wild Girls: How the Outdoors Shaped the Women Who Challenged a Nation, this time spent in the outdoors prepared these women to become pioneers in their fields. She joins Host Paloma Beltran for more. (15:59)

Show Credits and Funders

Show Transcript

250314 Transcript

HOSTS: Paloma Beltran, Steve Curwood

GUESTS: Tiya Miles, Leo Trasande, Christine Todd Whitman

[THEME]

CURWOOD: From PRX – this is Living on Earth.

[THEME]

CURWOOD: I’m Steve Curwood.

BELTRAN: And I’m Paloma Beltran.

Heart trouble from hot food placed plastics.

TRASANDE: We don't usually think of our gut microbes being damaged by plastic, but what really impresses me about this study is they opened up another Pandora's box and they opened up another potential mechanism by which plastic can harm the heart.

CURWOOD: Also, for Women’s History Month, pioneering women and the natural world.

MILES: Harriet Tubman talked about how she was a neglected weed. She recognized the way in which she was being mistreated as a child and she also associated herself with a kind of living thing that is incredibly tough and resilient.

CURWOOD: That and more, this week on Living on Earth. Stick around!

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[NEWSBREAK MUSIC: Boards Of Canada “Zoetrope” from “In A Beautiful Place Out In The Country” (Warp Records 2000)]

[THEME]

EPA Under Attack

CURWOOD: From PRX and the Jennifer and Ted Stanley Studios at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, this is Living on Earth. I’m Steve Curwood.

BELTRAN: And I’m Paloma Beltran.

The Trump Administration has hit the Environmental Protection Agency with major changes. Many workers have been fired, some rehired, and amid the confusion billions of dollars face claw backs. And the new EPA Administrator, Lee Zeldin, has promised to slash regulations to shreds.

CURWOOD: Also, President Trump has taken the US out of the Paris Climate agreement. And the scale of the efforts to cut EPA spending and rollback rules is unprecedented.

BELTRAN: Christine Todd Whitman was the first woman governor of New Jersey and led the EPA as a Republican with a comparatively modest conservative agenda under President George W. Bush. Now she’s co-founder of Forward, a new political party to appeal to centrists who feel left out by both Republicans and Democrats.

CURWOOD: Governor Whitman joined us earlier and I started by asking how she feels about the country’s direction now when it comes to climate and the environment.

WHITMAN: I think we're going totally the wrong direction. There's no question in my mind, the charge of the Environmental Agency is to protect human health and the environment, and that's what it does. It's the one that does the research to see what is acceptable for human consumption on some of these chemicals and things. It is the one that's there when there's a disaster and helps clean up. I mean, in the Maui fires in Hawaii that destroyed an entire community, it was EPA that went there and helped with the cleanup. Helped identify where there were hot spots, where there were problems, worked to lay out a map of the totally destroyed buildings. Worked to ensure the constant monitoring air quality, so that people would know what they were getting into when they went back to their homes and helped ensure the cleanup of a whole lot of batteries that were stored there, lithium batteries. I mean, EPA, that's the kind of thing it does when it responds to a crisis. And we're the ones that respond to crises everywhere. And then it's also the one that's out front saying you've got to be careful about this, that, or the other. It's monitoring the quality of water, monitoring the air quality. And Mother Nature, as I think we're learning, doesn't care at anything about geopolitical bounds. And so when I was governor of New Jersey, I could have closed down every manufacturing plant in the state and still had problems with the air quality standard because of air transport from the coal mining in Kentucky and West Virginia. We've seen this with storms, with water runoff, things like that. It doesn't stay in one place. It affects everybody, and that's why you have to have some national standards. It can't just be state to state. States can go beyond what EPA says is safe. They can make it stricter, that's fine, but they can't go below what the agency says. And the agency has incredible scientists and a depth of knowledge that no individual state really has.

BELTRAN: And what do you make of what we've done as a country in the 20 plus years since you've left your role as EPA Administrator?

WHITMAN: Well, we've had forwards and backwards. I mean, we did pretty well under the last Democratic administration, under Biden's administration, but previous to that, the Trump administration had already started cutting and starving the agency for money. And unfortunately, many of those with the real depth of knowledge, the institutional knowledge that you need, because these things are complicated, left. There's still quite a few of them there now, but I think they're leaving because it's clear this administration does not want an Environmental Protection Agency. I mean, we, as a country, I have to say we're the only industrialized country in the world that does not have environment as a recognized cabinet position. EPA is only an agency. We were treated as a cabinet level, and I attended all the cabinet meetings, that went without saying, but we could never make that extra step. You could never get a clean bill through that would say it's a cabinet position. So we've always been a little bit hesitant about regulations, and it's easy to hate the agency because it's a regulatory agency, so it's either telling people to do something they don't want to do and spend extra money, or telling them to stop doing something that was beneficial to them. So it's easy to hate the agency, but you have to trust that they're doing what's in the best interests of the greatest number of people to keep us safe and healthy.

BELTRAN: So let's just say for a moment that you were President of the United States and could set the policy for the EPA. What direction do you think we should be heading in? What major environmental issues in the US do you think the EPA ought to be addressing right now?

WHITMAN: Well, I mean, if we haven't figured out that Mother Nature is a little mad at us right now and is kind of sending the message that you guys may think you're smart and capable, but I'm in charge, then we really are deaf and dumb to this. We have to take climate change seriously. It's costing us lives. It's costing us livelihoods, businesses, billions of dollars, and destabilizing a number of countries around the world. It's not good for us when these countries are destabilized like that, when you start to have violence, because people are frustrated and angry, and so we need to take this issue seriously. I have said for a long time that if you want to get it down to one particular issue, that quantity and quality of water is the number one environmental issue, but that's all tied up in climate change as well.

BELTRAN: And you are the co-ounder of the Forward Party, a centrist third party that aims to look forward from this time of partisan polarization. To what extent do you see this party as a possible option for conservatives who don't feel their beliefs align with that of the Make America Great Again crowd?

WHITMAN: Well, it's a home for them. It's a home for people on both sides, from both parties, who feel that they've been displaced, that their parties have left them. The far left on the Democrats and the far right on the Republicans, because we're building from the ground up. We're serious about a third party. It's not like the third parties that we have seen traditionally, which run just presidential candidates and there's no infrastructure below. So the minute the election is over, that's it. They're gone. Or parties like the Liberal Party or the Green Party, which are about just a certain subset of issues. We're about putting people in office who will represent their constituents. We don't have a platform that says you have to be pro-gun or anti-gun, or pro-abortion or anti-abortion. You have to sign a pledge that says you'll uphold the rule of law, respect the Constitution, work with anyone to solve problems, create a safe space to discuss the controversial issues, and open the process so that anyone who is legally able to vote, can vote. And then we have principles of respect for one another, for protecting our democracy, for economic opportunity. And then we want our candidates to decide what are the issues that are most important to my constituents? What matters here? I mean, what's important in Arizona is not the same as what's important in New Jersey. They're very different, and we should recognize that. But unfortunately, the two major parties don't do that. They have a very strict set of policies, and you have to adhere to those. And if you don't vote the way they want you to vote, then they'll come after you in a primary, they'll stop funding you, they'll take away committee assignments. We hear every day how many people there are in Washington who really don't like everything that's going on, but are afraid to do anything about it, because they're afraid of the repercussions. That's not how we should be operating. And so what we're saying to those people is, look, join us. We'll get you volunteers, we'll help you with issue research, we'll help you with getting money, and we'll have your back.

CURWOOD: Governor, how healthy is our democracy? The man in the White House at one point campaigned saying that you'll never have to vote again. Some people say that it's time to vote while we still can. How do you feel about the present state of the way the law and the Constitution is being viewed by the people who seem to be in power right now?

WHITMAN: Our democracy is teetering on a knife's edge. We held in the last go round of the Trump administration because he had people there who were sensible and who were able to stop some of the most extreme things that he wanted to do. Now he's filled the administration with syncophants, and they're not going to oppose him. They've learned that the best way to motivate Donald Trump is to praise him and to do it publicly. But you know, Steve, the thing that bothers me the most is absolute by the book dictator approach, which is you start driving wedges between people. You start making people afraid of others who don't look like them or don't act like them. When you look at what's happening with Columbia University in New York, they're going after Palestinian protesters. I don't like what those protesters are saying, but we have something called freedom of speech here, and unless they're inciting a riot, which is clearly illegal, they can say what they want to say. We don't have to like it, but now all of a sudden, you're not supporting Jews enough. I've been a big supporter of Israel and been there several times, but that's not right. And what it is is, again, it's speaking to that hate. It's saying all immigrants are rapists or drug addicts and we're in danger from them. It's creating a world that is just so counter to what the United States has always stood for. That I, I don't hate Donald Trump, but I really deeply deplore what he's doing to our country. And undermining the rule of law. He doesn't seem to care about it, Constitution is an inconvenient document. He's just going to go right ahead and do what he's doing, and if he starts to ignore the courts, really ignore them, and he already is, in a way. He's pushed off a lot of decisions that have gone against him, and hasn't paid penalties, but he's never paid bills, so that's not unusual, but he's really undermining the public's confidence in the courts and in the rule of law. Then we're in a really dangerous spot. I don't know what we do then.

CURWOOD: In other words, vote while we still can.

WHITMAN: Yeah, I would advise it. I mean, listen, democracy doesn't ask a whole lot of us, but it does ask us to be engaged and at least vote, and we just haven't been doing a good job of that.

BELTRAN: And what have you heard from various voters? You know, how do they feel about the trajectory that this country is on?

WHITMAN: On an everyday basis, right, look, people are just concerned about keeping a roof over their heads, being able to feed their family, being able to be treated with dignity and have the opportunity to move forward and succeed. And for too long, they feel that Congress and politicians have not listened to them, and that's how Donald Trump got into office because he played to them. He said, I hear you. He's the wrong person for them, because he may have heard them, but he doesn't really care about the person who's struggling. And if you look at his tax policies, they're all to benefit the rich. They don't benefit the average wage earner. And right now he's saying, well, we might have a recession, not a big deal. Maybe not a big deal if you have billions in the bank, but it's a big deal to someone who is living right on the edge and paycheck to paycheck. So I think we're going to have some buyer's remorse coming. But in general, after this election, our internet traffic at the Forward Party went up over 120% and our state organizations were seeing the same thing. People who coming to them saying, what can I do? Can I run? How do I do this? How do we stop what's going on? And you're seeing more and more people leave the two major parties, the Republican and Democratic Party, and become independent, independently registered. And those are the people that we want to work with. They've got to start to get engaged and help us build a party that can push back against what's going on.

CURWOOD: So Governor, your name is Christine Todd Whitman. This is Women's History Month that we're talking to you in, and you did become the first female governor of New Jersey. What did little Christine Todd learn as a young person that opened the door for you to become governor, to run the EPA, to be starting a middle way political party?

WHITMAN: Well, I'm the youngest of eight, and so I was the one that was there at the dining room table when my parents were talking about what was going on in the world. And they were very involved politically in the Republican Party. Never ran for office, but they were very involved. And I grew up listening to all of that, what was happening in the world and the state and our local government. I knew I wanted to be involved in policy. I'd started going door to door when I was 13. Stuffing, stamping, sealing, and sending, which is what we did in the old days, of getting campaign materials out. And particularly, I was doing a door to door, I'll never forget it. And I knocked on the door to ask this person about voting, and she said, it's my, it's my right not to vote. And I remember thinking, yeah, it is. But if everybody took that attitude, where would we be?

CURWOOD: And there are, of course, barriers for women back then and still in this society. How did you overcome those?

WHITMAN: Well, you know what? I never thought about them much, Steve, because I figured that was going to be somebody else's problem. I couldn't do anything about it. I was what I was. I was a female. And if they were going to have an issue with that, they were going to have an issue with it. So you don't feed the beast. So when I was running for governor, when they said I was a Tom Kean in pearls, referring to the previous Republican governor, I just didn't wear pearls anymore. If they said my husband was giving me all the ideas on the tax plan after I got into office, John just never came down to Trenton, so they didn't see him around. You just don't make it easy for people to reaffirm their prejudices. And so that's about the only way I handled it. Except the only thing I will say is I did make oh, it'd be terrible now, it'd be DEI. I mean, I know, I know, the awful thing. But I did make an effort to make the administration look more like the state. And first of all, I got into trouble with Republicans because I didn't fire every Democrat when I got into office. Because I said, look, if they're doing a good job, why would I fire them? Why should we lose somebody who had the institutional knowledge and doing an important job? But when there was an opening, and I'd ask my personnel people to, you know, give me some names to fill a slot, almost inevitably, the first draft was all white male, and I'd say to them, nope, I want diversity here. Give me some diversity. And they would, and they'd come back with enormously qualified candidates. And sometimes I would pick somebody from the first list. I mean, I wasn't saying I'm not going to hire white men, but often I could find immensely competent men and women, people of color and women and it, I think it made a difference in people's ideas and thoughts about what they could do.

BELTRAN: Governor Christine Todd Whitman is a former administrator of the US Environmental Protection Agency. Thank you for joining us.

WHITMAN: Paloma, it's been a pleasure to be with you.

CURWOOD: And a pleasure for us to have you, Governor Whitman.

WHITMAN: Good to have talked to you. Steve.

Related link:
Read more about the Forward Party

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BELTRAN: Coming up, New research adds to the growing list of health concerns associated with food placed in plastic. Stay tuned to Living on Earth.

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Plastic Containers Linked to Heart Failure

BELTRAN: It’s Living on Earth, I’m Paloma Beltran.

CURWOOD: And I’m Steve Curwood.

It’s the end of a long work day, and, surprise, surprise, you’re starving. All you want to do is curl up with your favorite takeout and binge watch that one addicting TV series. But there may be a cost to eating food served from plastic containers, beyond the hit to your bank account. A study from China, published at the end of 2024 in the journal Ecotoxicology and Environmental Safety, found that higher exposure to plastic takeout containers was linked to a greater risk of congestive heart failure. Dr. Leonardo Trasande is a pediatrician who directs the NYU Center for the Investigation of Environmental Hazards and he’s read this study. Welcome back to Living on Earth, Dr. Trasande!

TRASANDE: It's always great to be here with you, Steve.

CURWOOD: So we've talked to you before about the negative impacts of plastic on our health, but now there's a study in Ecotoxicology and Environmental Safety that shows even more health and safety concerns linked to food takeout containers and plastic exposure. Talk to me about that study, starting with its finding that high frequency exposure to hot food placed in plastics is significantly associated with an increased risk of congestive heart failure.

TRASANDE: So the researchers based in China started with questionnaires that asked all sorts of lovely details about what they ate and how they placed their food before they ate it, and what conditions they used to manage their food. And then they followed the population over time and identified who got sick and from what. And when they looked more carefully, they found that adults with higher consumption of this food that they routinely placed hot in plastic containers was associated with a greater risk of dying from congestive heart failure.

CURWOOD: So this link between hot food placed in plastics and congestive heart failure, this is in humans. What about animals?

TRASANDE: So the researchers did something quite impressive that you don't usually see in a single peer reviewed publication. They took what they found in humans and then did an animal experiment to verify what might be going on in the humans because you can't control humans even in a randomized, controlled trial the way you would need to to expose people intentionally to hot food in a plastic container. So what they did is they took plastic containers, they put hot water in them, and then they used animals as the experimental vehicle to test their hypothesis, and what they found here is pretty impressive in that they looked at the microbes in the guts of these animals, and they found really interesting differences that might explain why people might be developing heart disease. Now I want to go back to the hot water part, because there's something really important here in this study, and that is that we typically put food into these packages, and the hot food we often put into these packages is processed food. And so a lot of people, when they see associations in humans of fast food consumption with heart disease, they say, well, it's not really the plastic. It's really the food that they're eating in contact with the plastic. The plastic is, they say, an innocent bystander. Well, putting hot water in a plastic container really goes a long way to excluding that, really focuses on what's going on in the plastics that's changing the animal's body and the animal's microbiome, as we call it. And then they went further, and they looked at the hearts. This is where you can sadly sacrifice the animals to evaluate the tissue more directly and in a controlled fashion. And they found changes in the heart consistent with the congestive heart failure they found in the humans. So what's really compelling here is the read across from humans to animals, and the consistency of the study findings in aggregate.

CURWOOD: So what are the mechanisms behind this phenomenon, this plastic exposure, increasing this risk of congestive heart disease, human or animal? How?

TRASANDE: Well, to begin with, I have to say, I was surprised by what they found was the explanation. We don't usually think of our gut microbes being damaged by plastic, but just like animals and wildlife are damaged by plastic, just like humans are damaged by plastic, our microbes are damaged by plastic. But what really impresses me about this study is they opened up another Pandora's box, and they opened up another potential mechanism by which plastic can harm the heart. Mostly what we thought with plastic and harming the heart is back to those particles that literally irritate the linings of the coronary arteries, and then the chemicals themselves hack our hormones, our natural signaling molecules that underlie basic biological functions like temperature, metabolism, salt, sugar and even sex. And so when I opened up the study, I have to say, I was a little bit gobsmacked, because I expected a similar story to what other studies had identified that hormones might be affected somehow or there might be inflammation in the arteries of these people or in the hearts, directly in the muscle of the heart, and they did find inflammation in the muscle. But the microbiome changes really beg an interesting question. Is it changes in the microbiome, which play crucial roles in human metabolism, by the way, and maybe even heart function, are those the changes that are explaining it? So it really makes researchers like us have to dig back in and think about the mechanism. Does it change the importance of the findings of the study for public health and human health? Absolutely not.

CURWOOD: By the way, what is endocrine disruption?

TRASANDE: So endocrine refers to hormones. Hormones are our natural signaling molecules. The endocrine system is way more complicated than we originally thought. It's also more complicated because it's not just looking like the hormone that can cause hormone disruption. You can change expression of genes that are crucial for metabolism, for example, and have the same hormonal effects. So this field gets more complicated the deeper we look at it.

CURWOOD: Now, what's the understanding of how the microbiome, that is what's, those little critters in our intestinal tract, what's their relationship to our hormone systems?

TRASANDE: Well, a few possibilities here. One is that the microbiome may metabolize hormones that are circulating in our body. They may metabolize hormones that are in the food we eat. After all, let's imagine we eat animals or even plants. They have hormones. They use hormones for their own purposes, and those changes in hormones can lead to different hormonal molecules crossing that is metabolites of hormones or some other transformation of the hormone itself that can enter the human body and cause physical changes that we don't completely understand. In fact, bringing new chemicals into the picture that aren't naturally made by the human body.

CURWOOD: And how does endocrine disruption play in this research?

TRASANDE: So we don't completely know the story here that connects all the dots. As best I can interpret, the endocrine disruption could be part of the story or not part of the story of this particular finding. It could be that the microbiome changes are one major part of the story that we didn't appreciate. We didn't see any data in this study to confirm or deny the role of endocrine disruption in inducing heart failure in particular. We do know that the endocrine disruption is well described to be a contributor to cardiovascular disease in general, including heart attacks.

CURWOOD: We’ll be back with more from Dr. Trasande about the dangers of plastics and human health. So, Paloma, does this study make your stomach turn a bit, or is it just me?

BELTRAN: Yeah, I mean I’m definitely adding plastic containers to my no-go list. And you know Steve, it’s not just heart disease we have to worry about when it comes to plastics. I don’t need to tell you that there’s been a lot more research beyond this study on how plastics, and especially the chemicals added to them, harm our health, from reproductive issues to cancers to cognitive function.

CURWOOD: That’s right, and our listeners may remember that we talked to Dr. Trasande earlier in 2024 about a truly staggering study he led. His team of researchers estimated that health problems from chemicals in plastics are costing the US $250 billion, that’s a B, a year.

BELTRAN: That’s hard to wrap your head around. And from what I remember, they only looked at 10 or so chemicals, but there are thousands added to everyday plastic products.

CURWOOD: Yeah, makes you wonder how many zeros should be added to that economic cost.

PALOMA: Absolutely.

CURWOOD: Well, when I talked to Dr. Trasande this time around, I had a few more questions. And specifically I wanted to ask him about another study he did a few years back that might give listeners some context, beyond this one study from China, about the potential connection between plastics and cardiovascular health.

TRASANDE: So a few years back, we did a study looking at levels of phthalates. These are chemicals used to soften polyvinyl chloride plastic in particular. These are often used in food packaging because the phthalates make the polyvinyl chloride clingy and flexible, ultimately. And so we looked at urine levels of these chemicals in a large national survey called the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, and then we linked the data to the National Death Index, which is a little morbid, but bear with me for a minute. The fact is that we followed that population for about 10 years of time, and the National Death Index doesn't tell you just when you died, it tells you why you died, and we're able to look at heart disease and cancer as origins of that mortality. When we looked at the data, the phthalate exposures were directly associated not with cancer mortality, but with cardiovascular mortality in the overall mortality event itself, and if you extrapolate up to the US population, because the NHANES is national survey data, you get 50,000 deaths among 55 to 64 year olds each year. And that impact at a societal level, is $20 billion, that's with a "b," a year in lost economic productivity. Now we weren't as sophisticated as these Chinese researchers were. We didn't have an animal model to put together with the human model, but when you put all of the studies together, and that New England Journal of Medicine study a year or so ago that identified plaques in the carotid arteries, the artery that feeds the brain with oxygen, that the microplastic levels in those plaques, including polyvinyl chloride, by the way, were associated with a four fold increase in heart attack, stroke and death as a composite outcome. So you have now three studies in humans, as well as an animal study that's embedded with the human study that show effects of plastic exposure, be it chemicals as they were measured, or the micro nano plastics themselves with slightly different cardiovascular endpoints. You could say congestive heart failure is a little different than heart attack and stroke, but at the core is dysfunction of the heart and injury to the heart at the crux of the matter. So that's really what's setting all these adverse outcomes like death in motion.

CURWOOD: So where do we get phthalates in our food?

TRASANDE: Well, phthalates in these softer food wraps are not bound directly to the plastic, so especially with heat, those absorb right in and then you eat it.

CURWOOD: So if I go to a fast food restaurant and get a hamburger wrapped in something that had phthalates, that's part of the recipe?

TRASANDE: Well, to be clear, Steve, this isn't the only type of food that has this clingy wrap. Salads have them. Sandwiches have them. So as much as people try to argue that it's the unhealthy food that's the only place you're getting phthalates, I beg to differ.

CURWOOD: What is your sense of perhaps the environmental justice component of this? What does this current research say about how this phenomenon might be impacting some groups more than others?

TRASANDE: Well, we know that phthalate levels are higher, characteristically in certain racial and ethnic subgroups and also in low income populations, and that can be in part, driven by the food they eat and the packaging in the food they eat, whether it's salad or fast food. And what we know is that the higher urinary levels of these chemicals drive disparities in chronic disease endpoints that are unfortunately disproportionately borne by Latino and African American populations, and that also costs them directly. A few years back, we had done a study looking at hormone disrupting chemicals and the economic costs borne by Latino and African American populations, and unfortunately, as you might guess, they bear not just the additional disease burden, but an economic burden as well.

CURWOOD: So if plastic is such a pervasive problem, especially in our food system, what do you think needs to be done in terms of regulations that would be most helpful in this decreasing this disease and, and such, from plastic exposure.

TRASANDE: Well, the Food Drug Administration has been asleep at the wheel for many years. It's a bipartisan sleep. So let's just start there. We need to have a system where chemicals used, either intentionally or unintentionally in food, contact materials, or what have you, that they're properly tested for their safety. Right now, there's this generally recognized as safe loophole that basically a food industry person could say, yeah, it's fine, and I as a researcher, have to provide data to even get the Food and Drug Administration to pay attention to the chemical as a problem and reconsider the decision to allow it under the guise of, well, the industry person said it's fine, so it's fine, and we definitely need additional testing, and that will require money in the hands of the Food and Drug Administration. This is one of the ways that we can make America healthy again.

CURWOOD: Dr. Leonardo Trasande is a professor of pediatrics and population health at NYU, and he's also author of Sicker, Fatter, Poorer: The Urgent Threat of Hormone Disrupting Chemicals on Our Health and Future. Thank you so much for taking the time with us today.

TRASANDE: Thanks again, Steve, it's always a pleasure.

Related links:
- Ecotoxicology and Environmental Safety | “Effects of Leachate From Disposable Plastic Takeout Containers on the Cardiovascular System After Thermal Contact”
- Living on Earth | “Phthalates Linked to 100,000 Yearly Deaths”
- Environmental Pollution | “Phthalates and Attributable Mortality: A Population-Based Longitudinal Cohort Study and Cost Analysis”
- Living on Earth | “$250 Billion Yearly Economic Costs from Plastics”

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Wild Girls: How the Outdoors Shaped the Women Who Challenged a Nation

CURWOOD: It’s Living on Earth, I’m Steve Curwood.

BELTRAN: And I’m Paloma Beltran.

In honor of Women’s History Month, we turn now to the history of women outdoors in America. During the 19th century, the ability to spend time in nature helped free some girls from restrictive social norms and turned them into pioneers. Abolitionist Harriet Tubman, novelist Louisa May Alcott, Native American writer Zitkála-Šá, and farmworkers’ champion Dolores Huerta all shared a connection to the natural world in their girlhoods. For more on these trail blazers, we turn to historian Tiya Miles. In her book “Wild Girls: How the Outdoors Shaped the Women who Challenged a Nation”, she reveals how playing and working outside as girls prepared them to lead the way towards gender equality, abolition, and more. Tiya joined me and I asked her to start our conversation by reading a passage from her introduction.

MILES: From the micro scale of a single tree to the macro scale of the forest, spaces in nature have been meaningful to the visionary lives of American girls. Girl outsiders became trailblazers in their communities and in American culture, writ large. Time in the outdoors ignited girls’ critical awareness, fed their self-knowledge, charged their imaginations, built their capacity for resilience, and bestowed moments of inner peace that steadied their spirits and tumultuous times. The stories pressed into this book, like wildflower petals, will show how time spent outside shape the character of girls who later changed the country.

BELTRAN: Thank you. Please talk to me about the complicated social context in which these wild girls grew up in amongst the outdoors.

MILES: Well, most of the book is describing experiences that take place in the 19th century. And this was a period of extreme restriction, constriction, oppression for many different populations of girls living on these lands. It was a period as we know, of enslavement. It was a time when boarding schools, organized and funded by the federal governments were created to compel Native American, quote, education. It was a time when girls of any class at any background were expected to know their place in a sense, when it came to gendered organizations of society. So girls were supposed to be quiet, still, pure, virtuous, and obedient really, across the board in the context of American civilization.

BELTRAN: A moment in history that you point to is that of the Leonid Meteor shower that took place in 1833. Where thousands of meteors were seen across North America. Harriet Tubman observed that event. Can you tell us more about Harriet her story and what she witnessed that day.

MILES: Harriet Tubman was enslaved in the US South, Tubman was born in Maryland, probably in the early to mid 1820s. And she grew up in the dire-ist of circumstances. She was constantly being separated from the mother she loved, from her siblings and her father, because the man who owned her mother, and her mother's children, including Harriet Tubman, would lease them out to bring in income. So Tubman was often as a very young girl, separated from her family, alone, desperate, afraid. And as she got to become a little older and a little bolder, in part because of her experience outside, Tubman learned how to run away from the people who were leasing or renting her, and to find her mother, who was on another farm or another plantation.

BELTRAN: Tremendous bravery.

MILES: I know, I know, it's incredible and so much courage. And one of these nights when Tubman ran away, just briefly, temporarily, to visit her mother. She was there with her brother, and they were inside the cabin where her mother lived. And her brother would stand outside at the door of the cabin, to watch for the patrollers. And these are people who would basically police the roads to look for enslaved people who might be out of their so-called rightful places without permission. And they would return these enslaved people, and they could exact terrible punishments. So Harriet Tubman as a girl, probably around the age of a tween, so a preteen was with her mother visiting and her brother was standing guard by the door, and her brother, all of a sudden shouted, "come out, come out and look at the stars". And Harriet Tubman, who at that time was known by the nickname of Minty, came outside and joined her brother. And she looked up and she saw what she later described as just an uncountable number of stars that were shooting across the sky. Harriet Tubman later said that she thought that moment could have been Judgment Day, because it was so incredible, so miraculous, to see what looked like, you know, millions or billions zillions of stars just raining down onto the earth. Well Tubman wasn't the only enslaved girl to witness this site and many other enslaved girls and boys and children saw this and remembered the story of what they often described as the night the stars fell. And in Harriet Tubman's world, and the world of enslaved girls and enslaved people, this shower seemed to carry a message. And the message was that God could possibly pass judgment on the people who are mistreating others on the earth, God could possibly pass judgment on enslavers, because God could bring the sky down in a shower of stars.

BELTRAN: How did Harriet Tubman’s experience outside help her gain the tools she needed to lead people to freedom?

MILES: Spending time in nature gave Harriet Tubman psychological tools as well as the practical tools for the freedom fighter that she would become. She talked about how she was a neglected weed as a child, and these are her words. This is something that really caught my attention when I was thinking about how to interpret her life story, because it tells us that Tubman was an observer of nature. She was someone who thought through nature, thought about herself through the language of nature. But it also tells us that Tubman recognized the way in which she was being mistreated as a child and she also associated herself with a kind of living thing that is incredibly tough and resilient. Tubman was a very religious woman. She believed that God was against slavery and at the same time she felt that it may have been ordained by God that she was placed outside during her teenage years to learn how to navigate the woods and learned she did. She learned about the woods, she learned how the waters flowed in the woods, she learned how to read the sky in the woods, she learned about the different animals that would be with her in the woods and when she made her escape, which would be her final escape from slavery as a young woman she applied all of those skills. For a decade of her life following that she helped other people in the very same way, moving through those woods that she had become a companion of.

BELTRAN: And you also profiled the famous author Louisa May Alcott as one of these Wild Girls. How did Louisa's connection to nature inspire her literary work?

MILES: Well Louisa May Alcott is a historical figure who I never really expected to research and write about Paloma. She's someone whose work I read when I was a teenager, I read "Little Women" I think probably in high school or around that time and I vaguely recall enjoying the novel. But I had never thought that I would return to her. I worked on this book during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and there was one particular weekend when my kids and I were just feeling stir crazy in the house. We needed to get out and for some reason it popped into my head "let's go to Louisa May Alcott's Orchard House". This is a historic site in Concord, Massachusetts not too far from where we live. And as I was at her home and reading about her it sort of clicked that she would've been walking these hills, she would've been planting in this garden, she would've been looking out at a landscape where not too far away there was the very famous Walden Pond. And so I thought let me just look into this and it turns out Louisa May Alcott was a perfect figure to include in this book. I really did not know that before Paloma, I had not idea the extent to which her connection to the outdoors, her sort of psychological and emotional connection, was born out in her childhood and the things she loved to do. The way she perceived herself and not just in the novel "Little Women" where we see it all over the place in the character Joe March who is a quote "tomboy". Well Louisa May Alcott was also a "tomboy" those were the words she used to describe herself and she was somebody who would say, that she didn't even want to play with a kid unless they could climb a tree, unless they liked to play with spiders the way she did. Her favorite reading spot was this old kind of wheel barrel out in the yard, she loved to go tearing across the fields. She loved to hang out with actually older men including some of the famous philosophers that we know of from Concord, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau. Louisa May Alcott I learned through my research had a really interesting way of thinking about herself. She wrote that she felt much more like a boy or a wild deer or a horse than a girl. She felt like one of these beings, these other kinds of beings who could be outside, could run outside, could express themselves in these kind of big dramatic movements all of which was supposed to be off limits for girls. I mean there's this really interesting detail that I have to slip in there…

BELTRAN: Please do!

MILES: Alcott says that when she was a girl, her mother actually tied her to the sofa to try to keep her in the house. I mean, that is, I think, the perfect symbolic image for the expectations of certain girls, especially middle class, Euro-American girls living in New England at this time. That they were supposed to be in the parlor, behaving properly, being dainty, being quiet, being pretty, being seen and not heard. But that was not who Louisa May Alcott was, she refused to be that girl. And actually, when her family moved to the country, which was Concord, her mother just seems to have given in maybe given up perhaps actually recognize and embrace the kind of kid she had. And she said Louisa May Alcott go run, and she allowed Louisa to explore the outdoors.

BELTRAN: Talk to me about how the multiracial spaces near Boston and Walden Pond. How did that help shape Louisa May Alcott, her writing and her spirit?

MILES: Louisa May Alcott was an unusual kid. She was an unusual girl for her family, for her society and for her time. And one time when she was doing her walkabouts, she fell into Frog Pond. And she was actually in great danger in this moment. She might have drowned. Alcott reports that it was a black boy who saved her. It was a black boy who jumped in and helped her to get out of Frog Pond. And she says from that moment, she became an abolitionist. One of the things that we see through Alcott's story and also the other stories that I tell in the book is outdoor spaces seem to make a way for people of different racial categorizations, different sex and gender categorizations, different class categorizations to come together, because they are not as heavily separated and segregated, and surveilled and policed as some of these interior spaces. So Alcott might not have come across a black boy who had that kind of freedom of movement in the town homes and country homes of her family, but outside of the park, she did encounter him, and that encounter changed her life in more than one way. It may have actually saved her life and it certainly began a transformation in her thinking.

BELTRAN: Tiya, what do you hope readers take away from your book and these stories?

MILES: I have heard form a number of readers, a number of women readers that the most meaningful thing to them about this book is that it reminded them of their girlhoods, it reminded them of who they were when they loved to be outside, when they loved to run through the woods to explore their neighborhoods. And it has reminded them that they want to be those same people. They want to embrace those girlhood adventures again. I so appreciated hearing that. And I would also hope that people take away a sense of inspiration about their own lives. That I really do wish that people would see the examples in this book as models for what it is we can do to take care of the earth, to take care of these faces in nature and also to ensure that people have equal access to them.

BELTRAN: Tiya Miles is a Professor of History at Harvard and author of “Wild Girls: How The Outdoors Shaped the Woman who Challenged the Nation”. Tiya, thank you for joining us.

MILES: I enjoyed it so much. Thanks Paloma.

Related links:
- Learn more about Tiya Miles
- Literary Hub | “How America’s Natural Beauty Called Generations of Women to Action”
- Purchase Tiya Mile's book Wild Girls: How the Outdoors Shaped the Women Who Challenged a Nation

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CURWOOD: On the next Living on Earth, the risks of fracking waste in landfills.

BENSE: The EPA conducted an investigation, where they inspected the landfill in March of 2023 and they took pictures. You know, they took samples. They documented the operations at the landfill in general and basically, they found what they called pretty significant disrepair. One of the things that inspectors saw was a containment building, which is supposed to hold untreated hazardous waste, had a hole in the roof and was leaking. And on the day that inspectors were at the landfill it was raining, and they were able to watch the waste and runoff, like leaking out of the building. It definitely seems concerning. It's literally a containment building that is supposed to contain the waste. So if there's a leak in it, that is a big problem.

CURWOOD: That’s next time on Living on Earth.

[MUSIC: Mary Lou Williams, “My Blue Heaven” on Mary Lou Williams Presents Black Christ of the Andes, Smithsonian Folkways Recordings]

CURWOOD: Living on Earth is produced by the World Media Foundation. Our crew includes Naomi Arenberg, Kayla Bradley, Jenni Doering, Daniela FAHria, Mehek Gagneja, Swayam Gagneja, Mark Kausch, Mark Seth Lender, Don Lyman, Ashanti McLean, Nana Mohammed, Aynsley O’Neill, Sophia Pandelidis, Jake Rego, Andrew Skerritt, Melba Torres, and El Wilson.

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