About the author

Joanna Malaczynski

Joanna Malaczynski has spent over a decade working on eliminating toxic chemicals from consumer products as an attorney, consultant, and entrepreneur. She first became involved in the enforcement of environmental and consumer protection laws related to environmental health as an attorney, then started a software company focused on helping industry find safer alternatives to toxic chemicals. Before writing Silent Winter, Ms. Malaczynski consulted for sustainability entrepreneurs.

Sound Bite

Silent Winter is about the silent spread of toxic chemicals in our daily lives and their role in the growing prevalence of illnesses such as cancer, chronic fatigue, diabetes, asthma, digestive issues, depression, dementia, and others. The scientific evidence about chronic illness and toxic chemicals is withheld from us through stunningly elaborate efforts so that business can continue as usual.

About the Book

Approximately 45% of the adult US population now has at least one chronic illness. We are often told that these are a result of our lifestyle or our genes. We rarely hear that chronic illness is on the rise as a result of toxic chemicals in consumer products and throughout our environment.

Industry does not want to change, so it is forcing us to change on an evolutionary level to deal with the onslaught of chemicals in our daily lives. When we cannot keep up and get ill, we are sold chemical solutions to make us feel better. But individuals and families dealing with chronic illness often know or suspect that toxic chemicals have played a role in the demise of their health.

The author describes how toxic chemicals wreak havoc in our bodies and lead to the growing epidemic of chronic illness. The problem is covered up at a societal level by obscuring what we know, and discussion of possible solutions is silenced by manipulating the marketplace. Millions of human lives are being muted as a result of chronic illness. Finally, the author discusses our way out of this mess.

In the 1962 book Silent Spring, Rachel Carson dedicated one short chapter to the anticipated human health impacts from toxic chemicals. That chapter seeded the present work, Silent Winter, which was written after sixty additional years of scientific research and widespread human exposure to a variety of toxic chemicals.

In Our Stolen Future, 1996, Theo Colborn et al. warned of the potential dangers of hormone disrupting chemicals on human health. Nearly another 25 years have passed since that writing. Silent Winter reveals the observed impacts of these hormone disrupting chemicals on human health.

About the Book

Around 45% of American adults are now living with at least one chronic illness — cancer, diabetes, asthma, depression, dementia, chronic fatigue — and most of us are told to blame our genes or our lifestyle choices. Joanna Malaczynski-Moore argues that this explanation is dangerously incomplete. In Silent Winter, she makes the case that toxic chemicals saturating our consumer products, food supply, and natural environment are driving a chronic illness epidemic that industry and regulators have gone to extraordinary lengths to conceal.

Malaczynski-Moore brings an unusual combination of credentials and personal experience to this subject. A professional working on toxic chemical elimination, she became seriously ill after swimming in the heavily polluted Willamette and Columbia Rivers near Portland — rivers contaminated with persistent bioaccumulative chemicals, agricultural pesticide runoff, and industrial pollution. Her frustrating journey through a conventional medical system that told her she was "too healthy to be ill" informs the book's urgency and its sharp skepticism toward official reassurances.

The book moves through the mechanics of the chemical industry's influence over public knowledge — covering regulatory rubber-stamping, the public relations industry's role in suppressing inconvenient science, forever chemicals like PFAS, hormone disruptors, and the legacy of wartime chemistry repurposed for modern agriculture. Chapters on collusion, corporate monopoly, and the manipulation of research explain why so much evidence linking toxic exposure to illness never reaches ordinary people. The final section looks at what meaningful change could actually look like. This is an accessible, well-researched read for anyone trying to understand why so many people are sick and why so few answers seem to be coming.

Additional information

Weight N/A
Book Type Ebook, ePub, Hard cover, Soft cover
Pages

180

Release Year

BISAC I

SCI013080   SCIENCE / Chemistry / Environmental 

BISAC II

SCI013090  SCIENCE / Chemistry / Toxicology

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