Water, air, soil – the main components of the big ball of matter we call the Earth.

Formed from floating atoms and molecules billions of years ago, our planet is treated by its human inhabitants as a toilet, a smokestack, and a garbage can.

Humans adulterate, besmear, corrupt, defile, dirty, foul, impair, litter, pollute, spoil, and taint our earthly home with scarcely a thought for tomorrow.

Environment in Peril is the title of a book published by the Smithsonian Institution in 1991. The book is a compilation of presentations by eloquent defenders of the environment who spoke at a seminar convened by the Smithsonian and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

As we prepare to commemorate the 40^th anniversary of the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970, the Earth Day Network (http://www.earthday.org/) – an alliance of more than 20,000 partners and organizations in 190 countries – says “the world is in greater peril than ever.”

What follows are some facts that support that dire argument.

Pollution affects over a billion people around the world. The World Health Organization estimates that 25 percent of all deaths in the developing world are directly attributable to environmental factors.  About 40 percent of deaths worldwide are caused by water, air and soil pollution, says David Pimentel, Cornell professor of ecology and agricultural sciences.

People affected by pollution problems are much more susceptible to contracting other diseases.  Others have impaired neurological development, damaged immune systems, and long-term health problems.

Pimentel and a team of Cornell graduate students examined data from more than 120 published papers on the effects of population growth, malnutrition and various kinds of environmental degradation on human diseases. Their 2007 report was published in the journal Human Ecology.

“We have serious environmental resource problems of water, land and energy, and these are now coming to bear on food production, malnutrition and the incidence of diseases,” said Pimentel.

The study also found that air pollution from smoke and various chemicals kills 3 million people a year. In the United States alone about 3 million tons of toxic chemicals are released into the environment contributing to cancer, birth defects, immune system defects and many other serious health problems.

Soil is contaminated by many chemicals and pathogens, which are passed on to humans through direct contact or via food and water. Increased soil erosion worldwide not only results in more soil being blown around but the spread of disease microbes and various toxins.

While children only make up 10 percent of the world’s population, over 40 percent of the global burden of disease falls on them – more than three million children under age five die annually from environmental factors.

Pollution has always been with us, at least since humans invented fire. Soot found on ceilings of prehistoric caves provides evidence of the high levels of pollution associated with inadequately ventilated open fires. Metal forging appears to be a key turning point in the creation of significant pollution that spread over wide areas. Core samples of glaciers in Greenland indicate increases in pollution associated with Greek, Roman and Chinese metal production.

Pollution has long been recognized as a threat to human health and to the Earth’s ecosystems. The earliest known writings concerned with pollution were written between the 9th and 13th centuries by Persian scientists and Arabic physicians.

The industrial revolution gave birth to environmental pollution as we know it today. The emergence of large factories and consumption of immense quantities of coal and other fossil fuels gave rise to unprecedented air pollution and a large volume of industrial discharges that added to the growing load of untreated human waste.

In the unusually hot summer of 1858, the overwhelming smell of untreated human sewage in London became known as The Great Stink and led to the construction of the London sewerage system.

Chicago and Cincinnati were the first two American cities to enact laws ensuring cleaner air in 1881. In response to the Great Smog in London that killed 8,000 people in 1952, the British Parliament introduced a Clean Air Act in 1956. It would take until the 1970’s before the United States and Canada passed similar laws but the effectiveness of the laws is questionable.

Britain’s environment minister Jim Fitzpatrick admitted in February that air pollution – minute sooty particles emitted by motor transport, ships and fuel burning in houses and industry – may be leading to the premature deaths of 35,000 people a year in Britain. About four percent of deaths in the United States can be attributed to air pollution, according to the Harvard School of Public Health.

A 2008 report by the Canadian Medical Association predicted 700,000 Canadians will die prematurely over the next two decades because of illnesses caused by poor air quality. The doctor’s group said the costs of dirty air, in terms of treating the illnesses in hospital and visits to doctors, as well as indirect expenses for time off work, would add up to $10 billion in 2008 alone.

Toxic chemicals in the environment are being blamed for a rash of illnesses among children – including cancer and autism.

The Environmental Working Group (http://www.ewg.org/) has detected nearly 300 chemicals in the cord blood of American newborns. Many of these chemicals are PBTs (persistent bioaccumulative and toxic chemicals), a category that includes DDT, polychorinated biphenyls (PCBs), the Teflon chemicals perfluorooctanyl sulfonate (PFOS) and perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), brominated flame retardants, lead and mercury compounds and dioxins.

Among the most troubling substances found in cord blood that are not PBTs are bisphenol-A, the synthetic estrogen and plastics component; perchlorate, a thyroid toxin and explosives chemical used in fireworks, airbags and rocket fuel; and phthalates, a class of potent endocrine disruptors linked to birth defects in boys and a common component of soft plastics.

“The chemicals that deserve highest priority are those that contaminate the blood of babies before they are born,” says the EWG. “There is an emerging consensus within scientific and medical communities that the most critical chemical exposures occur before birth, when the brain and other organs are exquisitely sensitive to trace changes in blood chemistry. Any substance, PBT or otherwise, that intrudes upon the womb and threatens a child’s normal development must receive our most urgent attention.”

Chemicals not only affect humans, but also denizens of the sea.

Scientists studying burbot in the Mackenzie River, one of Canada’s most pristine rivers, have found rising levels of mercury, PCBs and DDT in the burbot, a delicacy in the north described as tasting like freshwater lobster. In the period from the mid-1990s to 2008, PCBs have gone up six-fold, DDT by three times, and mercury by 1.6 times.

The chemicals have been deposited in the north as air pollution fallout from heavily industrialized areas. Scientists surmise that as temperatures in the Arctic rise due to climate change, snow and ice cover are diminishing, leading to a profusion of algae, zooplankton and other aquatic microscopic life able to absorb pollutants from water.

“What climate change is doing is changing the biological availability of PCBs and the DDT that are already in the system,” said Dr. Gary Stern, a senior scientist with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. While this greening of the Arctic environment means there is more for wildlife to eat, it also allows harmful contaminants to enter the food chain in far greater amounts, Dr. Stern added.

Toxic chemicals are also endangering us where we live.

Studies have shown that significant levels of toxic substances can leach out of commonplace items in our homes and workplaces. How do these toxins make their way inside us and what impact do they have on our health? And more importantly, what can we do about them?

Rick Smith and Bruce Lourie, two of Canada’s leading environmental activists, tackled these questions head on by experimenting upon themselves. Authors of the book Slow Death by Rubber Duck, Smith and Lourie ingested and inhaled a host of substances that surround us all every day, things suspected of being toxic and posing long term health risks to humans. By revealing the pollution load in their bodies before and after the experiment – and the results in most cases are downright frightening – they tell the inside story of seven common substances in their book.

Their book begs the question: Isn’t there any protection for Canadians from these dastardly toxic chemicals?

In February, the Globe and Mail newspaper revealed that potentially harmful substances were entering the Canadian marketplace because the federal agency charged with determining their safety often can’t complete the task in a timely fashion. The newspaper said an internal government audit of the New Substances Assessment and Control Bureau states the failure of the bureau to meet its deadlines “constitutes a risk that is not currently being tracked.”

When companies want to make or use new substances or import them into Canada, they must ask the bureau for an assessment. The bureau must then respond within specified timelines – 75 days for chemicals and 120 days for organisms. If the timelines are not met, substances can be used without an assessment.

While breast cancer deaths in Canada have been going down for years and survivor rates are increasing, one in nine women will be diagnosed with the disease in their lifetime – more than 400 every week.

It was no April Fool’s Day joke when Canadian scientists announced on April 1 that exposure to certain chemicals and pollutants before a woman reaches her mid-30s could triple her risk of developing breast cancer after menopause.

Writing in a study in Occupational and Environmental Medicine, researchers found that women exposed to synthetic fibres and petroleum products during the course of their work appeared to be most at risk.

“Occupational exposure to acrylic and nylon fibres and to polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons may increase the risk of developing post-menopausal breast cancer,” they wrote.

The researchers from Montreal’s Occupational Health Research Institute based their findings on more than 1,100 women, 556 of whom were diagnosed with breast cancer in 1996 and 1997 when they were aged between 50 and 75 and had gone through menopause.

A team of chemists and industrial hygienists investigated the women’s levels of exposure to around 300 different substances during their employment history. After taking account of the usual factors associated with an increased risk of breast cancer, the analysis indicated a link between occupational exposures to several of these substances, the Montreal team wrote.

The substances that are of particular concern to the scientific and medical communities are those known as endocrine disrupting chemicals or EDCs. They are under intense scrutiny because they’re found in every home in North America and our increased exposure to them parallels a rise in cancers in adults and autism in children.

Although many of the chemicals have been considered dangerous by some scientists and doctors for years, recent research is providing mounting evidence against EDCs like bisphenol-A (BPA) found in food cans, hard plastic water bottles, phthalates (found in soft plastics and cosmetics) and fire retardants (found in mattresses, sofas, computers, and flame-resistant clothing). Multiple animal and human studies have linked EDC exposure (during or after fetal development) with a host of hormone-related disorders, like low sperm count, cancer (breast, ovarian, prostate, testicular), congenital malformation of the genitals, infertility, early puberty, diabetes, heart disease, neurological disorders, and even obesity.

Exposure to EDCs is no mere theoretical concern. In 2000, a Centers for Disease Control (CDC) study found detectable phthalates in 99.9% of adults including women of childbearing age. The CDC also discovered detectable levels of BPA in the urine of 93% of thousands of tested Americans over the age of six.

The presence of EDCs in women of child-bearing age is especially worrisome because there is evidence that even minuscule amounts of these chemicals – levels commonly present in a woman’s body – may disturb fetal brain development during highly sensitive periods of neural development known as windows of vulnerability.

On the second last day of March, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration announced “plans to scrutinize closely the potential environmental risks of bisphenol-A.” The Environmental Working Group has been asking for such studies for years. Bisphenol-A was invented in 1891and was first identified as toxic in the 1930s.

Surely the protection of our children calls for immediate and urgent action. Children should not be afflicted with rising rates of cancer and autism. A glance at obituaries in any large metropolitan newspaper finds the words “after a courageous battle with cancer” in far too many of them. Some of these are adults in their 20s, 30s or 40s.

When will we learn that life on Earth is a blessing and we should live our lives with precaution? Will it be the exposure to the chemicals released in backyard leaf burns, those in the plastic water bottle, or those in our household cleaners that causes our cells to mutate? Why are we taking the risk?

Pollution may be poisonous and a global killer, but it’s also a solvable problem. We can stop our contamination of the Earth by ceasing to use it as a repository for industrial and human waste. It can be eliminated worldwide with conscious commitment and the required resources. We must demand this of our industries, lobbyists, politicians – and ourselves – on Earth Day and every day.

On April 22, communities, churches and campuses will take action to create a blueprint for a cleaner world. Join in and help end the abuse of our Earth. Even after 40 years, there remains much to be done.

RESOURCES – See Earth Day Canada’s top ten actions to help the environment at http://www.earthday.ca/pub/resources/top10.php. These are simple everyday initiatives that everyone should do. Then read the book Slow Death by Rubber Duck by Rick Smith and Bruce Lourie; now you’ll really get active. The web site http://www.pollutionwatch.org/ is operated by Environmental Defence and the Canadian Environmental Law Association and is a source of information about toxic pollutant discharges that may be affecting your community. The EWG web site http://www.ewg.org/Health-Tips has a series of printable guides that may help make life safer for you and your children.