Ed Brown grew up in a small Pennsylvania town, went to a small Pennsylvania state college, but had big ambitions for his career. After he graduated with a double major in speech communication and journalism, he moved to the Big Apple, working at CBS as a sports writer and an Internet company that developed streaming video technology. After taking a job at Bravo, he met and worked with high-profile filmmaker Michael Moore. Brown developed the filmmaking bug and moved back to Pennsylvania to make his first film. He lost everything.
Shortly thereafter, Brown met and married his wife. Excited to raise a family, their excitement of a new pregnancy turned to sorrow after a miscarriage. They tried again and now have a beautiful three-year-old son. Wanting to grow their family, his wife's third pregnancy once again ended in miscarriage. "After she lost the second one I got pretty pissed off," recalls Brown. "I started saying this isn't the dynamic of the universe, this isn't god's plan, something is going on and I want to know what."
Ed started looking at what she was putting in her body and was shocked to learn that the chemicals in many of the products in the supermarket are largely unregulated and are not held to any federal standards. The emotional experience became the impetus for his next film, Acceptable Levels?, a poignant documentary opening this September in Washington D.C. and San Francisco.
Did you have any background or a basic knowledge of industrial chemicals before going into the project?
Nothing. Once we were done looking in to what she was putting on her body, we started looking at everything that
was going into her body, like foodãand especially our son. We as parents refocused our attention toward our children
and started to think, they're much smaller than I am, I wonder if something could seriously be happening to them.
We started looking into water, air quality and the products are kids were playing with. The stuff goes right into
their mouths. If there's an acceptable level of risk with one particular chemical, what happens when you put 232
into your body everyday? I do think it's strikingly odd that with chemicals, especially since we don't really know
anything about some of these, how can you say something has an acceptable level of risk when you don't know what the risk level is?
How many different regions do you explore in the film and what commonalities do you see across the board?
We have six different areas that we talk about: vaccines, water, food, cleaning products, children toys, cosmetics. What
brings them all together? We all have inputs and those inputs come into contact with our bodies everyday. The term is
ubiquitous. So if we are coming into contact with them everyday, how much are we coming into contact with? Maybe it's
a small amount, maybe a high amount. It depends. A gardener by trade may come into contact with pesticides a lot more
than most people and his exposure level is going to be much higher.
What ties all this together is that we are all in this realm. Everyone might think they're separate from it, but we have 270 million people living in this country that come into contact with this stuff everyday because we bring it into our homes, we drink it and we breath it. It's not like we can avoid all of it, but we can limit what we're exposed to inside of our homes. Air quality is six times worse in your home than outside, but the EPA can't come into your house and say let's regulate this. The inputs. I'm breathing air, I'm alive and that means I'm being affected by this stuff one way or another.
What adverse health risks and diseases do you see in conjunction with this barrage of chemicals?
Let's take cancer for instance. Childhood cancer has increased over the course of the past 10 years. Where it was 1 in
every 550 kids that have been affected by childhood cancer, and I'm talking about kids three years old and below, now 1
in every 300 kids are being affected by this. Now why would that just happen?
I hear the argument all the time: If we're living so much longer then we used to, how do you say that all this stuff is bad for you? That's why I go back and use children as my fulcrum, my pivot point. When that many kids are affected by something like this, something has to be happening genetically and also environmentally.
Autism is another big one where it depends on what state you live in. If you live in Minnesota, 1 in every 67 kids has autism. In Pennsylvania, 1 in every 110 kids has autism. Nobody's pointing the finger at vaccines and saying this is the culprit. My point is that we have a genetic ability to be affected very adversely by environmental chemicals we're coming into contact with, and most of those are industrial waste byproducts.
This is a great example, in Johnson & Johnson shampoo, when it comes to No More Tears, it's not No More Tears because it's so pure. It has a chemical agent in it that inhibits the pain receptors and nerves inside of your eyes. That's why kids don't feel that pain. During the processing of that shampoo, formaldehyde is a byproduct. So if formaldehyde is a part of that product and that's how our son got eczema all over his skin, once we stopped using that product, his eczema cleared up.
What specifically can we learn here in Hawai'i about the chemicals that we come into contact with on a daily basis?
The one thing that stands out to me are sunscreens because the UV rays are much different here than other parts of the
world. There are four major chemicals that are known to affect the body adversely: oxybenzone, parabens, phthalates, stuff
like that, endocrine disrupting chemicals that are in a lot of commercial sunscreens.
The point is, when you come to a place like Hawai'i, where it's 85 degrees and sunny almost every single day, you're going to have to use something and many people don't know what to do other than use sunscreen, so they buy whatever's on the shelf. If I have to use sunscreen everyday and apply it two or three times, what am I applying to my skin? You absorb 60 to 70 percent of it. Skin is not a barrier, it's just like a sponge. It will soak up whatever you put on to it. A great example of that are transdermal patches, like a nicotine patch. So when it comes to Hawai'i and sunscreen, what you're putting on your body, especially when you have to put a lot of it, year round, you might want to find a more naturally derived sunscreen that doesn't contain a lot of the chemicals that many of the commercial brands have.
During your research, did you find any concrete, scientific links between industrial chemicals and disease or health risks?
The most difficult part of having 232 different, uniqueãand unique is the key wordãchemicals inside of your body at any
point in time is sitting back and saying, which one is going to do the damage, because we all do things differently on a
different scale. And your genetic makeup might be different than someone else. The point of making this film is quite simply to say,
if you don't know what all these chemicals are going to do to you, and absolutely no one on this planet working in health care today,
despite their elite status, they won't be able to tell you either, then taking the precautionary principle is really the best way
to handle things. We have an example in the film: we have two tomatoes, one is sprayed heavily with pesticides, one isn't. Which
one do you want to eat? Pretty easy.
What scares you the most about what you've learned while conducting research for this film? I went from a degree of high skepticism to a degree of sitting back and being comfortable with the fact that it is very easy to change what we've been doing. It sounds pretty simple. As consumers, we should be able to tell them what we want and what we don't want. But fundamentally, it comes back to the American Chemistry Council, the biggest trade association on the planet, and they're not going to go down without swinging.
Here's my thing, I'm not afraid with what's going to be put out there, but as an environmentalist, if we make the changes in the chemicals first, where else does it start and end, with all of us and all of our lives? And where most of this stuff is coming from is oil. Most of our products are derived from oil, even if it's the plastics they're being transported with. Only 19 gallons of a 42-gallon barrel of light sweet crude is being turned into gasoline. About nine percent of every single barrel of oil that we're pulling out of the ground is going into creating the products that we use every single day. And that makes me feel empowered, and that's what I want to show other people. I don't want to eat oil and I don't think it's a great idea to put it on my skin. And that to me doesn't sound crazy.
What gives you hope? Hope isn't going to cut it. You have to actually do something about it.
These industrial chemicals are already out there in staggering numbers. What can we do to protect ourselves? This is a small step process, so don't expect to do everything overnight. We've gotten ourselves into this situation very slowly, and that's what we're going to have to do to get out of it. Focus your attention on one thing first. If you're living in Hawai'i, sunscreen might be first. If you're living in Pennsylvania, dairy products might be first. Ask yourself some simple questions. Do I want chemicals in what I'm eating? Do I want chemicals in the stuff my kids are eating? And you have to make budget minded decisions.
A lot of people might think this is an unsexy subject, but it does make me feel better knowing I'm making better choices. As a consumer in a consumer-based economy, that's what I want to do, make better choices. If we can all do that, or a large percentage of us do that, maybe our dependence on foreign oil will change, maybe our dependence on the health care system would change.