testable. Science is a very narrow and careful way of doing business.

Science is also expensive. For lack of funding, many products never undergo proper scrutiny. Government support for such work is pathetically inadequate, which is not surprising considering how much industry pours into political campaign coffers. University research is no better off; again, much of the cash comes from private sources -industrial sources.

Steingraber reports the results of two major studies positively linking high cancer rates to chemical pollution problems, one on Long Island, the other on Cape Cod. What is important was that these studies got done only because the residents were rich, highly influential and suspicious. They forced private and public researchers to undertake honest and expensive analyses, which bore out the residents' suspicions. Their environment was in some demonstrable way poisoning them. Apparently you have to be wealthy to prove cancer agents are in your backyard.

Steingraber discusses an additional study, performed (sort of) by the Tazewell County Health Department at the Normandale subdivision near Pekin. An awful lot of people in Normandale had contracted cancer, enough to make residents there suspicious of Dead Lake, a long-used industrial dump site. The health people did a demographic analysis of the population in the context of the county as a whole, and concluded that cancer incidence was not unusually high. They never went to Normandale, never tested the lake, never examined any of the cancer patients, never looked at any potential cause and effect relationship. Normandale was normal, scientifically speaking. Unfortunately, the good people there had neither power nor influence equal to that of Cape Cod folks. Their study went no further.

We uphold science as our savior and our protector, little understanding that science is only as effective as we determine it to be. No money equals no studies equals no determinations of danger. Therefore, in the folklore of our times, we must be safe. We drink atrazine, rub benzene on our skin, eat arsenic laid down in 1939. We are safe, though. Science has not proved we are not.

I live on the environs of agricultural country Each year at plowing and planting, when rumors of wholesale spraying drift across the landscape, my neighbors exchange uneasy jokes about gas masks, holding our breaths, glowing in the dark. These same neighbors employ companies to spray much the same chemicals on their own lawns, envisioning a utopia of monocultural greenery. They are a little nervous, some of them. They warn their neighbors with little white and yellow flags, they keep their dogs away for a day or two. Intuitively, they realize that this spraying is not an unmitigated blessing. Danger lurks. People die. Cancer is a nasty death.

Last year, despite the lack of unimpeachable scientific evidence, a jury in Taylorville awarded millions of dollars to families who had lost young children to neuroblastoma. The odds against so many deaths from so rare a disease in a single place were extraordinarily high. Surely the culprit was the abandoned coal gasification plant in the neighborhood - residues of coal tar are known carcinogens. Not proven scientifically, said city and state officials. Science did not matter to the jury. They decided for the families. The 12 jurors knew, knew intuitively, what science could not tell them: The environment had killed these children.

We live in a world of paradox. In one very large sense, we are fabulously successful, the recipients of an incredible bounty derived from the land and from our industry. We are also victims, prisoners of a cavalier attitude toward our own house -our physical environment. In little more than a century, we have dumped, slopped, sprayed, buried, expelled an unconscionable array of manufactured substances on our own nest. We eat, drink and breathe these poisons every day. The success and the victimization go hand in hand; we believe, true or not, we could not have accomplished one without the other. Certainly they are inextricable now. Enjoy the plenty, accept the ever-growing cancer rates as the price we pay.

Can we do better than this? At times, Sandra Steingraber seems to believe we can. Public health efforts can be strengthened, pesticides better investigated and regulated, newer, more environmentally healthful methodologies employed to grow and protect better corn and soybeans. "From the right to know and the duty to inquire flow the obligation to act," she argues. An epilogue provides specific instructions for exercising the right to know. Mostly, though, she is disquietingly pessimistic. Our capacity to accept, however grudgingly, a dangerous environment seems to outweigh our determination to make it better.

Very soon, spring will blossom in central Illinois. Surviving songbirds will sing a cheery counterpoise to the din of progress; permitted flowers will bravely cling to roadside ditches. Farmers will renew their yearly ritual of planting the region's bounty: corn and soybeans. Chemicals, of course, are now an ingrained and inevitable part of the ritual. My government -state and federal - tells me I am perfectly safe. My intuition urges me to keep the windows closed.

Robert Kuhn McGregor is an environmental historian at the University of Illinois at Springfield. He is the author of A Wider View of the Universe: Henry Thoreau's Study of Nature.