NEW YORK - Theo Colborn is renowned for her research on endocrine disrupters - tiny, mostly manufactured chemicals found in pesticides like DDT as well as everyday objects like plastic water bottles. She believes they are behind the rise in autism, ADHD, and some birth defects.
"This is a pandemic," she says. "Something is happening, and these systems aren't functioning properly."
Concerns generated by her own research led Colborn, 80, to make lifestyle changes. The environmental health analyst and co-author of the 1996 book Our Stolen Future avoids Tupperware and Saran Wrap; leftovers go in mason jars and empty peanut butter containers. In 1987, fearing a coming energy crisis, she bought a 900-square-foot cottage, no air-conditioning, within walking distance of the small town of Paonia, Colo.
While scientists like Colborn are making environmentally sound lifestyle choices based on their own study,
a growing number of people have literally worried themselves sick over a range of doomsday scenarios.
Their worry has a name: eco-anxiety.
And the latest report on climate change - a United Nations panel warned Friday of increased hunger, water shortages, massive floods, avalanches, and species extinctions in various parts of the world unless nations take major action - is not likely to help.
Melissa Pickett, an eco-therapist with a practice in Santa Fe, says she sees between 40 to 80 eco-anxious patients a month.
They complain of
panic attacks, loss of appetite, irritability and unexplained bouts of weakness, sleeplessness and "buzzing," described as an eerie feeling that their cells are twitching. Pickett's remedies include telling patients to carry natural objects, like certain minerals, for a period of weeks. Making environmentally friendly lifestyle changes can also prove therapeutic, she says.
