As a little girl growing up in Toronto, Liz Armstrong kept goldfish in her backyard.

They were low maintenance pets – mostly feasting on bugs and organic debris from surrounding rocks, lichens and shrubs – but they were pets none the less.

One was affectionately named Mrs. Big after giving birth one summer, nearly filling the outdoor pond with her offspring.

But Mrs. Big, and all of her little fingerlings, mysteriously went belly up one day.

The whole situation seemed more than a little fishy, said Armstrong: the day before, planes had flown over the city spraying DDT, a synthetic pesticide, to help control mosquitoes.

Like canaries in a coalmine, Armstrong believes her beloved goldfish were a sign that something terrible had been unleashed on the world.

“It doesn’t take a genius to figure out something was wrong,” said Armstrong, co-author of Cancer: 101 Solutions to a Preventable Epidemic, during a presentation at Kanata Baptist Church on Nov. 24.

DDT is now known as a persistent organic pollutant that takes decades to break down. It has also been linked to cancer.

Just like those goldfish, Armstrong – co-founder of both the Women’s Environmental Health Network and the Breast Cancer Prevention Coalition – said people are getting sick and dying as they contract the deadly disease from their everyday environments loaded with chemicals and pesticides.

“If there’s a war on cancer, we’re not winning it,” she said. “It’s a preventable epidemic.”

Based on statistics by the Canadian Cancer Society, an estimated 166,400 new cases of cancer will have occurred in Canada this year.

About 74,000 people are also expected to die of the disease.

Cancer rates could further increase by 50 per cent to 15 million new cases worldwide in the year 2020, according to the World Cancer Report.

“People say cancer is a result of your lifestyle? Yes,” said Armstrong, adding that lifestyle isn’t the only cause.

“Animals don’t drink, smoke or have stressful jobs yet their cancer rates mirror our own.”

Armstrong said cancer has many environmental causes but some serious ones include gender bending and hormone disrupting drugs in our water, radiation and X-rays and pesticides in our food.

“It’s known that more than half of cancers are preventable,” she said. “Why didn’t we know all about this?”

The voice of environmentalists have been historically “overshadowed and drowned out by industry,” she said.

Richard Doll, a cancer researcher who died in 2005 at the age of 92, famously found a connection between smoking and health problems in the 1950s. Doll, awarded the United Nations prize for outstanding research, helped undermine other findings that linked chemicals in the environment to incidence of cancer, said Armstrong.

It was recently discovered that Doll had received payments by major chemical companies in the mid-1980s, including $1,500 per day from agricultural company Monsanto along with other payments from the Chemical Manufacturers Association, Dow Chemicals and Imperial Chemical Industries.

CHEMICAL WORLD

More than 100,000 synthetic chemicals were created in labs in the 1960s and “unleashed on the world,” said Armstrong.

The message at the time was “better living through chemicals,” she said, but many like DDT were improperly tested and have had long-term, adverse effects.

The Environmental Defence group released results of laboratory testing on four Canadian politicians in 2007.

Sixty one combined pollutants were detected in NDP leader Jack Layton, Conservative Minister of Labour Rona Ambrose, Conservative Minister of Industry Tony Clement and former Liberal environment critic John Godfrey including 54 carcinogens, 54 reproductive or developmental toxins, 37 hormone disruptors, 33 neurotoxins and 16 respiratory toxins.

Many of these chemicals could be causing cancer, said Armstrong.

“We’re spending a lot of money on cures. Why not prevent it in the first place?”

Despite fears of an economic recession, Armstrong said people still have the power to make changes in the world and urge our leaders to clean up the environment.

But we’re running out of time, she said.

“What’s going to be the epitaph for our generation?” asked Armstrong of her fellow Baby Boomers. “They can’t build cancer hospitals fast enough.”

Armstrong offers a list of ways to avoid the deadly disease, in the meantime:

• Don’t smoke.

• Eat healthy food: preferably local and organic. Take vitamins and supplements.

• Get regular exercise.

• Use natural cleaning products like vinegar and baking soda in your home.

• Avoid plastics: use glass and stainless steel.

• Give up the car. Walk, cycle or take the bus.

• Avoid unnecessary radiation from cell phones and X-rays.

• Speak up and demand a clean, green Earth.

For more on the book, visit www.earthfuture.com/cancer.