I never met Daniel Ellsberg. I vaguely remember him from the 1970s when he leaked confidential military documents about the Vietnam War. Those documents chronicled how America planned and fought an entirely useless but deadly war in the forests, rice fields, and cities of Vietnam and other countries of Southeast Asia. In time, some of those secret documents appeared in a book,  The Pentagon Papers .  I read that book during my service at the US Environmental Protection Agency. I learned something about the Pentagon, the industrial-military complex, and that bitter conflict.  But I also learned something about Ellsberg. I admired his decision to risk everything for a higher purpose: telling Americans the war in Vietnam was immoral and unwinnable. His courage was contagious. I could see his life was blowing the whistle on Pentagon corruption and, especially, Pentagon’s planning for “fighting” nuclear wars. This touched me profoundly. I, too, was a whistleblowe...

A friend recently put me in touch with Janet Brown (not her real name). This is a woman from Chicago who had the misfortune of renting an apartment that had been sprayed with the neurotoxic pesticide chlorpyrifos. DowDuPont produces this deleterious substance.   In late August 2018, Janet Brown visited me and we spent several hours talking. Her real education started in the poisoned apartment in Chicago. She had read my book,  Poison Spring . She wanted to talk.  A poisoned apartment Our discussion was mostly about pesticides and the Environmental Protection Agency, which “regulates” toxic pesticides like chlorpyrifos. I told Janet Brown a few of my EPA stories. And she told me her astonishing story.  Janet Brown grew up in Illinois. She got married to a doctor. She had hopes of becoming a doctor herself. However, the poisoned apartment blew up in her face, causing a tsunami of psychological and health adversities and pain. House fumig...