As a child of parents who eked out a living in part by peeling potatoes and boiling borscht at resorts in New York State’s Catskill Mountains, Phil Brown grew up with a natural empathy for people who didn’t have much. He spent his childhood summers busing tables in the vacation area’s lesser hotels. In winter his family would relocate to Florida, where his parents rented furnished apartments and worked in restaurants while Brown attended school.
Today Brown is a leading sociologist in the field of environmental health. After earning a doctorate in sociology at Brandeis University in 1979, he embarked on a career as an academic, soon joining the sociology department at Brown University. Although his focus was originally on mental health, environmental disasters impacting low-income communities, which often experienced far-reaching medical problems from exposure to toxins, would become his calling. In 1984 Brown’s affinity for the working class took hold again when he arrived in the town of Woburn, Massachusetts, 12 miles north of Boston, along with a scientific team looking into an alarmingly high rate of leukemia in both children and adults: 19 cases in one decade, with only two survivors. The community’s efforts to find the cause and its lawsuit against corporate giants W. R. Grace and Beatrice Foods were later detailed in Jonathan Harr’s book A Civil Action and a movie of the same name.
The Woburn residents contended that chemicals from the factories had contaminated their water supply and caused the leukemia. Their grassroots efforts, led initially by a local mother whose son was diagnosed with acute lymphocytic leukemia, reminded Brown of the community effort at New York’s Love Canal, whose residents, having assessed their own chemical contamination, challenged the government and the corporations they held responsible. It was an effort for which Brown coined the phrase “popular epidemiology.”
A longtime professor of medical and environmental sociology at Brown University, Brown has championed the collaboration between impacted citizens and the scientific community. The effort made by the community of Woburn was chronicled in No Safe Place, the critically acclaimed book he coauthored with Edwin Mikkelsen.
We spoke with Phil Brown recently at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
