I just finished reading the book Slow Death By Rubber Duck. It's 4:30 am. I can't sleep.

My mind is full of questions that I can't answer. I can't even fathom why anyone should ever have to ask these questions. They make no sense.

Questions like: when did "acceptable risk" replace the "precautionary" approach? As in, why would we release a product onto the market without fully testing it for all sorts of toxicity? Apparently, even food companies don't always do this because they have been blithely lining their canned products with BPA ridden plastic that has no known "safe" level of exposure.

Our kids have been eating it with every spoonful of their canned spaghetti and with every slurp from a polycarbonate baby bottle.

The good news is that we seem to have woken up from the market-driven stupor that we lived in and are removing this substance from our lives. The bad news is that scientists knew that BPA disrupted hormones 70 years ago. So how was it that this plastic became part of everything, from the windshield on your child's toy truck to the trendy french press coffee maker in your cupboard to the reusable water bottle you have toted around with you? Thank heavens people have taken action and BPA is starting to disappear from our shelves. (You'll still get a dose of it from your cash register receipt at many big grocers: one hopes this is also a doomed usage.)

Why did it take so long to take action? Why did regular people have to become part-time chemists to get BPA removed from common consumer products? How could we be so stupid? Why are we still using it in anything?

And that's just my first round of questions.

When did the interests of big business and corporations become more important than the interests of the people who buy their products? Why the heck would any company want to keep selling products that hurt the people who buy them?

Why does it take an Erin Brockovich to make a company do the right thing?

And how was the unregulated "free" market supposed to fix this? Apparently, if we are depending on the good conscience of companies, we are barking up the wrong tree. While this doesn't make any sense - after all, any company is composed of people and and they have children too - somehow, when it's a profit at stake, humans will ignore tons of common sense and create a story that protects a toxic product.

There's lots of evidence of this. In fact, Big Plastic (a kissing cousin of Big Oil) is busy modeling itself after Big Tobacco. We all remember Big Tobacco, don't we? Big Tobacco is notoriously quiet these days, but there was a point when it was everyone's best friend. Big Tobacco sponsored all kinds of sporting events - even art events. The ads extolling the virtues of the product were everywhere. Didn't we come a long way, baby? In fact, at one point in its illustrious career, Big Tobacco touted itself as a health product.

Well, enter Big Plastic. It's a health product too: just consider the recent actions to try to prove that reusable bags are dangerously contaminated with all kinds of nasty things - despite not a single case that we know of regarding bag-borne disease in the real world. The whole idea is to play on our cultural case of "germaphobia". Of course, single-use plastic bags are paragons of virtue: not a bug to be found.

I'm waiting for phase 2 of that campaign, where they try to come up with a "safer" version of this already spectacular product. I do believe that was step 2 in Big Tobacco's game plan - introduced as the "light" cigarette.

Big Tobacco has only retreated because we continue to prove that it's a dangerous product. But it still hasn't gone away - stores still sell it and people still die.

How long does it take to learn a lesson? When do we say "enough"? How much evidence do we need of harm before we are willing to ban something? Why are the products I can buy openly on the shelf not safe?

It's 4:54 am and I have still more questions.

How can any consumer know enough about the production and packaging and pollution in that lovely item on display at a local store? Who's guarding the hen house? It can't be the government or wouldn't dangerous chemicals be banned?

There are dangerous chemicals in the couch that my children play on every day. Fire retardants have become part of almost every consumer item you can buy for your home. My kids are soaking in it. Did you know that fire retardants resemble PCB's in chemical composition? Do you remember how we actually banned PCB's because of the danger?

Who the heck decided fire retardants on everything from kid's pyjamas to consumer electronics was a good idea?

Of course, that's not the only crazy thing we humans are doing. Mercury is a long-known poison with documented dangers. We know it's a neurotoxin. We know that the only safe level of mercury is zero. Yet, those coal-burning electrical plants that don't want to install "scrubbers" on their exhaust stacks are spewing mercury into the air. Right up, into the atmosphere.

Mercury later falls to earth and turns up in the flesh of polar bears and native people in the Arctic. They don't use coal-burning electrical plants. But their babies are eating mercury with every drop of breast milk.

It's not just old, well-known pollutants that confuse me. There's that new, whiz-bang stuff. For instance, your non-stick pan, coated in Teflon, could be poisoning you. Certainly there is lots of evidence to indicate that the Teflon in the water of Parkersburg, West Virginia is doing nasty things. It's also in the blood stream of 98 per cent of Americans, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. If Teflon is "safe", why is it leaching from our cookware into our bodies? Isn't it supposed to be stable at high temperatures? That was the whole idea behind cooking on it.

It's 5:06 am.

Is anyone paying attention? How can we let companies get away with such behavior? When did I need an advanced degree in biochemistry, including knowledge of hormones and organs and tissues, just to buy milk? When did the words "endocrine disruptor" slip into my vocabulary?

How did it get so bad? What the heck can I do about it?

The first step, as painful as it is, means getting informed on the scope and breadth of the problem. Read the book Slow Death By Rubber Duck. Take action on your own behalf to reduce the exposures that you have in your own home, as much as possible. But also recognize the need for action on a much larger scale.

We are not islands. Our skin is not impermeable. When the milk from a cow passes through flexible plastic tubing on the way to the farmer's holding tank, we are exposed to plasticizers that make their way in minute amounts into the resulting milk. Studies show that even very tiny exposures of some chemicals are problematic. In many cases, these tiny exposures are deemed "safe". So, be prepared for the fact that pollutants are in the apparently harmless things we do, eat and live with every day in ways that you might never imagine.

It has never been more true that "we have seen the enemy and the enemy is us". We are not separate from what we put "out there". What is out there is inside you.

The good news is that the government does listen if enough of us rise up in arms. Look at the BPA example. This dangerous plastic is now being banned from many usages in many areas - and the momentum to remove it from new products is gaining steam rapidly. Corporations are quickly taking up the challenge too - and in many cases, voluntarily getting this stuff out of what they produce.

This is where you come in. You make a difference every time you decide to buy - or not buy.

Don't buy what hurts you or your family. Write letters to the government. Write letters to companies. Don't ever become complacent.

Believe what your guts tell you, even when a friendly company representative says, "Our products are completely safe." Be willing to shame a company into doing the right thing because the only shame for any parent is to know that there is a problem and not do something about it.

Don't let anyone off the hook for their part in this crazy story where the modern parent has to be a chemist and environmentalist and medical researcher to protect their children from the actions of companies who are more interested in profits or the inaction of governments who are more interested in getting re-elected.

These things might be some of the most important things you do for your children - and yourself.