When I arrive at Raffensperger’s home near Windsor, North Dakota, at the end of February, we go to the front porch, her favorite room in this rambling and comfortable house filled with more than 15,000 books. A bank of windows overlooks softly undulating hills and the cattails of a 12-acre slough. Within minutes Raffensperger is talking urgently about her love of this land, her admiration for pioneers like Love Canal community activist Lois Gibbs and Rachel’s Environment & Health News editor Peter Montague, her husband’s cancer, and the parts that make up the whole of ecological medicine. "We have a lot of ground to cover," she tells me.

Using her hands when she talks, drawing pictures in the air, Raffensperger is someone who sees the interconnectedness of things. Part archaeologist, part attorney,

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part North Dakota farmwife, she is the kind of pragmatic, interdisciplinary thinker we need if we really want to reimagine a culture as highly specialized and short-thinking as modern science is.

The tragic flaw in most science these days, she believes, is its refusal to ponder the impact of its creations before they’re turned loose in the world. Instead, she says, scientists should have to prove that their work will do no harm either now or in the future. That’s the heart of the precautionary principle, which she and others have been advocating for several years. When I ask how all this relates to medicine, she puts it plainly.

"Prevention is ecological medicine," she says. "Do you want to cure your daughter’s breast cancer, or do you want to prevent it?"

If you’re looking for tomorrow’s medical paradigm simply stated, there it is.

Raffensperger’s home office is set in the hillside beneath the guest cottage, but it gets plenty of light through the glass ceiling of an interior patio. For the past six years this has been mission control for SEHN, a scientific think tank and information clearinghouse. Founded in 1993 by several environmental groups, including the National Resources Defense Council, the National Audubon Society, and the Environmental Law Institute, SEHN promotes the wise use of science, especially as it affects the environment and public health. Along with helping community groups find progressive scientists, it acts as a scientific translator for the public and the press.

As SEHN’s executive director, Raffensperger runs the organization virtually. Her four colleagues—physician and science director Ted Schettler, biologist Mary O’Brien, botanist Katherine Barrett, and communications director Nancy Myers—also work out of homes scatterered around the country. They meet by conference call every few weeks. Their electronic newsletter, The Networker, appears several times a year (www.sehn.org/thenet.html). As advocates of a new ethically grounded science, they’re in demand, writing and speaking about issues like biotechnology, grizzly bear recovery, ethnobotany, and dioxin’s effects on children’s health.

Raffensperger insists that she’s only one voice in a wider campaign, which is true. But she does have a uniquely panoramic view of this new terrain, including the rise of ecological medicine. She’s been thinking about these things all her life.

Raffensperger, 47, was raised in Chicago, where her father is a prominent surgeon. He himself became an ardent environmentalist after noticing patterns that linked cancers and birth defects in children to certain environmental factors, though no one could prove the connection. As a child, Raffensperger wanted to be a doctor, too. But while working as a potter in college, she discovered archaeology. After finishing a bachelor’s degree at Wheaton College and a master’s degree at Northwestern University, she did fieldwork near Durango, Colorado, studying the artifacts of the Anasazi people. It was her job to determine how those artifacts were used, whether for cultural rituals or food processing.

"It was the perfect training for what I do now," she says. The only question in archaeology—How do you know?—should be central to all science, she explains, but even that basic rigor is often lacking in the commodified re-search that passes for science today.

Raffensperger’s turn toward activism began at that time. It was the early 1980s and President Reagan’s controversial secretary of the interior, James Watt, had proposed dumping radioactive waste near a national monument in Utah. She wanted to protest, but as a young pacifist Mennonite, she didn’t know how. So she re-turned to Chicago and took a job at the Sierra Club "to help me figure out how to say no to bad ideas," she says. She became an outspoken opponent of radioactive waste. She also became an attorney, attending Chicago-Kent College of Law’s environmental law program.
At the Sierra Club, Raffensperger coordinated the lawyers doing volunteer work for the organization. Pro bono work is an important tradition among attorneys, but not among scientists, as she discovered after taking the job at SEHN and moving to Washington, D.C. One of her new goals was to convince more scientists to put their expertise to work in the public interest.

Raffensperger met her husband eight years ago when both were speaking at a symposium in Arkansas. Kirsch-enmann, who has a Ph.D. in historical theology, spoke about the spiritual bonds between people and domesticated animals. She was impressed, she says, "So I married him." Six years ago she left Washington for the prairie.

Raffensperger does her share of barnstorming these days. She’s spoken at Harvard, the White House (in 1999), and a host of other places, hoping to spread the precautionary principle and its values. The idea is catching on across the country, but not as fast as in Europe. Precaution isn’t part of our public culture, Raffensperger notes. Many see it as antithetical to competitive enterprise and as a threat to the deeply held belief that technology can solve all our problems.

But Raffensperger doesn’t take this criticism very seriously, as she noted last year in a speech in California: "It seems unassailable if you’ve got a heart and mind," she said. "Who can oppose taking action to prevent harm when the science is uncertain?"