About Varda Burstyn

Varda Burstyn was born in Israel, and raised in Israel and Canada. Her early  forays  into politics and social activism took place in  Chicago in 1967 and 1968 where she joined that city’s first feminist group, became an active participant in Rev. Jesse Jackson’s economic justice campaign Operation Breadbasket, and in the campaign to stop the war in Vietnam. She was also learning more about pollution and ecology and in 1969, back in Toronto, joined the founding staff of the newly established Pollution Probe at the University of Toronto. As well as loving, and eventually writing about, literature, fine art and popular culture and becoming active in Canadian politics, in the NDP and the independent left, she has remained an environmentalist activist and writer ever since, publishing and producing work on environment and health since 1984. 

In 1987, Varda, who had always remained engaged in peace and two-state solution efforts related to Israel-Palestine,  traveled for an extended stay in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank . She interviewed key players in all those sites in order to move beyond the often superficial reportage of the day and present an in-depth look at the politics of this region. What she found was presented in a 3-hour CBC Radio Ideas series - Israel at the Crossroads. More recently, in the wake of October 7 and the Israel-Hamas war she has once again become involved and written two articles (2024) for Canadian Friends of Peace Now on the re-emergence of the two-state solution and on perspectives on the West Bank settlements.

From 1987 to 1998 Varda’s work passionately engaged the debates and dangers of the then  “new” reproductive and genetic technologies. She worked in multiple media, in both scholarly and popular arenas, producing multiple works across different platforms. In 1988, she was the series consultant for the multiple-award winning National Film Board two-part documentary series directed by Gwynne Basen, On the Eighth Day: Perfecting Mother Nature, a series that raised prescient concerns about human infertility and disability and the problems likely to arise from the unregulated proliferation of new reproductive and genetic technologies. She wrote a number of magazine articles, including the 1992 Breeding Discontent (Saturday night), which was nominated for a National Magazine Award and was widely anthologized. She wrote and presented a two-part documentary radio series, Technologizing Procreation (1991) for CBC’s Ideas. As co-chair of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women’s reproductive rights committee, in 1991 she was the lead author of its brief - A Technological Handmaid’s Tale - from that organization to the Royal Commission on New Reproductive Technologies. 

Also in the mid- 1980s Varda began her work on the politics of sport culture - which she continued to write about until 2000. Her body of work over those years comprised many magazine and scholarly articles, scholarly conference papers and a 3-hour radio documentary series, again for CBC’s Ideas, called  Play, Performance and Power (1986). Eventually she wrote a major work, The Rites of Men: Manhood Politics and the Culture of Sport (University of Toronto Press, 1999), which won the 2000 Book of the Year Award from the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport.

In 2005 and 2006, Varda took on issues being identified in emerging knowledge about the types and the far-reaching extent of adverse health impacts of chemicals in widespread, everyday use. She  wrote a loose series of three articles on several aspects of these subjects as they related to children, two anthologized in Praeger Press’s cross-over series, Childhood in America (Techno-Environmental Assaults on Childhood in America,Toxic World, Troubled Minds), the third in the acclaimed anthology, Child Honouring: A World Fit for Children.

Since the mid 2000s, Varda has worked with a variety of allies and clients – patients’ organizations, health care providers, government health officials, physicians and others, in voluntary and consultative capacities – on an extended multi-stage, multi-component effort to bring about health care services for people who suffer from a number of chronic, environmentally- linked illnesses that have become epidemic, but for which Canada’s health care systems provide no care.

Misdiagnosed for decades, she had lived with one such disease process, known variously as Multiple chemical sensitivity (MCS, the most common name), Environmental Sensitivities (ES) or perhaps the most accurate name, toxicant induced loss of tolerance (TILT) - at mild levels most of her life. But in 2000, thanks to an intense, prolonged chemical exposure, she radically deteriorated only to discover anew there was no recognition of this condition in Canada’s famously “universal” health care system, nor capacity to treat it.

As a result, from 2008 to 2022, with a number of other senior colleagues in and around Ontario’s health care system and in advocacy organizations, she was the initiator, then eventually the lead overall project consultant of what turned into a multi-year, multi-stakeholder study process to establish a network of environmental health clinics and centre of excellence, called the Ontario Centre of Excellence in Environmental Health (OCEEH) – learn more about this project and the reports it produced.

This process eventually resulted in the establishment of an Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care’s Task Force on Environmental Health 2016 to December 2018, which produced two reports, in 2017 and 2018. Varda was instrumental in writing the first in 2017, but resigned after this because of major differences she had regarding the government’s limits and distortions of the mandate of the task force. Her history and evaluation of the task force’s Phase 1 report (2017) are available on her informational website, Dispatches from the Chemical Edge. Click here for her 2019 in-depth critique, with extensive research support, of the invalid definition of MCS appended by health ministry officials without task force approval, to the final report (2018), along with an constructive discussion about the lack of awareness of MCS in the medical profession in Canada, and what is needed to repair this. 

For many years, Varda spoke widely about her areas of interest as a featured speaker at universities, conferences and colloquia and social/political events including, multiple times, in Halifax, Montreal, Toronto, London (ON), Ottawa, Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver in Canada; in London and Manchester in the UK; and in Madison, Detroit, New York City, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Boston and Pittsburgh in the United States. She has also been called on for commentary by CBC and CTV national public affairs programs (as well as consulting to some of these on occasion); and has been featured on many other regional and local television and radio broadcasts over the years, including Democracy Now and other U.S. radio outlets. In addition to serving on the board of Greenpeace, she has also served on a number of other boards, including film festivals, national women’s organizations and environmental health organizations. From 2016 to 2023, Varda served as a member of the board of the Chemical Sensitivity Foundation (USA).

Varda Burstyn has lived and worked for extended periods in Toronto, Tel Aviv, Chicago, Vancouver, Montreal and Cincinnati. She now lives northeast of Toronto with her husband and frequent collaborator, David S. Fenton.