If you are alive in 2011, no matter what your age, you have been part of one of the largest and worst experiments in history. No matter how carefully you eat or drink or watch your exposure to toxins, your body has chemicals in it that do not belong there and have the potential to make you ill, even fatally ill.
You didn't give anyone permission to experiment on you, it just happened to you. Chemicals have been spewing from smokestacks, sprayed on crops, dumped in your water, incorporated into your food, clothing and shelter. You've been exposed to large amounts mercury if you eat fish, you've breathed in asbestos from fabrics and building materials. You've ingested lead from paint. You have consumed Bisphenol-a since the 1950's or since you were a baby if you were born later. You probably have PCB's in the tissues of your body. If you eat meat, you are eating antibiotics meant for livestock. This is a particularly shoddy experiment since there is no control group, no hypothesis and the experimenters ignore the outcomes.
In spite of the fact that we have many laws on the books to protect us and federal and state regulators to enforce the laws, the sheer scale of pollution has overwhelmed us. We all pay the price for this with our health and our very lives.
For generations, environmentalists, health advocates and people with common sense have been fighting corporate interests to keep toxins out of our environment. Have we been successful? Well, we have managed to ban and regulate some of the worst poisons. In some cases we have only shifted the manufacturing and distribution channels off shore so that we primarily poison other people with those particular toxins. However, it's difficult to demonstrate any real big picture success against the tsunami of chemicals that we swim in every day.
Toxic pollution has no international boundaries. In China, a group of students shocked by the headlines about " toxic milk, tainted pork and beef and reused gutter oil" undertook a project to map toxic hot spots for food production. In Canada, environmentalists fight pollution in Lake Ontario and the massive threat of tar sands extraction fouling ecosystems. In Japan, radioactive particles from the massive failure of the Fukushima nuclear plants are being found in food and water. All over the United States, we transport out kids to school in diesel buses that spew carcinogens out of their tailpipes.
While we have seen this rapid acceleration of ever more toxic substances into our environment, we have experienced a corresponding increase in disease. Cancer rates continue to increase, although treatments have reduced the number of deaths. According to the World Health Organization's 2008 Cancer Report:
The rapid increase in the cancer burden represents a real crisis for public health and health systems worldwide. A major issue for many countries, even among high-resource countries, will be how to find sufficient funds to treat all cancer patients effectively and provide palliative, supportive and terminal care for the large numbers of patients, and their relatives, who will be diagnosed in the coming years.
The WHO warns of a possible 50% increase in cases of Cancer by 2020.
The Scientific American suggests that soaring rates of autism are linked to our constant exposure to toxics. Again, we pay an enormous emotional, practical and financial price to deal with the increase in this disease.
Links correlating many other illnesses with toxic and radioactive exposure are many and powerful. Yet we continue to operate in a manner that all but ignores this fact. It is not from stupidity. We are smart enough as a species to understand the connection. It is more likely from a combination of greed, laziness and apathy that we continue to allow this to happen.
This is not a problem that can be solved in a year. No governmental body can pass a regulation or set of regulations that will fix this quickly. The hard work of reducing exposure to toxins from our environment will occur over decades and centuries. It will take a massive shift in our thinking about the rights and responsibilities of corporations and the role of our governments, local, national and global, in protecting the commons and prioritizing human health over things like the cost of production.
The fact that this problem is so massive is no excuse to give up. It is a reason to get active. Progress in reigning in the power of corporations to poison the entire population of the world will bring with it many collateral benefits. It's an enormous cultural shift and requires dis-empowering the most powerful entities in the world. But if we don't wish our descendants to live in a world riddled by disease, genetic damage and drastically shortened life spans, we need to begin now. As we fight the important battle against climate change, we must not lose sight of the urgent need to support organizations that fight the battles against toxic exposure and unbridled corporate power.
Follow John DeCock on Twitter: www.twitter.com/jdecock
Oh, I forgot, our leaders would have already done that had it not been their desire to sell us out for economic ruin (you know, the bi-partisan plan to spend trillions on bad wars and bad debts).
There should have been an Apollo type effort (without the shredding of plans) to create advanced machine automation that would have made solar energy almost free (and the LiFePO4 batteries needed to store it, too).
MILLIONS of local installation jobs and secondary supporting jobs throughout the world would have been created. That is if robotics were used for the manufacture of clean energy collection devises such as the NASA style 35% panels...
Science created the cart but it also created the brakes needed to create more carts and save more lives from the fall.
And none of those things are prerequisites for what most people consider a modern standard of living. In fact, most people expect a safe workplace, healthy food, nontoxic household products, and factories and power plants that do not emit substances which are harmful to human health and the environment.
What does it truly mean to be "in Christ"? What does it mean to be on his team? If you value profits over people it means your allegiance is to the Emperor. If you value profits over people it means you are supporting the crucifixion of your Lord. If you value profits over people it means you are not really "in Christ". Just some food for thought. Our Christian leaders today very rarely give their followers the vision to see that line. They themselves are usually on the wrong side of the line. The sacrifice that Jesus made drew a line in the sand that can never be erased. A clear and everlasting guide to real peace and prosperity.
A manual laborer had a much, much lower life expectancy than a wealthy individual in the early 1900s due to the fact the wealthy individual had access to healthcare (however ineffective or actually detrimental it was at the times), the relative level of cleanliness the wealthy person would experience vs the exposure to germs a city dweller working at a factory would experience, and dangerous work conditions manual laborers were put in caused physical injury often, leading directly to death or later from a disease contracted due to the injury.
Modern medicine hasn't seen any significant gains in average life expectancy for non-wealthy individuals since the 1960s, and the gains seen from the early 1900s to the 1960s were mostly due to the ubiquity of vaccinations and regulations on workplace safety.
The fact is that the life expectancy for poor people today is similar to what it was when Social Security was first implemented, and the relative gains in average life expectancy have been due to wealthier individuals living longer. Increases in the age of eligibility for recieving SS benefits are based on increases in life expectancy, which increases due to individuals who do not rely on SS living longer.
Living to 80 or 90 is normal if you don't have a
Grow your own organic food and source the rest from local organic farms. Replace your microwave with a solar cooker. Try to eat as raw as possible.
These globalist corporations only weild great power because people utilize their goods and services. The less people who use conventional deodorant with aluminum as the active ingredient, the less $$ Alcoa makes, the less powerful they become. Easy, effective alternatives to the corporate consumerist option will reduce corporate influence.
The most inefficient and ineffective method of change is via federal legislation.
The larger questions are not what toxins are doing to us, but what we are doing to the ecosystem as a whole, and whether that ecosystem can long support human or any other large life form.
We live in a scary time. These leaders don't care about anything but their elections and we are loosing our country because of this greed. And our we are not living longer as before. The numbers have changed. Look at our children some getting strokes at a young age and oh so much Cancer.
What are we supposed to do-- they aren't listening when I write or the people I know all over the world that write to their leaders. I have never felt so afraid.
Say what you want about greedy, uncaring, unfeeling corporate this or that. Modern farming, chemicals & energy feed the world on a scale unimagined a hundred yrs ago. We free up trillions of hrs of brainpower that's not dedicated just to laboriously producing our next meal. We're doing something right. We may not be doing it perfect, but we're on the right track. One of the main reasons cancer rates go up is we're living long enough to get it.
Unfortunately, to many eco-chondriacs do nothing but sit & read this drivel (on a full stomach).
My suggestion would be to eat "third world style", walk behind a stinking water buffalo from sun-up to sun down, not knowing if the next monsoon or drought will ruin 3 months of work. Go live in a place where "everyday is Earth Day"-------& see that living that close to a "Mother Nature lifestyle" may be uncomfortably close to having Casey Anthony for your mother.
Again:
We have this one little Rock, Spinning in the vastness of Space.
It has given us everything we have ever Needed.
We either learn to live With it and it will continue to provide for us.
Or we attempt to dominate it (as we have) and it will change in ways we can never predict.
There is No Earth 2.0
We are contributing to our own demise.
I thought it was mostly indoor plumbing, the ability to move food supplies to areas when crops fail, and other nifty innovations. Do we really have to have PCBs in our tissues to live longer?
The industrial revolution increased some lifespans and shortened others. The life expectancy of children working in factories, for example, was very short. Early modern cities were notoriously dependent on in flow from the countryside to maintain population because child mortality in cities was so incredibly high, due to filth, overcrowding, malnutrition and all of the other goodies we got as we modernized.
I'm failing to see the connection between chemicals in the environment and an increased lifespan. Did you move the goal post?