Addendum to "When we poison the world..."

So yesterday, I came upon this NPR article about two Canadian men documenting how toxic and quietly self-destructive our everyday Canadian/American lives are:

Inspired by Morgan Spurlock's fast-food gluttony in the movie Super Size Me, two environmental activists from Canada devised their own experiment. Instead of fast food, Rick Smith and Bruce Lourie absorbed themselves in everyday products like shampoos, soaps and cleaners to find out what kind of damage might be done to their health.

Their book about the adventure is called Slow Death by Rubber Duck: The Secret Danger of Everyday Things. Smith tells Guy Raz that writing the book was like conducting an adult science fair project — with one cardinal rule.

"Our experiments had to mimic everyday life," Smith says. "Obviously it would be very easy to dramatically increase your Teflon levels if you were willing to drink some Teflon, but nobody does that, so it wouldn't have any applicability to daily life."

But Smith and Lourie didn't need to take baths in mercury or eat tuna for a whole year to see the chemical levels in their bodies skyrocket. After just two days of eating only canned food microwaved in plastic containers and drinking from one of his son's old baby bottles, Smith saw a major rise in the levels of BPA in his body.

"My levels increased over eight times," he says. "You can only imagine what the levels in an infant would look like if after two or three years of their sole source of nutrition being a BPA baby bottle. Their levels would just be through the roof."

The book they wrote should be a pretty interesting read, showing anyone who's daring enough to read how profoundly poisonous (western/westernized? I don't know. Humans are humans, one species. It seems kind of silly to divide along culture/ethnicity lines in that sense. It's like saying some kinds of people are bad, but others aren't. I really do think it's a species-level biological issue, not simply culture. This is a much longer debate, I know) humans have made not just the world in general, but the homes in which they live, the food they eat and even the containers and delivery mechanisms for that food. We buy this shit every day with no qualms, and likely not even any thoughts. Just keep pushing ahead, pretending that everything will be ok. Cause it always has been, right?

When we poison the world...

we poison ourselves, as we are of it. It follows that we also poison our children.

I was part of a discussion earlier this afternoon about autism and its potential causes. Toxins, like mercury, were mentioned as one.

Nicholas Kristof, you shining star of the New York Times, you had a piece on this very topic waiting for me in my inbox. In it, he writes about new research establishing more explicit documentable links than ever before between deadly chemicals and developmental disorders.

It sucks that there has to be any investigation into this issue at all. How could it be anything other than logic? If you take poison into your body, whether you eat it, drink it, breathe it or it seeps into your skin, it's gonna fuck you up. It's also going to fuck up the children in you. This should not come as a shock. Really. Think about it.

I promise that it will fuck you up in some way, and it probably won't be obvious. It's not like you will suddenly have a third arm, or your skin will begin to fall off. Things like this are subtle.

Example - drink a gallon of antifreeze. You will die. Drink two drops of antifreeze, and you will likely not die, but it will have ill effects on your body. Drink two drops of antifreeze every day, and you will develop long-term health problems.

Think about children eating lead paint. Think about people working in a coal mine. Think about smoking cigarettes. Over time, sickness will come.

Our bodies are resilient, but there is only so much we can take and this world we've made poisons us with way fucking more than we can handle. Rates of cancer are no surprise. Autism on the rise, well that's no revelation.

Senator Lautenberg says that under existing law, of 80,000 chemicals registered in the U.S., the Environmental Protection Agency has required safety testing of only 200. “Our children have become test subjects,” he noted.

Eighty thousand. Fuck. We're all test subjects. Unknowingly, unwillingly. Testing for no end.

Perhaps the worst part is that corporations have us paying them so that we may poison ourselves through our daily routines, especially ones of cleanliness:

Researchers measured the levels of suspect chemicals called phthalates in the urine of pregnant women. Among women with higher levels of certain phthalates (those commonly found in fragrances, shampoos, cosmetics and nail polishes), their children years later were more likely to display disruptive behavior.

What a deep irony.

So here we are, steeped in ignorance. It's a cultural and personal ignorance. I see several vectors behind this feigned blindness, all interconnected.

One is the intense desire for profit, profit at all costs. People in charge of manufacturing firms, chemical companies and drug corporations, almost always, do not give a fuck about the outcomes (not necessarily side effects, as they are often primary effects) of their endeavors. If they let such concerns get in the way of their money making, that would significantly hamper their money making. They figured out ways to make things cheaply and pay very, very little concern to anything that does not cut into their bottom lines. Until pollution and killing people significantly takes away from their profits, they will show no concern.

For fuck's sake, these people can hardly be bothered to pretend to care even when serious problems arise in the public eye. Once again, look at what's going on with Toyota. The people running that company should be on their knees, begging for forgiveness and mercy for being such heinous pieces of shit, but instead they're going around telling people about how hard they are working and trying to play it off as though they haven't done anything wrong.

Closely related to the greed aspect of these problems is the issue of a profound lack of knowledge. People simply do not understand most of what they create. Humans are real fuckin good at making things, but holy shit are there difficulties controlling them and knowing the full range of what they do. Again, and I will always go back to this, the human species has this biological flaw where if we can do something, we go ahead and do it to the furthest extent that we can with no concerns for repercussions. Atomic bombs/energy. Petroleum-powered global economy. Slavery. Cloning. Factory farming. On and on. We sure are curious.

Finally, there is the pathetic trust we put in others, especially our supposed superiors. What sorry supplicants we are, always deferring to those who tell us they know better. People simply don't believe that companies would make something harmful, and ESPECIALLY not knowingly. If it's bad for you, well then it wouldn't be in a store, right? Yeah. Pork rinds? And if these things were bad for you, then the government would take care of it! Yup. Check out the recent/current handling of the diabetes drug Avandia. Similarly, we willingly turn a blind eye to these kinds of things. We have ideas in the back of our heads. We know. How could it be ok?