Last week I announced today's Hump Day Hmm topic as:"Where I'd like to go next." This can be your personal goal, professional goal, cultural or societal goal, political goal...you get the picture. Just tell us something about how you'd like the future to be. Link back to me in your post, send me the link to your post at j pippert at g mail dot com and I'll add you in to the list!
I had three or four other post ideas in mind in answer to that question, which strikes at so many things for me. But, in light of Monday's news, my words are sort of jumbled, unprocessed...a Chicka Chicka Boom Boom mess after falling down from the coconut tree.
Two things are clear in my head, though.
Clear Thing One: Silent Spring
One commenter asked if I'd read Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. I have. A little known fact about me is that I aspire(d) to be an anthropologist. I figured this out a little too late, without enough confidence, after I stumbled into what would have been my double major (had my college allowed such a thing...because I ended up taking to many hours): cultural geography. So I've read and re-read Silent Spring. I've read the controversy about it, studied Ms. Carson's life, and read counterarguments (which I didn't quite buy). I even read the follow-up, Beyond Silent Spring (which was pretty new back when I read it in college). I've also studied the Gaia Hypothesis. And I think it might really have been there that I became so very concerned about the environment.
(Each link goes to a different site with information. If you are interested, I encourage you to click and open new tabs to read more.)
Here are a few salient quotes from Silent Spring, published in 1962 (emphasis mine):
There is still very limited awareness of the nature of the threat. This is an era of specialists, each of whom sees his own problem and is unaware of or intolerant of the larger frame into which it fits. It is also an era dominated by industry, in which the right to make a dollar at whatever cost is seldom challenged. When the public protests, confronted with some obvious evidence of damaging results of pesticide applications, it is fed little tranquilizing pills of half truth. We urgently need an end to these false assurances, to the sugar coating of unpalatable facts. It is the public that is being asked to assume the risks that the insect controllers calculate. The public must decide whether it wishes to continue on the present road, and it can do so only when in full possession of the facts. In the words of Jean Rostand, “The obligation to endure gives us the right to know.”
Chapter 2, The Obligation to Endure
If the Bill of Rights contains no guarantee that a citizen shall be secure against lethal poisons distributed either by private individuals or by public officials, it is surely only because our forefathers, despite their considerable wisdom and foresight, could conceive of no such problem.
Chapter 2, The Obligation to Endure
Notable quotes from recent ATSDR literature about PAHs:
PAH contents of plants and animals may be much higher than PAH contents of soil or water in which they live.
Clear Thing Two: Mercy Mercy Me (the Ecology)
There is a song I haven't been able to get out of my head. It's a song that has always hit me emotionally, much as John Lennon's Imagine does. It's Marvin Gaye's Mercy Mercy Me (the Ecology).
Ah, mercy, mercy me,
Ah, things ain't what they used to be, no, no.
Where did all the blue skies go?
Poison is the wind that blows from the north and south andeast.
Mercy, mercy me,
Ah, things ain't what they used to be, no, no.
Oil wasted on the ocean and upon
our seas fish full of mercury,
Oh, mercy, mercy me.
Ah, things ain't what they used to be, no, no, no.
Radiation underground and in the sky;
animals and birds who live near by are dying.
Oh, mercy, mercy me.
Ah, things ain't what they used to be.
What about this over crowded land?
How much more abuse from man can she stand?
It seems too clear that we value the short-term of profit over the long-term of a human life. This makes me ineffably sad.
So my hope for tomorrow?
That we abandon the greed foundation of our culture and goals and prefer human health and life to the almighty dollar. That the government becomes so alarmed by industry that poisons and kills that there is a zero tolerance for that. We seem to have no problem with the concept of zero tolerance in other areas, so why not this one? Arguments about dependent income and so forth is ridiculous, especially in the face of human life. Take the Superfund money and help the communities financially and build new, safe industries for them to have dependence on for income.
We're sick. We are all sick, maybe some not as much as others, but sick has become the new normal.
We are sick because public protest is not as important as profit margins.
We are sick because our government---which has zero tolerance for terrorism---has incredible tolerance for eco and human health terrorism.
We are sick because companies lie about risks and effects. Because they take risks with our health and that of the environment by trying to save a few pennies and illegally dump toxic wastes.
We are sick because, sadly, CEOs of toxic companies are not considered murderers and jailed.
We are sick because we have not forced ourselves and our nation to Make This End.
45 years ago a brilliant woman told us we were poisoning ourselves and our land, the animals who share the planet with us.
Since then, there has been much art about the issue, but little matter.
Do you want to know how big an epidemic our dirty little world creates?
You won't be surprised to learn I couldn't find any information about the United States, but I'll tell you a cold, hard number and let you extrapolate:
About 460,000 Chinese die prematurely each year from breathing dirty air and drinking polluted water, the World Bank estimates.
Source: Reuters, Sept. 13, 2007
Take a breath.
Did you pause before doing so? Now that you know how dirty and harmful it might be?
Now you know how much you care.
And what else do others care about...what are other goals for tomorrow?
Painted Maypole wrote Free to be...ME
Emily wrote I’m not sure where I’m willing to go next
Garden of nna mmoy wrote Prophecies and Foreshadowing
Within the woods wrote Where do we go from here?
Lyrical Catherine wrote Next Up: Islam
Copyright 2007 Julie Pippert
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Comments
ABout 1500 people die in ONtario prematurely every year from poor air quality. I don't know where to find the equivalent info from the States, but I know that Houston's air quality is the worst in the US, so if you extrapolated from that to Houston, you would have a conservative estimate.
I did one today. It's a little more frivolous.
It's all so overwhelming. The every day problems of living, plus war, poverty, the environment. I know that we all say just do something every little bit helps, but I don't think we have the time to wait. I think we need massive, collective pressure on our government and the public needs to be better informed. How many people really know what is going on? Perhaps a movement much like the African American blogging community that raised awareness and coordinated the largest demonstration since the Civil Rights Movement in Jena, LA.
Peace,
~Chani
and i somehow keep failing to get on the bus with these weekly posts and then every time i read your and others thoughts on your topics i kick myself.