Inventions, or technology
have made many people rich and saved time for many more. Technology is seen as the
savior of lives and crops. Most would agree that progress is
good and that technology is the driving force behind it. But when technology
is assessed
for all of its qualities, if all costs involved are included, technology is
not at all the savior it seems to be. Economists rarely include the
environmental harm or negative human health and social effects of
technology.
Today, the CEOs of corporations proclaim that genetic engineering
will feed the starving people of the world. But will it? Aren't they hungry
because of a lack of money and work, inequality and discrimination, war and
disease, drought and flooding, and frigid or sweltering temperatures leading
to crop losses? How
will the poor purchase the expensive fruits of technology when
they can't afford the low-cost foods of low-tech right now?
When we are all kept ignorant of the facts, it is easy for industry to pull
the wool.
Scotchgard™ was
great stuff. Spray it on and you've got fabrics that baby can do just about
anything on. Not to rain on technology's parade, but on May 16 2000, 3M
pulled Scotchgard™ stain-repellent products
from the market because one of the chemicals it's made of, perfluorooctane
sulfonate (PFOS), was found to be both persistent and pervasive in the
environment and in the blood of people. Other such chemicals are DDT, PCBs,
and dioxin. Several years before 3M pulled the products, they found PFOS in
the blood of people in the United States, Japan,
Europe, and China at levels of 10 to 100
parts per billion (PPB). When the same ultra-sensitive
test was performed on blood samples from the 1980s, the
compound was absent, meaning that it came from Scotchgard, which was
made almost exclusively by 3M. Since there hasn't been much testing done on
the health effects of PFOS, 3M has downplayed the problem. But this is
nothing new because almost none of the more than 75,000 chemicals on the
market today have been tested in any way. And the ones that have been
tested, haven't been tested by today's scientific ability. This doesn't
account in any way for real-world combinations of these 75,000 chemicals.
Just think, with only ten numbers on the telephone keyboard, there are
sufficient combinations to supply millions of people with distinct phone
numbers. How will anyone test 75,000 chemicals in random combinations?
Another point is that endocrine
disruptors are active in our bodies at 1 part per trillion (PPT).
That looks like 1 drop of water in 660 rail tank cars in a train 6-miles
long. This is not to say that PFOS is an endocrine disruptor--it very well
could be if it were tested--but PPB
is not a low enough concentration to be looking for. There are no
regulations that require anything near PPT, and it's rare that testing is
done in PPB. Here's the point: If one doesn't look for something, it
won't be found. Therefore if the effects of the 75,000 chemicals on the
market are not looked at in terms of PPT, and if real-world exposures to
multiple chemicals are not studied, then all regulations are extremely
inadequate. As a final note on regulations, it is generally industry that
writes the regulations for its own products.
There are flame retardants being used today that are also being found
in significant quantities in the environment and human bodies. The claim is
that they are needed to save lives. But since there are no data on how many
people are injured or killed by these fire retardants, how can one make the
claim that the risks outweigh the benefits? Presently, it is the industries
that profit from the production of the chemicals that those same industries
are making the claims of benefit.
Steam engines bring back the nostalgia of
yesteryear. As a child, I could hear the whistle from trains passing by many
miles away. The sound would waft in and out with the movement of the breezes.
Songs like Cassie Jones
romanticized life on the rails. Inspiring stories were written for children
like The Little Engine That Could. That's the good part, from there
on nostalgia goes out the window.
Coal miners get black lung from breathing coal dust while working long, hard
hours thousands of feet below the earth's surface in cold, dark, and damps
mines. In return for their hard work and loss of their health they get
nothing compared to what the mine owners get from significantly less work
and risk to their health. Typical of many other industries, when workers
demanded decent pay that would allow them the basics of life, mine owners
hired armed thugs to murder them and call it self defense.
Many miners were lost to cave-ins because the companies refused to update
safety standards for workers and mines, complaining that the costs would be
too great. Today, lobbyists are the hired thugs of the coal industry. They
effectively stall or kill any legislation that would restrict the coal
industry or dilute their earnings. They also hire "experts" to sit
in on public meetings dealing with a wide range of coal-related issues from
water and air, to landfill and trucking regulations. All the while, these
experts spout hours of scientific facts. Verification of most of what
industry calls "fact" is strongly recommend.
Soot and fumes from steam engines made the air in London so dark that was
difficult to breathe, let alone see the sun. In most large cities today
electric engines are used. Some are diesel-electric. These newer engines
pollute significantly less than the old steam engines, but they still need
to be improved 100% before being acceptable. Industry would like to make
comparisons to the steam engines of old London and tell us that the air is
very healthy now. But why are so many inner-city children being
admitted to hospitals to be treated for asthma? For years industry claimed
that asthma was not really a disease but something that existed only in the
mind of those that had it. The commonly-used term was psychosumatic.
