Discuss: 3 Bets
16 comments
Your article addresses a wide range of concern, so I’ll steal an analogy and compare the focus of my response it to the threat of death. For instance, if you find yourself on fire, Sandra, you are going to forget about dealing with the results from the lab, of course, because you have to focus on the most imminent threat. In other words, there’s no point in worrying about the cancer while your clothes are burning. Incidentally, it is my wish that you live a long and continually productive life, that you see the triumphs of your children, and that your demise is one completely unrelated to the dreaded disease for which my mother is also periodically checked.
There are some parallels that strike me other than those you’ve drawn. Notice the economy isn’t getting any better, in spite of the drastic measures that have been taken? Oh, I know that almost daily, we’re hearing how things “seem to be looking up”—yet we are also “not out of the woods yet.” Our economy and ecology are indeed linked. Unfortunately, so much of those links are politically contrived, and are designed to do the opposite of what the politicians claim.
The evidence that Global Warming (excuse me, I mean Climate Change) is caused by human activity, and to what degree, is not settled, no matter how many times Al Gore insists that it is.
Now, wait a minute… Stop right there.
Let’s be clear about something. I am not (read that word again: NOT) a person who thinks that Human Beings can do no wrong. Do not think for one moment that I am in any way questioning cancer statistics as related to industry. Not at all. I’ve seen Silkwood and think Erin Brockovich is amazing. Hey, I saw The China Syndrome on its first day in theatres. (Do you recall that only three days after its nation-wide release that the incident at Three Mile Island occurred?) I know humans achieve incredible feats with technology, and I also understand human carelessness. And greed.
So, a couple of points. With your insatiable curiosity and drive to continue your life-long education, I’m hoping at some point you will take it upon yourself to study the effects of sun spot activity as it relates to the global climate. I’m hoping that you will be willing to look on another bookshelf when studying the amount of that data as compared to the effects of carbon dioxide on the subject. I am hopeful that you will be willing to ask, for starters, “If the evidence to support human activity as the culprit for Global Warming is inconclusive at best, then why—WHY—are there so many prominent individuals pushing so hard for ‘immediate’ solutions? And do the proposed solutions make sense?”
One of the failings of our culture is the expectation of immediacy. We want everything NOW, and yes, many people tend to want THINGS to dull the pain of our hardships. Even our hardships ain’t like they used to be. In our Western culture, we also tend to forget our roots, our history. Sheesh, wasn’t it Al Sharpton who just proclaimed Michael Jackson was the one who enabled the music of black people to infiltrate the mainstream? Talk about willful ignorance. He sorta forgot about decades of black talent that came well before Jackson was even born—not to take anything away from Michael Jackson’s contributions, but hey, let’s give history its due. Wait a minute…what was I talking about? Oh, yeah…history and how we forget what’s gone before.
So that’s the flaw I find with your analogies between the economy and ecology before college students. In case you haven’t noticed, the mainstream media has only recently begun to have opinions about the new administration’s economic team. Up until now, the mainstream media has had NO opinion of the team, the policies or the President himself. ABC, CBS, NBC, etc., have engaged in nothing more than Group Think, and have been very reluctant to do the job that journalists are supposed to do. We’d have a country much better educated on the present state of affairs both economic and ecologic if the mainstream media were willing to ask the tough questions. But then again, there’s the Greed factor I alluded to earlier.
I hope you see that you shouldn’t want our legislators to take immediate action to bail out our ecology. Sheesh, they can’t even run an efficient DMV or run schools properly.
It is my prayer that enough people are starting to wake up, and stop depending on the likes of the Government to come to the rescue. Good Lord, Sandra, you even point it out in your own article the absurdity of allowing cancer causing agents and other harmful elements to flow freely downstream. We’re going to depend on our Government to save us all from Climate Change? Wait—I’m sorry. What we need is a BIGGER government, a Global Government! Surely, those people will be smart!
No, it is the undying Human Spirit that will save us. Educate people properly, and it is people—individuals, not a government entity—who will save us through incredible flexibility, adaptability and ingenuity.
So before we start moving toward legislation to protect us all, let’s make sure the legislators have the interests of We The People at heart. We’ve become so accustomed to, well, being comfortable, that we don’t even realize where the fire is. Our leaders are dazzling us with pretty sparkly things and distracting us with a big show, like a macabre Three Ring Circus, that many of us are starting to become suspicious. Where is the man behind the curtain? And is there another one behind THAT curtain?
We’ve been looking at all the distraction so long that we simply don’t realize our feet are starting to burn, or we’re so numb that we don’t feel it.
Being skeptical is good. It keeps you asking questions. Like “one in every four mammals now appears to be heading toward extinction”... Wow. That’s dramatic. I would love to see the raw data behind that one. Then I’d love to see the raw data behind THAT. Then I’d love to see who collected the data…and Why. Bet the truth is far from concern over protecting the furry little buggers.
Dare to dig.
—Tom
http://www.EmpoweredActor.com
It’s You ...for Real
Having worked in environmental labs for 30 years, I can offer some insight as to the elevated numbers of chemicals in the environment. When I started working in labs in the late ‘60’s, if we could analyze for contaminates at the parts per million level, we were lucky. Now, with the advancements in instrumental technology, we can detect chemicals at the parts per quadrillion level. A lot of those chemicals may well have been there, we just could not detect them until recently. It would be interesting to find old sample that were analyzed in the 1960’s and retest them to see what “new” contaminates would be found.
I forgot one fact. I have Multiple Myeloma which has definately been linked to Agent Orange and is “presumtive” for ionizing radiation exposure and I was in the nuclear weapons field during the cold war.
Thank you Sandra, and Orion, for this very fine piece. Sandra thanks also for your reference to Guth’s “Law for the Ecological Age.” As a political scientist who focuses on democratic institutions I’ve been intrigued for some time about whether an aggressive application of the 4th Amendment protections of our Bill of Rights might be applied to the toxics that “trespass inside our bodies.” Your clear argument for human and global protections in the face of severe threats was a joy to read.
I humbly add my congratulations to Sandra for her attitude to wellness and to motherhood, and thank her for her carefully thought out discussion on climate change. For the nay-sayers on climate change, whatever the natural reasons for climate change, humans have done too much destruction to the earth that sustains us all.
A beautifully written and researched article, Sandra. Thank you. I was wondering if you or others had written up a Universal Declaration of Ecological Human Rights, or were trying to get the U.N. to add to their Declaration, to have it declared a basic human right. I think this would help make the facts known. As another commenter says, the agricultural industry has a stake in keeping this quiet, but perhaps that could gradually be overcome.
The pill kills. It is a chemical overdose that does just what you suggest in your article chemicals should not do. You write in this article “maybe we can all agree, pro-life and pro-choice, that any chemical with the power to extinguish human pregnancy has no rightful place in our economy”.
Simple old time logic, if it’s not broke, don’t fix it. We are killing ourselves and destroying human life, the mother’s and the babies when we put into normally functioning bodies chemicals and other contraceptives with great and grave potential to destroy human life, which is sacred.
You do have a right, we all have a right to take care of ourselves and do what is right. What is right, is facing the facts, that science even shows…..God is pro-life.
At the PP sponsored conference on women and the environment, where I got a copy of this article, even a fairly liberal columnist, Cindy Hill noted in her October 2009 article in VT Woman magazine, entitled, Worrying our Pretty Little Heads about It, shared the dangers of the pill for women.
Hill in her article shared the news that Dr. Janet Grey at this conference that warned women there that they should be concerned about chemicals in the environment but despite the fact that she had on a big overhead listed amoung the pill is amoung the many places that hormone disrupting chemicals come into the woman’s body, nobody dared mention it.
A house divided against itself, isn’t that the Biblical quote….if you are trying to destroy the natural makeup of your body, you are potentially going to kill yourself, and certainly you are going to kill your children if you look upon life as a curse rather than a blessing and a gift of our reproductive health.
Let’s face it. Look at the warnings and literature that doctors give out with contraception. You will see if you do, these “medicines” we are giving to healthy young women are dangerous to them and do destroy pregnancies.
So yes, Mrs. Ms. Miss Steingraber we should agree, “ANY chemical with the power to extinguish human pregnancy has no rightful place in our economy” and I would add our society! Because if you are pregnant, you are going to have a baby.
A child is a blessing, not a curse. Contraception and abortion is not health care, it is destroying women and babies. So do you not, we all not have a duty to our brothers and sisters to speak out against this human tragedy of abortion and contraception. Because unlike other places that we might not be able to avoid chemicals that can destroy life, we can choose to avoid these life destroying substances.
I don’t know if you are still reading comments but that was beautifully written. I agree with you that there will be a rise of an eco movement. One embedded in a religion.
Your article addresses a wide range of concern, so I’ll steal an analogy and compare the focus of my response it to the threat of death. For instance, if you find yourself on fire, Sandra, you are going to forget about dealing with the results from the lab, of course, because you have to focus on the most imminent threat. In other words, there’s no point in worrying about the cancer while your clothes are burning. Incidentally, it is my wish that you live a long and continually productive life, that you see the triumphs of your children, and that your demise is one completely unrelated to the dreaded disease for which my mother is also periodically checked.
There are some parallels that strike me other than those you’ve drawn. Notice the economy isn’t getting any better, in spite of the drastic measures that have been taken? Oh, I know that almost daily, we’re hearing how things “seem to be looking up”—yet we are also “not out of the woods yet.” Our economy and ecology are indeed linked. Unfortunately, so much of those links are politically contrived, and are designed to do the opposite of what the politicians claim.
The evidence that Global Warming (excuse me, I mean Climate Change) is caused by human activity, and to what degree, is not settled, no matter how many times Al Gore insists that it is.
Now, wait a minute… Stop right there.
Let’s be clear about something. I am not (read that word again: NOT) a person who thinks that Human Beings can do no wrong. Do not think for one moment that I am in any way questioning cancer statistics as related to industry. Not at all. I’ve seen Silkwood and think Erin Brockovich is amazing. Hey, I saw The China Syndrome on its first day in theatres. (Do you recall that only three days after its nation-wide release that the incident at Three Mile Island occurred?) I know humans achieve incredible feats with technology, and I also understand human carelessness. And greed.
So, a couple of points. With your insatiable curiosity and drive to continue your life-long education, I’m hoping at some point you will take it upon yourself to study the effects of sun spot activity as it relates to the global climate. I’m hoping that you will be willing to look on another bookshelf when studying the amount of that data as compared to the effects of carbon dioxide on the subject. I am hopeful that you will be willing to ask, for starters, “If the evidence to support human activity as the culprit for Global Warming is inconclusive at best, then why—WHY—are there so many prominent individuals pushing so hard for ‘immediate’ solutions? And do the proposed solutions make sense?”
One of the failings of our culture is the expectation of immediacy. We want everything NOW, and yes, many people tend to want THINGS to dull the pain of our hardships. Even our hardships ain’t like they used to be. In our Western culture, we also tend to forget our roots, our history. Sheesh, wasn’t it Al Sharpton who just proclaimed Michael Jackson was the one who enabled the music of black people to infiltrate the mainstream? Talk about willful ignorance. He sorta forgot about decades of black talent that came well before Jackson was even born—not to take anything away from Michael Jackson’s contributions, but hey, let’s give history its due. Wait a minute…what was I talking about? Oh, yeah…history and how we forget what’s gone before.
So that’s the flaw I find with your analogies between the economy and ecology before college students. In case you haven’t noticed, the mainstream media has only recently begun to have opinions about the new administration’s economic team. Up until now, the mainstream media has had NO opinion of the team, the policies or the President himself. ABC, CBS, NBC, etc., have engaged in nothing more than Group Think, and have been very reluctant to do the job that journalists are supposed to do. We’d have a country much better educated on the present state of affairs both economic and ecologic if the mainstream media were willing to ask the tough questions. But then again, there’s the Greed factor I alluded to earlier.
I hope you see that you shouldn’t want our legislators to take immediate action to bail out our ecology. Sheesh, they can’t even run an efficient DMV or run schools properly.
It is my prayer that enough people are starting to wake up, and stop depending on the likes of the Government to come to the rescue. Good Lord, Sandra, you even point it out in your own article the absurdity of allowing cancer causing agents and other harmful elements to flow freely downstream. We’re going to depend on our Government to save us all from Climate Change? Wait—I’m sorry. What we need is a BIGGER government, a Global Government! Surely, those people will be smart!
No, it is the undying Human Spirit that will save us. Educate people properly, and it is people—individuals, not a government entity—who will save us through incredible flexibility, adaptability and ingenuity.
So before we start moving toward legislation to protect us all, let’s make sure the legislators have the interests of We The People at heart. We’ve become so accustomed to, well, being comfortable, that we don’t even realize where the fire is. Our leaders are dazzling us with pretty sparkly things and distracting us with a big show, like a macabre Three Ring Circus, that many of us are starting to become suspicious. Where is the man behind the curtain? And is there another one behind THAT curtain?
We’ve been looking at all the distraction so long that we simply don’t realize our feet are starting to burn, or we’re so numb that we don’t feel it.
Being skeptical is good. It keeps you asking questions. Like “one in every four mammals now appears to be heading toward extinction”... Wow. That’s dramatic. I would love to see the raw data behind that one. Then I’d love to see the raw data behind THAT. Then I’d love to see who collected the data…and Why. Bet the truth is far from concern over protecting the furry little buggers.
Dare to dig.
—Tom
http://www.EmpoweredActor.com
It’s You ...for Real