To Your Health...

Stella Block

1989

Published in:

Section 3 Newsletter July 1989, No. 71
The Northwest Technocrat, 4th quarter 1989, No. 317

``Smoking May be Hazardous to Your Health'' is a warning that is printed on every pack of cigarettes. This small statement was printed on boxes of cigarettes after years of crusading by a few dedicated scientists, civic leaders, citizens and physicians. A crusade was also launched against saccharin, a suspected carcinogen; cyclomates have been barred from retail store shelves. There have been other crusades against some chemical or other, some activity or other, all taken very seriously and pursued to some degree with righteousness and an aura of serving the ``public good.'' The press devotes a great deal of time and space to these campaigns as news items. A great deal of research goes into these activities. But the one crusade, the one campaign that deserves banner headlines in every newspaper, day after day, the one thing that is truly hazardous to everybody's health is never mentioned -- the Price System.

Cigarette smoking is hazardous to one's health -- if one smokes them. Cyclomates and saccharin are perhaps harmful to those who use them. But there are substances that are being inhaled, imbibed, and ingested by the public (without its knowledge) that will prove far more harmful than cigarettes or saccharin -- not only to the immediate victims but to unborn generations to come (radiation is only one example). Not even the trees, grass and animals in the world are immune from the environmental pollution that rains down on the earth from chemical substances and particulates that are spewed forth from smokestacks. Industrial wastes are dumped and buried in the ground or poured into rivers and oceans. These practices by industry are destroying the environment. Not much is done about it because it would ``cost too much'' to devise technology or techniques of prevention. Legislation is being devised in an attempt to control future dumping, but that which is already dumped and fouling up the environment is hardly touched.

The Price System has one inflexible rule: Does it pay (in terms of money, of course)? Every product must show a profit; every endeavor must prove its money making capabilities; otherwise it ceases to exist.

The chemical age, which was ushered in after World War II, has been proven to be the biggest bonanza of all time. The magic of chemistry was hailed as a panacea to end humankind's ills. A headline in a Cleveland, Ohio newspaper in March of 1948 reads: ``Sees Chemistry's Age of Abundance End War.'' The prognosticator was William J. Hale, research consultant at that time for the Dow Chemical Company. He went on to say, ``For the next 1,000 years, our civilization will be based on three great new industries -- plastics, alcohol and light metals, in that order...'' He went on to explain how plastics could be made from a variety of plants. ``Plant life breaks down into lignum, starch, gums, vegetable oils, fats and alcohol that the chemist simply puts together in different ways. Then we come to alcohol. There you've got something. Ethyl Hydroxide is the most diverse chemical compound known to man.'' He warned then that gasoline is the worst fuel for automobiles. Speaking of the nonrenewable resources such as coal and hydrocarbons, he stated that he hoped ``we would not continue to exploit and destroy these nonrenewable resources...'' He said he hoped some would be left for the future when ``man had become intelligent enough to use them properly.'' This highly optimistic picture of the future was never given a chance. The nonrenewable resource, petroleum, was exploited to the hilt. In just a few short decades our dependence on oil and its byproducts is nearly complete: plastics, synthetics, detergents, sprays, paints, medicines, cloth and other materials too numerous to list -- all made chemically from oil (petrochemicals). The plastic wrap (pliofilm) that we bring our groceries home in is the least of the products that is made from petroleum by-products. From the time that the ``chemical age'' burst open at the close of World War II until now, the waste products, the residues from the manufacture of all the plastics, synthetics, herbicides and pesticides were buried in area that were deemed unsuitable for anything else. Haulers were contracted who disposed of the wastes as cheaply as possible. The producers of the wastes were thus freed of obligation to the community or to the public in general. They paid for the haulage as good business practice under the Price System and there ended their obligation.

Billion of dollars were spent by business to advertise their wares; the public bought, used and then threw away all those pretty plastic converings, those ``convenience'' products that are supposed to make life so wonderful in this modern day and age. Do you have mosquitoes in your yard? Get a spray can of good ol' something or other and spray them away. The list is endless, generating billions of tons of waste cans, plastics, foils, bottles and other throwaway wonders -- products of the laboratories of the new ``chemical age.''

Out of the front door of these laboratories poured synthetic materials that rivaled the richest silks and brocades of ancient times. Synthetic materials imitated fur, velvet, satin or the sheerest gossamer fabrics of incredible tensile strength. Weed killers enabled farmers to increase the yields of their acreage ten-fold and at the same time freed them from back breaking toil. The preservation of food was merely another miracle of the laboratories.

There is no denying that chemistry has created an easier world, a victory over nature, as one scientist put it. But it could very well be a Pyrrhic victory because of the effluent that flows out the back door of these same laboratories. Unimaginable chemical combinations were disposed of in the most careless fashion (and still are). It was cheaper just to dump the residues than to apply scientific means to detoxify or render neutral the waste at the source; it can be done but it would ``cost too much.'' At present count, it is estimated that there exists some 50,000 waste disposal sites around the United States, seeping noxious fumes into the air or seeping deadly chemicals into the ground waters.

It took humankind centuries to climb out of an ignorance and superstition that we find quaint; that diseases were caused by germs was scoffed at by the most learned men and women of ages past. It took much trial and error to arrive at what now seems simple precautions against illness. The wearing of clothing stopped many diseases that were caused by skin contact from one individual to another. It took humankind centuries to come up with medicines and procedures to cure the sick. Vaccines have been developed to the point where, it is possible, the last case of smallpox has been erased. Humankind have found solutions to many ills that had plagued them from the very beginning. The simple procedure of replacing thatched roofs with wood or tile prevented the spread of diseases by removing the breeding places of vermin -- rats, mice and other rodents -- that were carriers of disease.

But in just a few decades, humankind have foisted upon themselves a kind of plague that no amount of medical skill will cure because there is no known cure for chemical poisoning; there are no known vaccines against it. The ones who resisted the early medical doctors and scientists with their vaccination and preventive medicine were ignorant, unschooled people, still wallowing in some ancient superstition of their own. The people who developed the new chemicals and this wonderful new world of throwaway junk are brilliant men and women, well educated in their line of work. The language they speak is lime no language on earth. This is a language learned in the laboratories and class rooms of our most prestidious universities. But the end result of their work will be worse than the devastation wrought by the black death of the middle ages. Down through the ages, humankind did learn to live with their microbes and their viruses. They developed a biological immunity to the microbes they had to live with because they too were organic entities. But there is not enough time to develop immunological defenses against inorganic chemicals.

This is what Celso Bianco, immunologist at the State University of New York, has to say: ``The human system can vanquish the highly complex flu virus, made of thousands of amino acids and nucleic acids. But we are susceptible to a simple chemical such as DDT, which is composed of only 14 carbons, 9 hydrogen and 5 chlorine molecules. An important difference between flu virus and DDT, is that the latter was not present in our environment until recently, and consequently was not a selective pressure during the evolution of our immune system. Had we been exposed several million years ago to DDT and other recently synthesized chemicals, our cells might have developed means of breaking these substances into harmless byproducts. Industrial pollutants constitute a selective pressure that we are physiologically unprepared to handle at present. Since some of these new materials affect our genetic material, they can cause mutations. Theoretically, over time, we could expect populations capable of resisting pollutants to appear within the human species. Unfortunately, there are inarguable objections to allowing nature to take its course. First, we do not want to deliberately bring deformed beings into the world; in any case, we have no guarantee that an immune population would indeed appear.'' (Reported in Natural History Magazine, 1979.)

We have perhaps the highest education rate, the most schools, the best universities in the world, but we have behaved like tribes of primitives who look for signs in the slies for guidance when it comes to our collective safety and survival. Our quest for money has over-shadowed our intelligence. Every action is measured against what is profitable and what is not. The producers of the industrial wastes are not alone to blame for the staggering number of waste dumps. Peter Ibsen's An Enemy of the People (1882) is a classic depiction of the greed of city fathers itching after wealth. The locale is a resort town dependent on tourists to come to the mineral baths located there. A doctor of the town discovers that the baths are polluted. When he advised the town leaders of this fact, instead of welcoming the news and doing something about it, they labeled him ``an enemy of the people.'' The news of the pollution naturally would halt the tourist influx asnd thereby the money they would bring. A parallel can be drawn in the case of the now notorious Love Canal. The leaders of the city of Niagara permitted the dumping of the waste. They wanted the business and the money that industry would bring in. They did not investigate; the dumpers of the chemicals did not explain what went into the canal. The developers and home builders around the area either did not care or they didn't know. It was not investigated -- ``it would cost too much.'' Not until the situation literally blew up in their faces was something done -- but not enough. This is the situation clear across the continent. The Price System does not allow for human or environmental consideration.

Huge sums of money ($600 to $700 million) are being appropriated by Congress for clean-up purposes. This is not enough. We must change the entire structure of our society. Then and only then will we be able to stop the pollution at the source. Without the consideration of money, research can be done to PREVENT rather than cure, because there really is no cure. Unless we institute a system to halt the spread of the chemical poisoning, we will be inundated by our own effluent.

With the discontinuance of money, as proposed by Technocracy, will be the elimination of the practice of putting a price tags on human lives, the end of putting a price tag on whether or not the environment is worth saving or not and how much of it is to be saved. Technocracy embodies the concept of the conservation of resources, both human and otherwise.