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By Ted Schettler MD, MPH
Vitamin D plays an essential role in a number of biologic processes throughout the body. In addition to its long-recognized importance for bone health, vitamin D deficiency is increasingly acknowledged to be associated with a number of other diseases and disorders, including various kinds of cancer. A recently published study adds considerable support to yet another health impact—earlier age of menarche in otherwise healthy girls. If this finding holds up in future studies, the implications are profound.
If sunlight exposure is sufficient, adequate amounts of vitamin D are synthesized in the body. But many people, particularly those living in higher latitudes, are not exposed to enough sunlight to generate adequate stores. And, even in sunny places, skin cancer concerns limit sun exposure. Therefore some foods are fortified with modest amounts of vitamin D in an attempt to address the deficiency. Nonetheless, vitamin D insufficiency remains common in the general population. A recent report from the Institute of Medicine addressing this is available here: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK56070/
Previous studies reported earlier menarche in girls who live increasing distances from the equator, up to about 45-50 degrees latitude. Since vitamin D status is significantly sunshine dependent, vitamin D insufficiency has been proposed as one explanation. But these ecologic, observational studies are inherently limited and best suited to hypothesis generation. However, the more recent study measured vitamin D levels in a group of girls living in a single city before they experienced menarche and followed them for more than two years. It adds important new data.
This study was published in the October, 2011 issue of The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. It was a prospective, longitudinal study of 242 girls in Bogota, Columbia whose average age at baseline was 8.8 years when plasma vitamin D (25(OH)D) was measured. They were followed for an average of 30 months and periodically asked about the occurrence and date of menarche.
Fifty-seven percent of the girls who were vitamin D deficient (<50 nmol/L) reached menarche during the follow-up period compared to just 23% of those who had sufficient levels of vitamin D (>75 nmol/L). The average age of menarche in these two groups was 11.8 yrs and 12.6 yrs, respectively. These findings held up after adjustment for age and BMI, so that the results could not be explained by overweight or obesity. The authors concluded that inadequate levels of vitamin D were highly significantly associated with earlier menarche in this group of girls. The biologic mechanisms that might explain this remain speculative.
These findings are likely to have extremely important public health and research implications—particularly if they hold up in studies of larger populations.
1) If there is a causal relationship between inadequate vitamin D status and earlier age of menarche, it’s yet another reason to do more about widespread vitamin D deficiency in the general population. In this study, just 11.6% of girls were vitamin D–deficient. For comparison, other studies show that 52% of Hispanic and African-American teens in Boston are vitamin D deficient, and a small sample of white pre-teen girls in Maine showed a 48% deficiency with at least one level of 25(OH)D below 50 nmol/L over a three-year period. (Sullivan, J Am Diet Assoc. 2005;105:971-974)
2) Among the various kinds of cancer linked to low vitamin D levels, the evidence for increased risk of colorectal cancer is probably the strongest and most consistent. However, a link to breast cancer is sometimes although not always observed. A number of laboratory studies show that vitamin D can inhibit cellular proliferation and promote programmed cell death (apoptosis) and cellular differentiation in breast tissue. Laboratory rodents fed low levels of vitamin D develop more mammary tumors when exposed to a carcinogen than animals fed adequate amounts. The effect is most marked in animals that are also fed a high-fat diet. It appears that vitamin D can inhibit both early and later events in mammary tumor development.
In addition, adequate amounts of vitamin D are necessary for normal mammary gland development. For example, in mammary gland organ culture studies, vitamin D–like compounds inhibit estrogen-induced ductal proliferation and branching. This suggests that vitamin D status in pre-pubertal and pubertal girls could influence breast development and, thereby, breast cancer risk.
Epidemiologic studies virtually always look for associations between adult vitamin D status and breast cancer risk. None has attempted to study the influence of childhood vitamin D status on later breast cancer risk. This would of course be difficult to do and would require decades of data collection.
Thus, although laboratory and epidemiologic data confirm the plausibility of a causal connection between inadequate vitamin D and increased breast cancer risk, considerable uncertainty remains.
3) Collectively, these observations raise an additional question—one having to do with research study design and statistical analyses. Epidemiologic studies examining the relationship between vitamin D status and breast cancer risk usually “control for” age of menarche, since earlier menarche is itself associated with increased breast cancer risk. But this recent study suggests that controlling for age at menarche may not always be appropriate. If childhood vitamin D status influences age of menarche, it could thereby influence breast cancer risk. In general, variables within a causal pathway of an exposure-outcome of interest should not be controlled. In the recent IOM report Breast Cancer and the Environment: A Life Course Approach the committee said:
Moreover, confounders need to be understood as operating, not one-by-one, but rather in a complex network of causal relationships. Graphical tools, such as directed acyclic graphs (DAGs), are sometimes used to identify the appropriate confounders for control, and to identify which factors should not be controlled (Greenland et al., 1999; Hernan et al., 2002). This latter group consists of two categories of variables: (1) factors that are downstream of the exposure, and (2) factors that block a pathway between exposure and disease (e.g., they have antecedents, one that is associated with exposure and the other with disease). Some factors that are downstream of exposure may be intermediates on a causal pathway, but whether they are or not, control for them can introduce bias, except in very specific circumstances (Petersen et al., 2006). In most instances, factors that block an exposure–disease pathway should also not be controlled, in order to obtain unbiased measures of the association of interest.
Thus, in future studies of vitamin D and breast cancer risk, consideration will need to be given to a) childhood as well as adult levels of vitamin D and b) whether or not to control for age at menarche when that variable may be influenced by the exposure of interest (vitamin D status).
In summary, we can add earlier age of menarche to the list of potential health impacts that may be caused by inadequate levels of vitamin D—a common condition in the general population. This finding should be verified in a larger prospective study. The public health implications should not be underestimated.
For those who are interested, the Institute of Medicine report finds the evidence for many of the vitamin D–health endpoints, including breast cancer, insufficient to use for determining a recommended daily intake. But for those health endpoints with consistent, strong evidence here is their recommendation:
Vitamin D:
Recommended daily allowance (RDA) 600 IU daily, except 800 IU daily for men and women > 70 yrs of age;
Safe upper limit (UL): 1000-1500 IU infants; 2500-3000 IU children; 4000 IU adolescents and adults
The IOM report estimates that the average vitamin D intake for males in the US is 300-400 IU daily; for females 200-400 IU daily (varies with age; does not account for vitamin D from sun exposure). Thus, on average, vitamin D intake in the US is well below the RDA of 600 IU daily and well below the estimated safe upper limit.
By Carolyn Raffensperger
There is a lot of good writing on the precautionary principle appearing in academic journals. I should know, I am asked to peer review a lot of it. But there is one consistent mistake made in these articles. The authors focus their attention (and angst) on the definition of the precautionary principle. Many critics of precaution declare that all the different definitions of the principle render it meaningless or incomprehensible. What the critics and supporters of the principle miss when they limit their attention to the definition is that the precautionary principle is not self-implementing. There is nothing in the definition that tells you how to carry it out.
The two most commons definitions are the Rio Declaration and the Wingspread Definition. They are as follows:
Rio Declaration Principle 15
In order to protect the environment, the precautionary approach shall be widely applied by States according to their capabilities. Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation.
Wingspread Definition
When an activity raises threats of harm to human health or the environment, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically.
There are clear differences between these two definitions and the many others that are part of treaties, laws and policies around the world. Rio is stated passively and negatively: uncertainty shouldn’t be a reason to block action. Wingspread is stated actively and positively: precautionary measures should be taken when an activity raises threats of harm.
No matter what the differences are in the definitions, every single definition contains the same three elements—threats of harm, uncertainty and precautionary action. The beauty and power of the precautionary principle is that it is under-determined and fractal. By this I mean that it can apply to any environmental or public health issue and it can apply at any scale–from GMOs to nuclear power to climate change and from the international scale to choices made in your own home. But the fact that it is under-determined is what gives most critics heartburn. The definitions don’t tell you what to do.
I was one of the conveners of the Wingspread Conference in 1998, which was held specifically to design the steps to implement the precautionary principle. Over the past 13+ years we’ve identified 5 key elements to precautionary action. They are: heeding early warnings, setting goals, identifying and choosing the best alternatives, reversing the burden of proof, and engaging all stakeholders in democratic decision-making.
These steps are complete enough that they provide clear guidance to decision-makers. After all of these years and all the experiments with the precautionary principle, it is clear that we can stop arguing about the definitions and get on with the real work of taking precautionary action to prevent harm even when the science is uncertain.
By Carolyn Raffensperger
This morning’s news carried this headline “Atrazine link? Doctor sees ‘ominous trends,’ but no proof”. The story is about the link between an herbicide called atrazine and a birth defect called gastroschisis. Babies conceived in the spring near corn fields sprayed with atrazine are more likely to be born with this defect than babies who are conceived at other times of the year when atrazine is not being sprayed or in places distant from atrazine spraying. This particular birth defect is insidious, the baby’s intestines are on the outside of the body, rather than safely sheltered on the inside of the abdominal wall. Sometimes this can be repaired easily, but most of the time it requires multiple surgeries and a lifetime of disability.
My father, John Raffensperger is a pediatric surgeon. He specialized in gastroschisis and other childhood birth defects and tumors. When I was a child I knew one fact about gastroschisis: babies didn’t have a belly button because the abdominal wall was missing. My Dad would make one when he repaired the problem.
Birth defects like gastroschisis and various tumors in babies made him an environmentalist. When I was growing up he was the chief of pediatric surgery at Cook County Hospital and then surgeon-in-chief at Children’s Memorial, both in Chicago. One day he came home and said that he was seeing an increase in birth defects and childhood tumors. Since he had spent his entire career in Chicago, he had seen all of these childhood ills that had occurred in the Midwest for decades. He had been puzzling over the rising trend. He came to the conclusion that the cause was environmental pollutants. When he mentioned this to me, I asked him why he didn’t do something about it. He said he couldn’t prove the link between environmental contaminants and these ills. But he made environmental issues his personal cause because he knew, even without proof, that this suffering was preventable and it was his moral obligation to act.
We cannot rely on one person’s personal action to prevent this kind of suffering in babies. The problem is too grave and too large. As a society we must choose to produce our food, fiber and fuel without condemning babies to lives of misery and pain. We can and must employ the precautionary principle and take action to prevent suffering in the face of uncertainty. Is ethanol in our gas tanks really more important than a baby’s health?
If we wanted to make father’s day something more than golf outings, gifts of unwanted socks and tacky greeting cards, we would do everything in our power to prevent suffering in their children. To that end, I honor the work of my father and the love of all fathers by devoting my life to creating the conditions for health and to creating the conditions that will reduce the incidence of birth defects and childhood tumors. Every child deserves a belly button that comes from mom, not a scalpel. Happy Father’s Day.
By Carolyn Raffensperger
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Ancient ceremonies linger all around us
keeping the Earth turning on her axis.
The choreography takes you
into consideration.
Why don’t you dance?
Jamie K Reasor
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“There is a universal biological clock”, he says, “but it ticks in units of energy, not units of time.”
James Gillooly
Another word for ecosystem is “choreography” since an ecosystem is comprised of a multitude of synchronized relationships; dance partners that have evolved intricate, carefully timed steps. Flowers bloom and dance with hummingbirds. Cicadas emerge every 19 years and prune the forests on which they feed. Monarchs and white pelicans migrate fall and spring and depend on entire food buffet lines timed for the migration.
But we have smashed the rhythm section that keeps time for the Earth’s dances.
Mostly we are speeding up time. Although there are no conclusive definitions of time, one way of thinking about it is the sequencing of events. We have speeded up time through our use of fossil fuels and thereby altered the geochemical and biochemical sequencing of events in the natural world. A clear example is that the seasons now begin earlier. “Spring arrives an average of 1.7 days earlier now than it did in the first half of the 20th century, according to a new study. And there is less of a temperature difference between winter and summer.”
The reason for this difference is that the Earth is responding to the sun faster. The sun calls and the Earth responds. “The planet’s tilt toward the sun defines its seasons. On land, there’s about a 30-day lag between the sun at its maximum intensity and when the Earth is warmest. It takes the Earth those extra 30 days to soak up all the sun’s energy.“ Factors quickening the pace, “could include drier soils, which would increase the planet’s absorption of heat from the sun. Wetter soils take longer to heat up than drier soils…”
There are both biological and geological implications for this acceleration. Plants flower earlier, animals leave hibernation sooner and migrations occur earlier. For instance, plankton is blooming 50 days earlier in the Arctic. And last year 17 year cicadas emerged 4 years early in Iowa. But the dance partners don’t necessarily adapt to the changed rhythm. Whale migrations lag behind the plankton blooms or flowers don’t bloom when the pollinators migrate north leaving a food shortage for the winged ones.
In another example of how fossil fuels have jammed the biochemical timing of the dance, human girls are going through puberty at younger ages. Headlines in many papers on April 11, 2011 read, “Puberty starting earlier for many girls.” “About 15 percent of American girls now begin puberty by age 7, according to a study of 1,239 girls published last year in the journal Pediatrics. One in 10 white girls begin developing breasts by that age – twice the rate seen in a 1997 study. Among black girls, 23 percent hit puberty by age 7.” The wash of hormones that cascade through girls during puberty locks in certain things in the brain. It is harder to learn languages after puberty and almost impossible to learn a language without an accent.
These temporal changes have vast implications for life on this planet. Earlier seasons disrupt fundamental relationships of pollination or prey and predator. Earlier puberty increases the risk of breast cancer and other diseases in women. If everything speeded up, the dancers could stay in step with each other. But nature doesn’t work that way. For instance, some plants are light sensitive and some are temperature sensitive. If a migrating creature is dependent on a temperature sensitive food source, they migrate through a territory and are either too late or too early for an essential food.
Time has speeded up because we have tinkered with the universal biological clock and the universal geological clock. Both tick in units of energy. Humans have added so much energy to the system that time could only accelerate. Once geologic time is altered it is exceptionally difficult to slow time down.
We are at a turning point. We must get our energy and chemical budgets right or time will only accelerate.
There are two ways to slow these bio and geo chemicals rhythms. The first is to reduce and replace fossil fuels as our energy source. In contrast to fossil fuels, the sun has been a perfect metronome for the Earth’s dance. The second is to nurture resilience in our bio/geological communities, humans included.
A great deal has been written about reducing and replacing fossil fuels with current energy sources that are in tune with the sun. Less has been written about nurturing resilience in our communities and thereby slowing down these chemical rhythms. But there are some innovative experiments in community resilience that may help restore the choreography of biological and geological systems. Here are some possibilities with brief descriptions of experiments that people are trying now. All of these possibilities are based on the idea that nature is our model, mentor and measure.
1. Replace toxic chemicals with green alternatives. Too many of the toxic chemicals interfere with hormones that regulate biological systems like puberty. Green chemistry is a new field that can lead us to these alternatives. Green chemists are finding alternatives to toxic chemicals in plastics, solvents and electronics. This can only lead to healthier people and communities.
2. Increase the size and expand the diversity of wild places especially in cities and suburbs. One of the most innovative experiments is the Chicago Wilderness project. Because of accidents of history, Chicago has numerous patches of wild native prairie that are intact. Volunteers manage these prairies through prescribed burning and other techniques. Part of the original vision of Chicago Wilderness was to expand those marvelous prairies by having individual landowners planting native plants in their yards. Imagine that. Your yard could be part of a wilderness area. Here’s their logic: “Landscaping with native plants and creating a mini-prairie in your backyard is a great way to preserve Chicago Wilderness and create a healthier environment year after year. Native plants provide shelter and food to native wildlife more consistently, even during drought or freezing conditions. Native plants are beautiful, hardy, easy to maintain, and better for the environment because they require no fertilizer or mowing. The subtext to this argument for landscaping with native plants is that it reduces the use of fossil fuels and mitigates their effects.
3. Another way to restore the choreography of the Earth’s systems is to mimic them as carefully as we can in agriculture, medicine, and transportation. Excellent biomimicry experiments are being carried out in agriculture. At the Land Institute in Salina Kansas, Wes Jackson, is trying to develop an agricultural system based on the perennials modeled on the prairie. Perennials require far less fossil fuels and store far more carbon than annual grain crops. By creating a human food system that mimics the structure and function of a prairie ecosystem, we will establish a far more resilient agriculture. There will be less soil erosion, more biodiversity and fewer toxic chemicals at play.
Recognizing how we have altered the choreography of the ocean, forests and prairies is just a start. Learning the original dances and restoring the tempo by slowing the rhythm will go a long way to allowing future generations a place on the dance floor. As Miroslava Odalovic says,
dance the river is there to rise
dance touch me and close your eyes
dance the winds will touch your feet
just dance and dance feel the beat
…dance the river will find its mouth
dance east and west north and south
dance the river will find my lips
dance the poles to move my hips
dance the bees are dancing hives
dance the trees are swaying lives
dance the waves are breaking through
dance the sides for me and you
dance the birds are dancing flights
dance the stars are dancing nights
dance the currents dancing veins
dance in soils dancing grains
dance the last atom cutting a knot
just dance and dance until you cannot
By Carolyn Raffensperger
This morning friends and I were discussing the role of plants in mending the Earth. In the course of that conversation my friend Hawk described a neighbor’s plan to put 30 non-native roses in an Arizona desert garden. His point was that this is the opposite of mending. Roses in that garden will be dependent on humans for survival. They will suck up precious and scarce water. And they will get in the way of native plants that belong to that place. This conversation brought to mind these principles of restoration. They are equally applicable to human and ecosystem health.
Ten Principles of Restoration Plus One
1. The first rule of intelligent tinkering is to keep all the pieces.*
2. The goal of restoration is to enable the system or organism to renew itself.*
3. All restoration is undertaken in a bio-geo-mythic field. The mythic is part of the healing field because humans use stories to understand their relationship to each other and to the biological and geological elements. The mythic field can be as damaged as the physical components.
4. Death is essential. Remember the phoenix rose out of the ashes. But she needed the ashes.
5. A healthy system is resilient. It can move with disturbances, storms, the elements.
6. On Earth, every natural force is essential for restoration — fire, air, water, earth and dreams.
7. Every being has a place but not a place in every place. Membership is place specific.
8. Health is membership.** A being, a force, a myth, a cure, a technology, out of place is disease.
9. Human intervention must be scaled appropriately. The small respectful gesture is a good start.
10. Timing may be everything. Music and dance can teach us the right rhythm especially the music of the spheres, the dance of the pollinators.
0. Restoration is about restoring relationships. The only real rule of restoration is compassionate intimacy.
* After Aldo Leopold in Sand County Almanac
** After Wendell Berry in Another Turn of the Crank
by Nancy Myers
I am in grief over Japan. My personal feelings don’t matter but there is a pool of universal grief that disasters open up and we all find ourselves tapping into it, in one way or another. Port-au-Prince, Christchurch, Sendai. The Gulf of Mexico. The dying baby dolphins. And now, with Fukushima Daiichi (it means “Fukushima Number One” but it has 6 reactors), the grief ripples further back to Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Nagasaki, Hiroshima.
Grief has never seemed like a useful emotion—it just is. It is not a motivating force. It stops me rather than moves me. Anger seems more helpful, especially when disasters are human made. Anger focuses us on what is wrong and what needs to change. Anger moves us to action. Anger says never again.
But grief lasts longer. I still grieve over Chernobyl and that happened 25 years ago come April 26. I remember the date because it’s my wedding anniversary and because I was working at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists when that worst-case nuclear power scenario became a reality. I edited the articles about Chernobyl that we published in a special issue that September, which won a National Magazine Award.
The words of those articles haven’t stayed with me over the years—I had to look at the NYTimes diagrams to remind myself of how nuclear meltdowns happen.
What stays with me is the absolute, sinking grief over what was happening. Grief for the women and children and the unborn of the area, helpless in the fallout and the confusion. For the heroic workers who only half-knew what they were getting into when they were putting out the fires and entombing the reactor. Many got sick on the spot and died later. Grief for the poisoned soil and water and animals and plants. Grief for the human stupidity and heedlessness and desperation that leads to big mistakes. Grief for human arrogance.
And now I’m seeing it happen all over again in Fukushima. The details are different, of course. But it’s the same story, too. The big oops. Human beings apparently can’t foresee things like 9.0 earthquakes followed by tsunamis when siting systems like nuclear power plants where so many things can go wrong.
It’s grief that stops me again. I don’t know what to do. I don’t have anything to say that has not already been said. Of course we should stop nuclear power construction in its tracks. Of course we should review all our assumptions about safety. Of course we must get our own energy house in order. That’s been said before and we forget, we turn away.
If I were to march on a nuclear power plant today it would not be shouting and carrying signs. It would be wearing black. It would be in the company of mourners who know how to wail. It would be to sit in grief. It would be to keep open some wells into the universal pool of grief for as long as it takes.
by Nancy Myers
The other evening I found myself explaining and defending the precautionary principle once again. My new friend knew about the precautionary principle but he said, “My wife believes in it more strongly than I do.” I asked him what he meant by that and he said that if you take the principle to its ultimate conclusion it was absurd. You would never do anything.
Arrgh. And so I explained how the precautionary principle was more subtle and specific than that. It was clear that John agreed with actual precautionary policies; he just didn’t think that we should always be afraid of everything.
The precautionary principle is so close to some basic human emotions that people have difficulty seeing it as a rational course of action. Here it is, from the Wingspread Statement:
When an activity raises threats of harm to human health or the environment, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically.
The truth is, the principle is not only rational; it has strong emotional and ethical components. The emotional and ethical components are essential; they are part of what makes it a potentially robust framework for policy, to use some policyspeak.
We have written about the ethics of the precautionary principle (here for instance pdf). We’ve said less about its emotional components. I would like to deconstruct those here. The precautionary principle dips into three basic pools of human emotion: fear, love, and anger (all very broadly defined).
What John was sensing was the fear part. Critics dismiss the precautionary principle by saying it is all about fear: you are afraid of everything and you have to make sure the world is perfectly safe but it isn’t and never will be.
What the precautionary principle says is that fear—in the form of caution–has its place. When there is real reason to be careful, “when an activity raises threats of harm,” act accordingly! That is common sense, not an absolute.
But the precautionary principle is not just against what we fear; it is laid down on the side of what we love. We proclaim in the precautionary principle that “human health and the environment” are worth protecting.
The protection part, those “precautionary measures” that should be taken, will often have an edge of resistance to them, a “no.” Resistance is a polite but firm form of anger. And even though precautionary measures take a host of positive forms—alternatives assessment, goal-setting, restoration—people are more emotionally tuned in to the potential no’s of precautionary action than to the yeses and the win-win solutions. They feel or imagine the resistance and resist back. That may change with time but for now we are still divided into camps about “precautionary measures.” Voir the current absurdist extremists in Congress declaring war on all protective functions of government that are directed toward human health and the environment.
We can’t avoid or fully control these emotional responses but we can be aware of them and even use them for the power they give our principles, actions, and policies.
For example, the most powerful motivation behind the precautionary principle may be the protection of today’s children and future generations. We act with appropriate resistance as well as foresight, taking great care (appropriate caution), on behalf of those who come after us. We are not sissies afraid of taking risks; we are, in fact, ready to take heroic action for the future of human life on this earth.
Does the precautionary principle really say all that? It does to me. I’ve lived with it for more than a decade and it still has power for me.
But I’m really tired of explaining it.
By Carolyn Raffensperger
Question: Could the concept of rights serve as a unifying theme for a progressive agenda?
The Golden Rule and the sacredness of all life unify the environmental and social justice movements, according to Paul Hawken in his book, Blessed Unrest. These are ethical precepts that stand in contrast to the dominant political theory that free market economics is the standard by which we measure the success of law and public policy. The environmental and social justice movements have arisen in large part to counter the damage to the Earth and to people from pursuing a free market agenda.
“Free market economics” or free market agenda” is shorthand for the proposition that economics is the exclusive measure of value and that corporations should be given free rein to use the planet and people in order to make profits for their shareholders and CEOs. Inequities, pollution, and all the other consequences of this agenda are worth it because the market will adjust and correct for flaws. This view is expressed and reinforced over and over again. For example, The Guardian ran a story about the large bonuses in that banking industry and contains this stunning passage: “Lord Griffiths, vice-chairman of Goldman Sachs International and a former adviser to Margaret Thatcher, said banks should not be ashamed of rewarding their staff. Speaking to an audience at St Paul’s Cathedral in London about morality in the marketplace last night, Griffiths said the British public should ‘tolerate the inequality as a way to achieve greater prosperity for all’.”
A corollary of the free market agenda is that growth is essential for a healthy economy. This means that consumer protection, fair wages, regulations, or anything that gets in the way of growth and profits blocks the free market and should be minimized or eliminated.
Free market economic policies did not arise spontaneously but emerged out of a series of historical events and the work of intellectuals who created an integrated theoretical and strategic framework designed to suppress antiwar, civil rights and environmental efforts and promote a free market ideology. The most influential of these is the Powell Memo written by Lewis Powell for the Chamber of Commerce in 1971. Powell opens his memo with this description: “No thoughtful person can question that the American economic system is under broad attack. This varies in scope, intensity, in the techniques employed, and in the level of visibility.”
Powell made the argument that freedom was the essential foundation of the United States and that economic freedom was the basis for other freedoms. The freedoms Powell identified as essential were “private ownership, private profit, labor unions, collective bargaining, consumer choice, and a market economy in which competition largely determines price, quality and variety of the goods and services provided the consumer.” Powell was particularly critical of social justice and environmental groups and activists, calling out a few for particular criticism, most notably Ralph Nader, since these groups by their very nature interfered with the free market thereby impinging on the economic freedoms Powell thought were essential to America.
The Powell memo was was ultimately translated into a legislative agenda crafted by Newt Gingrich and the Republican Party and put forward in the 1994 Contract with America. The Contract was deliberately constructed to undermine civil rights, civil liberties, and environmental regulation and aggressively support and protect business.
Meanwhile, social justice and environmental groups have grown in number and sophistication. They have won many important victories. But the social ills and environmental threats are increasing in spite of the diligent and heroic efforts of civil society. Global warming, the number of black men in prison, the increase in chronic diseases in humans, child soldiers, the loss of pollinators, immigration raids, women conscripted as sex slaves, are all significant diagnostics that tell us that the social fabric and the web of the natural world continue to unravel. Note that each item on the list above is discrete and seemingly independent of the others. They are not. They are all symptoms of the problems of the free market agenda. The question is whether we can see a unifying pattern and context that provides a path to solutions.
In an essay on a new economic framework, Otto Scharmer says, “[t]he crisis conversation is happening all over the place. What’s interesting is that each of the … crises has its own discourse, its own NGO (each working with a single-issue mindset), conferences, journals, websites, funding mechanisms, programs, and so forth. While all these single-issue groups of change-makers engage in well-intentioned work, there are two missing pieces: one, a discourse across all these silos about how these issues are interconnected, and two, a discourse about the systemic root causes that continuously reproduce the whole cluster of crises mentioned above.”
It’s time to fill in these missing pieces. If Hawken is right that the Golden Rule and the sacredness of all life unify environmental and social justice groups, the question is whether they can be translated into policy and legal threads that go beyond the aspirational and connect all the silos.
Why law and policy? One definition of “law” is that it is the set of rules a community has agreed to live by. Essentially law, either made by legislators or the courts, is an expression of the minimum ethical rules that allow us to live together. We’ve based our law on free market economics but that is no longer an adequate expression of the two ethical principles Hawken describes. Our legal rules guarantee that corporations have more rights than ecosystems; we have a stronger right to own a gun than to have clean water; industries are allowed to poison children if they have done a reasonable cost benefit analysis. This is wrong.
There is one central set of rules that can change the game so that the game reflects our ethics. That set of rules is organized on the basis of rights. Rights take moral standards and translate them into a legal mandate. We have a venerable history of expanding rights, from the Magna Carta to the 1948 Declaration of Human Rights, that we can use to create a unified progressive political agenda for the 21st century. A rights approach takes justice and environmental issues out of the narrow box of the free market. and since the concept of rights has a different logic and different rules from free market economic agenda, it provides a better chance for long term protection of the Earth and more justice between people.
For instance, environmental law is almost exclusively a species of the free market law described above. The regulations applying environmental law are cost-benefit analysis and risk assessment. These regulatory tools weigh the environmental or public health benefits against the economy. But rights law, especially the tradition of human rights, stands outside economics. We do not ask what the value of slavery is to the economy and then regulate slavery by, say, requiring owners to treat slaves a little better. Instead, we say it is wrong and illegal. We do not apply a cost-benefit test to slaves. There are other things like environmental issues that should be moved out of the rules of the free market and into the logic and rules of rights.
We can start with the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The Declaration lays out fundamental rights that attach to every human being. It is not law but it has the force of law since most countries sanction any country that regularly violates the rights defined in the Declaration. But this hugely influential document is outdated and lacks some rights that are essential in the 21st century: there is no right to a clean and healthy environment. Even the handful of U.S. state constitutions that identify an environmental right do not make it an inalienable right. A U.S. citizen has a stronger right to own a gun than they have to breathe clean air.
The list of rights could go far beyond the individual right to a clean environment. We can extend this right to future generations. The rapidly deteriorating atmosphere and resulting climate change is driving visionary legal work that would assign responsibility for safeguarding the rights of future generations.
There are many other rights that could be fully embodied as a matter of policy and law, particularly the rights of children, elders, indigenous people, women and gay and lesbian people. Nor have we fully developed a rights law that addresses poverty, racism, incarceration, the death penalty, or immigration. But we can.
Why and How
If the concept of rights is a useful organizing principle, it suggests a map of work. Here are seven tasks.
1) Reframe the political debate and reclaim the language of rights from the narrow confines of the right to own guns and property, which now occupy much of the political space.
2) Build in corresponding notions of duty and responsibility to balance the language of rights.
3) Develop new political ideas and language that are corollaries of the rights agenda. For instance, it may be time to create a new legal standard, the respectful person standard to replace the reasonable person standard in certain kinds of cases.
4) Reassert the constitutional protection of rights even in the face of majority rule.
5) Integrate the legitimate rights claimed by conservatives.
6) Articulate a theory of government that can provide a compelling rationale for government policy, size, funding and action.
7) Align tactics and strategy with the core philosophy.
Principles Derived from Rights
In order to unify the social justice and environmental movements we need to find common principles that can be used to draft a progressive agenda analogous to the Republicans’ Contract With America. An example of one such principle might be the precautionary principle, which directs decision-makers to prevent harm by taking precautionary action in the face of scientific uncertainty and the likelihood of harm. Preventing harm rather than fixing it later is probably a shared principle across many of the social justice domains.
Many of these principles will be found at the intersections of issue domains. For instance, what is at the intersection of women’s rights and the right to a clean environment? Or community rights and those of elders and future generations?
In sum it is time to challenge the outdated legal norms predicated on the free market and individual rights to property. It is time to expand and deepen our ethical moorings by creating a policy framework suitable for the 21st century. It is time to create a unified political agenda and strategy built on the core concept of rights.
By Carolyn Raffensperger
My friend and SEHN board member Rebecca Altman posted this comment after the blog entitled the Respectful Generation Standard:
“Carolyn, … I feel like my interaction with SEHN to date has been like a mind-blowing, eye-opening reading list. I would be interested, and perhaps other readers here, too, might love to read your list of essential readings, a post, perhaps to build on your Letter to a Young Person (re: hope). I haven’t read Susan Griffin’s work, but tonight feel so grateful for the introduction. After visiting her website, I am so eager to get to reading: I like that she merges explorations of the body and the body politic, a dual project I am stumbling through, too, as I plot out –terribly slowly, I fear– my own work on being pregnant, studying biomonitoring science and human body burdens of persistent chemicals, and following the hypothetical path these molecules travel from factory to the Circumpolar north. I think Susan’s examples might be both an inspiring and productive read. Thank you, as always.”
The Essential Library
The backbone of the environmentalist’s library is comprised of a few great classics. These books are timeless, poetic and cross-disciplinary.
Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac might be the most essential book because he is working out a new ethic that translates across all environmental issues. Leopold is a household name in the conservation and sustainable agriculture communities but less known in the environmental health/toxic chemical movements.
Everyone should read something by Rachel Carson. While Silent Spring is best known, any of her works that meld poetry with science are worth the money and the time.
Edward Abbey’s two books, the Monkey Wrench Gang and Desert Solitaire transformed my understanding of how environmentalists could go about their work. You may not agree with Abbey, but he never writes a boring sentence. He also shows how fiction and humor can galvanize a movement, as the Monkey Wrench Gang did.
Wendell Berry’s poetry and many of his essays are so expressive and so full of heart that his words have become part of my cellular structure. His Collected Poems, especially the Mad Farmer poems, or his essays on economics, many of which are available on the web, rise to the level of sacred texts for most environmentalists.
Every book by Barry Lopez has a treasured place on my shelf. I particularly loved Winter Count, Arctic Dreams and Crossing Open Ground. If you only read one book by Lopez read The Rediscovery of North America.
The poetry of Mary Oliver rarely makes its way into my speeches or writings but it is the single place I turn to for comfort in the dark night of the environmental soul. Many of her poems are more familiar to me than the color of my own eyes. Start with her poem Wild Geese.
Books that showed up at the right time:
The next ring out from the heart of my library contains books that showed up at exactly the right time for the questions I was asking.
Keith Basso’s Wisdom Sits in Places continues to inform my understanding about how people can live in one place for a very long time. Basso describes the White Mountain Apache cultural practices that tie ethics and stories to a place, that guide right living. They have something that European Christian immigrants cannot reproduce on this continent because their spiritual and ethical life is anchored to the land.
Albert Camus’ writings for the French resistance’s periodical, Combat during World War II are a sideways glance into the philosophy of activism. I am fascinated by this existentialist’s struggle to resist the Nazis and find meaning. The analogue to the environment is self-evident. There are several translations out that do justice to Camus’ writings.
The Harvard scientist Dick Levins thinks more interesting thoughts per square inch than almost anyone else. He thinks systemically and ethically. His book The Dialectical Biologist is a good starting place.
Gretel Ehrlich’s writings are eclectic and reflect a gritty, beautiful, feminine perspective. I first read her fiction and then books that might be more appropriately found in the travel section. They were particularly useful to me as a younger woman with an ecological sensibility finding my way in the west.
Michael Ventura and James Hillman’s book We’ve had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World is Getting Worse was revelatory. It was the impetus for integrating my spiritual life, especially dreams, with my environmental work. Hillman’s other works reach far into interesting, unexplored territory. It is always worth reading.
I read every single book about Arctic and Antarctic exploration. I’m not going to explain why, because there is no good reason except they make me remember what I am trying to protect. I particularly enjoy books that were illustrated by good artists like Rockwell Kent.
Place specific books:
I am always reading fiction to answer some question that follows me relentlessly. The question I’ve been trying to answer for the longest time is, “what is the impact of the landscape on either the soul or the community?”
Louise Erdrich’s novels about North Dakota and Minnesota are some of the most vivid and evocative of any fiction I’ve ever read. Love Medicine is in my top 20 books of all time.
Bless Me Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya is an exquisite and tender story of a little boy in Northern New Mexico.
Terry Tempest Williams book Refuge: an Unnatural History of Family and Place describes the desecration of both the land and her mother’s body from the nuclear bomb testing in Utah.
Gary Snyder’s book the Practice of the Wild, or any of his essays describing the etiquette necessary for humans to behave well in the wild, are just plain Zen beautiful.
Jim Harrison’s novels about Michigan’s Upper Peninsula are entrancing. He can get his Y chromosome to swagger with the best of them, but he has a deep love of the land, of food, and a tenderness for all of his characters, flaws and all. Start with True North or anything else that jumps off the shelf at you.
John Nichols’ the Milagro Beanfield War trilogy is a rich tribute to New Mexico and the struggle over water. Lots of good guys and bad guys and beautiful descriptions of land.
Rebecca Solnit is another person who can weave more disparate thoughts together than a mortal should be able to do. Her book Hope in the Dark is one of the best for the activist facing the inevitable losses in our field.
My friends:
Another category of books are by my peers and friends who serve the environmental community as public intellectuals. I read these books and come from those pages thinking new thoughts that I use shamelessly in my work. All of these people are dear personal friends.
Susan Griffin has one of the widest-ranging minds I’ve ever encountered. A Chorus of Stones was my introduction to her work.. Excerpts can be found on-line. But buy the book. Her recent book Wrestling with the Angel of Democracy is a tour de force.
Caroline Casey has one book out, but I’m going to recommend her radio program the Visionary Activist, or her Bioneers’ talks as more nutrient dense than a green smoothie. She has a capacity to use language in ways that only the Gods had before her.
Sandra Steingraber, is another poet scientist. Any of her books from Living Downstream to her book of poetry or her forthcoming book Raising Elijah will change the way you see the world around you.
Derrick Jensen has an intellectual depth that is unparalleled. One of the joys of reading, say, A Language Older than Words, is that you don’t have to agree with him, but if you accept his premises, it’s pretty difficult to explain why you disagree with him. He’s worth reading because of the clarity of his prose and his crystalline logic.
Last Category: the Important Books I haven’t read yet
I am always hunting for books that will change the way I see the world, the way I think about environmental problems. These are rarely environmental books. But I operate on the belief that the right books, the best authors will find me when I need them. These books are almost always in another discipline, music or medicine, fiction or poetry. I am always hunting for the beautiful phrase, the paragraph that pulls together paradox or wonder. If you need books like this, they will find you too.
By Carolyn Raffensperger
I wrote this essay for the peace making group everyday gandhis. It was published in their Winter 2009 newsletter with the title “The Outcome of Council is the End of War.” I am revisiting the theme of what it means to give River a voice.
http://everydaygandhis.org/
I wonder what Homer means by these words in the Iliad? “The outcome of war is in our hands; the outcome of words is in the council.” The Iliad is an ancient, long and eloquent poem about war, war and more war. But there is one stunning sequence about peace that begins with the death of Patroclus, the beloved childhood friend of the Greek soldier Achilles. Achilles’ utter grief at the loss of his friend replaces the burning wrath that drives his war-making. Rather than avenge Patroclus’ death, Achilles calls a council. He does not bargain or require a quid pro quo. He simply ends the warring feud with King Agamemnon. The king, in a stunning turn of events says it was he who was blinded by the gods and he makes amends with Achilles. The outcome of council? The end of war.
This story has all the more resonance today within the context of everyday ghandis. How do we make peace? How do we sustain peace? How do we mend the broken world? An answer everyday ghandis is exploring is Council, gathering together all people, listening to dreams, gathering wisdom, making decisions.
Deena Metzger, senior adviser to everyday ghandis once told me that Council is the new form of political decision-making. At the time I heard this I was deeply involved in the state of Iowa’s political process for selecting the president of the United States. Iowa is the first in the nation to choose among presidential contenders. We winnow the candidates and decide who the best might be. We do it through a quasi-council process called caucusing. We gather together and talk and vote and talk some more. Then we vote, publicly and with our bodies – we go to stand together in small groups under the banner of the candidate we like.
But I wondered whether we might make wiser decisions if we moved beyond selecting our hierarchical leaders in a council-like way and actually governed through egalitarian council.
There’s something downright peculiar about western democracy that presupposes our biggest concerns are individual self-interests and that most of those self-interests are economic. Me me me. Money money money. This means that my government officials are mostly protecting the Gross National Product, corporations, and banks. Forget clean air, clean water, the forests, or honey bees. As the United States has demonstrated we’ll go to war to protect our “interests”. This theory of government is oblivious to the fact that we actually love some things more than money and that we come to the political table with values about family, community, health and the environment. This “me” theory of government exemplifies the sociologist Max Weber’s definition of the state as holding a monopoly on violence because we grant government the right to protect those interests. This means that we, the body politic, grant the right to the state to go to war in our name to defend our self-interests, all that me-ness, all that money and right now, all that oil.
A different theory of government, the public trust doctrine, takes into account the values larger and more vibrant than self and economics. The public trust doctrine is an extension of Roman law and the Magna Carta that gave governments the responsibility to care for shores, rivers and other things we hold in common. It essentially says that the government is the trustee of the commonwealth and the common health for present and future generations.
Now it’s one thing to have a hierarchical leadership making unilateral decisions even on behalf of the rivers, it is another thing to have many voices at the table bringing unique perspectives to bear on decisions. If the only decisions are about money and me, we can send our leaders to the capital and they can fiddle with the economy. But if the decisions are about communities of beings and communities of place, the decisions are not about isolated things but about relationships. In these relationships we treat the other as a Thou rather than an It, to paraphrase Martin Buber.
Take rivers for example. The French philosopher, Bruno Latour, has suggested that rivers are important political actors–his definition of actor is “make a difference”. The implication is that we are in relationship to rivers. As the wise elder Joanna Macy says, “The beings that co-exist with us in the web of life are profoundly affected by our actions, yet they have no hearing in our human deliberations and policies, no voice to call us to account.” So Latour urges us to represent these beings politically. This means, as a political matter, not just a spiritual matter, that we treat the river as a Thou rather than as an It. They need a voice since a politics reduced to transactions on behalf of the individual human and money leaves out everything of beauty and meaning.
One way to, say, give rivers a voice is to appoint a Guardian for the Rivers, someone who speaks for the rivers in the body politic. That person speaks out of her I-Thou relationship with the river. Other Guardians need to represent all the other beings connected to the river. The most effective way to make political decisions then, is to do it in council. To sit together in council and protect the relationships of elk to river and river to fish and fish to eagle and eagle to elk by being the voice of elk and river and fish and eagle. Joanna Macy and her colleague John Seed created a practice to do just that in their Council of All Beings. According to Joanna, “The Council of All Beings is a communal ritual in which participants step aside from their human identity and speak on behalf of another life-form.” http://www.joannamacy.net/
I wonder too, if Achilles brought the River into the council when he unilaterally declared peace? There is a rich story in the Iliad about the River Skamandros. At one point Achilles is so angry he drives half the Trojans into the Skamandros and kills them. The River is infuriated by being clogged up with all the dead bodies and rises up to defeat Achilles. In a remarkable intervention by Fire sent by the goddess Hera, the River is beaten back by the flames and Achilles is protected from the wrath of the River. Perhaps by bringing the Guardian of the River along with the Guardian of Fire into council peace can be wrought and sustained.
In November 2008, in Des Moines Iowa, I participated in a council of river rascals (their words), which we called a River Congress. One of the things we did was brainstorm a list of river rights, which I’ve adapted here. It’s what a river might say about its own rights and therefore about the rights of all beings.
As a river…
I have the right to be full of life.
I have the right to use my flood plain.
I have the right to natural change.
I have the right to run free.
I have the right to be respected.
I have the right to be healthy.
I have the right to run free of trash.
I have the right to be recognized.
I have the right to be represented.
I have the right to take my time.
I am sacred.
http://www.iowarivers.org/Legislative/RiverBillofRights/tabid/84/Default.aspx
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