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By Ted Schettler MD MPH
What is health? How do we measure it? What determines it? A new report from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute takes a turn at answering these questions. “County Health Rankings: Mobilizing action toward community health” combines weighted measures of health outcomes and health determinants to define and rank the health of individual counties throughout the US.
Premature mortality and morbidity, estimated by a combination of how healthy people feel and the percent of low birth weight babies, were given equal weight as measures of health outcomes. Various measures of health behaviors, clinical care, social and economic factors, and the physical environment were weighted as measures of health determinants and expressed as composite scores. The website also provides comparative rankings of health outcomes and measures of health determinants at the county level. The authors describe their methods of data collection and analysis in some detail, including a justification of their final choices for weighting individual variables in the composite score. This remarkable effort is worth exploring.
At the outset, the authors had to choose among many candidate health outcomes and determinants. How did they do? Are these the right measures of health or just available statistics? What other health determinants could reveal important insights? Several limits are notable. Among them: This is a cross-sectional analysis and cannot determine causal relationships. Genetics, gender, race, and ethnicity are left out. The relative contribution of each group of health determinants always adds up to 100%, regardless of context. (Health behaviors were assigned a weight of 40%, health care 10%, socioeconomic factors 40%, and the physical environment 10% for the final composite score. The justification for these relative weights and alternative opinions are available on the website.) Thus, potential interactions among health determinants are not considered.
For example, the report uses air pollution as a measure of environmental quality, yet it doesn’t acknowledge that people who are socioeconomically disadvantaged are more susceptible to the health effects of air pollution than people who are better off. It’s increasingly clear that air pollution causes more asthma and asthma attacks in children lower on the socioeconomic ladder, independent of other environmental exposures. How should we think about this? Is the problem air pollution, socioeconomic stressors, or both? How does our answer influence what we propose to do? If we ignore interactions, we not only underestimate the impacts of combined eco-social variables in vulnerable groups but also set ourselves up to fail to identify interventions that can have multiple, crosscutting benefits.
Despite its inevitable simplifications and assumptions, this detailed report deserves attention and discussion, especially among those of us embracing an ecological model of health. It raises many interesting questions. Is this the right mix of individual and county-wide variables? Are there other measures of health at the county level worth identifying? Are there other measures of environmental quality and integrity that should be added?
Maybe the report’s biggest contribution will be to set the stage for soliciting ideas about what to do with the information. Should high-ranking counties be complacent? Should they compete with themselves to improve? Counties struggling with poor health outcomes and multiple adverse health determinants will need something more than disconnected, poorly coordinated activities. They must understand that risk factors don’t exist in isolation but rather in a complex, interactive web of causation. In those counties, the entire web needs fundamental transformation, achieved through creative, strategic interventions. This is no small task. I think of Donella Meadows’ Places to Intervene in a System in which she says, “There are no cheap tickets to systems change. The higher the leverage point, the more the system resists changing it.” This is where the environmental health movement comes in: strength in numbers, ideas, and mutual support.
By Carolyn Raffensperger
Note: Just last week I heard yet another reason why a government agency couldn’t regulate toxic chemicals in children’s toys. That incident inspired me to compile all the excuses I’ve heard over the years about why the public has to put up with the polluting, damming, bulldozing, and mining destruction of the Earth. Why exactly can’t we get industry to take responsibility for their actions? Why exactly is it that government can’t prevent or minimize harm to the public? Here’s the list.
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1. We can’t regulate because there is no proof that this (toxic chemical, power plant, dam, mining operation) is harmful.
2. Even if you demonstrate that this is harmful you can’t regulate it because you will take away jobs.
3. Even if you show that we still will have jobs, you can’t regulate this because the agency doesn’t have the authority since: (choose one)
- A. the facility is outside its political jurisdiction
- B. the legislature hasn’t granted the authority to regulate
- C. it is unconstitutional and conflicts with the Commerce Clause or the nonDelegation doctrine.
4. We can’t regulate it because the agency doesn’t have the money/staff to handle it.
5. The feds can’t regulate it because it interferes with states’ rights.
6. The states can’t regulate it because it is under federal law.
7. We can’t regulate this (pesticide, flame retardant, plasticizer) because if you do you will have sick and dying babies who won’t have enough to eat, or will burn up in their cribs, or will break their bottles. even if they are poisoned with toxic chemicals.
8. We can’t regulate it because we don’t have any alternative.
9. We can’t regulate it because it is a taking and and the business will require compensation for the lost business.
10. We can’t regulate this because the courts will overturn the regulation.
11. The courts won’t act because they can’t usurp the legislator’s responsibility.
12. We can’t regulate because the market will solve the problem.
13. But we can’t provide our confidential business information to the public because then the consumer won’t buy our product and the economy will collapse.
14. We can’t regulate because the public isn’t ready for such a big change.
15. We can’t regulate this because regulation is (choose one)
- A. Socialism
- B. Communism
- C. Fascism
- D. UnAmerican
- E. All of the above
0. Besides, there is no proof that this (toxic chemical, power plant, dam, mining operation) is harmful.
By Carolyn Raffensperger
Perhaps the old reductionistic, objective science is a form of autism. This is the science that promotes dissecting frogs, but not loving them enough to work to protect them. It is the science that does risk assessment on toxic chemicals and says that some childhood cancers are acceptable. It is science funded by industry designed to block precautionary action on greenhouse gases.
But there are other scientists who are upfront about their emotional engagement with the subjects of their research. The primatalogist, Jane Goodall, is explicit and unapologetic about the role of empathy in her studies with chimpanzees. “There is absolutely no problem in having empathy and being objective. Empathy helps us gain an understanding at a different level that you can then test in a rigorous scientific way.”
The word science comes from the Latin “scientia,” meaning knowledge covering general truths of the operation of general laws as obtained and tested through the scientific method. The word science can also refer to any systematic field of study or the knowledge gained from it. The purpose of science is to produce useful models of reality.
The big worry about emotions is that they will interfere with the systematic study and the basic truths. If Jane Goodall is emotionally involved with chimpanzees, will her research be biased? Will it be replicable by other scientists? Will it distort the truth? Maybe. But consider a different possibility, what if her empathy actually allows her to get at larger truths than she would be able to discover without empathy?
Goodall is describing the difference between science as an I-Thou relationship between scientist and subject and an I-It relationship between scientist and object. She is claiming that objectivity does not require that the subject of the research become an object, an “It” for the science to be rigorous and truthful and expand human knowledge. Objectivity is a quality that remains with the scientist but does not prevent the round emotions of emotion, respect, generosity between scientist and subject.
I recently received a poignant email from a dear friend, an epidemiologist, about her display of emotion in a media interview on toxic chemicals. “I cried,” she said. Her tears were in response to the interviewer who said: “I really want to touch women. I really want women to feel that this is an issue of concern to them. What would you tell a woman?’ “That was it. I talked about all the women I know trying to conceive, who can’t conceive or have had miscarriages, and how their experience is not reflected in the science I encounter, and the science that exists is not translated in a manner that is meaningful, and so women feel alone, and often to blame. And that we should make this an issue of greater meaning than just our own concerns, and join together.”
What my friend was saying is that all of the epidemiology, all of the toxicology, didn’t come close to resembling a model of reality, that basic definition of science. Maybe it got at the reality of causation and infertility–a piece of the reality model–but it missed the physical, social and emotional facts of infertility. This scientist was bearing witness to the suffering of the women who cannot conceive and those who have lost babies and those who feel alone in their suffering. Tears were the only appropriate response.
Both my friend and Jane Goodall stand for a larger premise than the narrow confines of “science as knowledge”. They are practicing a deep empathy. They are bearing witness. They are creating a “science as wisdom”.
What, I wonder, would we want of our scientists who are predicting the climate of 100 years from now? I hope that they bear witness. I hope that they not only create a scientific body of research that can be called wisdom but that they call us all to wisdom and action to prevent harm. I for one trust the scientist who is capable of a deep empathy with future generations to ask the right questions and search hard and well for good answers.
By Carolyn Raffensperger
The Obama administration is taking on a sacred cow –space missions. They want to privatize the rocket fleet and thereby reduce the costs of NASA so they can balance the federal budget. Of all the agencies that are near and dear to American’s hearts, it is NASA and their remarkable space explorations. The opposition, though loud and vociferous, has been relatively vague about the grounds for their opposition. The strongest argument they’ve made against privatization is that inexperienced corporations responsible for complex rockets will threaten astronaut safety.
There are better grounds for objecting to selling the public space program. This proposal should be quashed because privatization is the first step in a celestial land grab by corporations. If corporations own the only vehicles to get to the moon or Mars, what is to prevent them from claiming those bodies as their own property?
Here’s the logic. Imagine 10 years down the road when Corporation X owns the only rockets that take tourists and astronauts to the moon and other celestial bodies. Then they lay claim to the airport on the moon and use that as their base for mining the moon for resources.
This is not the first chess move by corporations to gain exclusive access to the moon. For decades corporations have been developing technology to beam advertising on the moon. Imagine looking up at the night sky and seeing the logo of your (least) favorite business emblazoned across the face of moon.
Entirely missing from the conversation is whether or not we want corporations to own land on other celestial bodies. Corporations have long understood the value of owning the last frontier – space — and lobbied in the 1970s to prevent the United States from signing the Moon Treaty. A basic premise of the treaty is that the moon is the common heritage of everyone. That does not fit the basic model of the free market, which seeks to privatize benefits and externalize costs.
Until we clarify that space is the common heritage of everyone, not just private corporations in the United States, but everyone in every nation, until we have legally binding treaties to establish the commons and care of the commons, including the celestial commons, for present and future generations, then we need to leave space exploration in public hands. We don’t have to fund it, but we can’t hand it over to private corporations. We can begin by signing the Moon Treaty and acknowledging that we share the moon and all of space with all generations.
By Nancy Myers
I’ve been thinking about cumulative impacts.
This is not my choice. I’d rather be thinking about my coming grandchild than about this lumpy, awkward term, “cumulative impacts.” But my work at SEHN points me to this, and I do this work for that grandchild.
Jargony as it may be, “cumulative impacts” is descriptive. Impacts are blows; they hurt. When they accumulate over time and from many sources they are cumulative. They add up, and the whole is often greater than the sum of the parts.
The planet is suffering from the cumulative impacts of the industrial age. A “safe operating space for humanity” requires respecting the boundaries of nine key planetary systems, a group of scientists wrote last fall. Three of these boundaries have already been overstepped.
Many people’s bodies are suffering from the cumulative impacts of too many stresses–chemical, environmental, personal, and social. Breast cancer incidence has risen from one in 25 in my mother’s generation to one in 7 in mine. Autism, learning disabilities, reproductive disorders are multiplying. No single cause can be pinned down; many factors are interacting.
Many communities are suffering from the cumulative impacts of too much pollution from too many sources. This may come on top of other stressors such as joblessness, poverty, racism, poor schools, poor diet, crime, and epidemic chronic disease—with some of these factors serving as both cause and effect.
“Cumulative impacts” stands for overwhelmed, inundated, plagued, besieged, beleaguered. It makes me tired to think about this.
Do you have a personal strategy for dealing with being overwhelmed? I do. It involves three things: emergency care, streamlining, and re-energizing. Maybe these strategies can apply to a besieged world.
Emergency care. We must give priority to the health of the most vulnerable populations, communities, ecosystems, and planetary systems. Surely the health and wellbeing of future generations should get top priority. Believe me, I’m encouraging my daughter to shelter herself and her 4-month fetus as much as possible from chemical and other assaults.
But individuals can only do so much. At SEHN we are working on a number of tools that would give legal priority to vulnerable systems, including the planetary climate and struggling communities. These tools include the precautionary principle, rights of future generations, and strengthening environmental justice in the law. We need more legal tools and the political will to implement them. Our laws, as Caitlin Sislin says, must tell a different story.
Streamline. We must concentrate on the important stuff and stop wasting time. We must streamline the process of detecting, predicting, and addressing harmful impacts. That’s a thrust of current proposals and experiments in chemical policy reform. This includes shifting the burden of proof, assessing innate hazards rather than chemical-by-chemical risks, and developing robust processes that actually prevent harm to vulnerable systems rather than evaluate harm after the fact. These systems and processes must be painstakingly worked out in law and science. While we must not waste time, there are few shortcuts. We have to slow down, step back, and learn how to do it right.
Re-energize. This is the fun part, as far as I am concerned–developing cross-cutting solutions that address many problems at once and that spark healing and creativity on every scale, from the individual to the planetary. This includes everything from green chemistry, alternative energy jobs, and walkable communities to serving local organic food in hospitals. This is your backyard permaculture experiment, creation care in church, the cheerful organization called Teens Turning Green.
When I’m feeling overwhelmed I need help. Because of cumulative impacts, we all need to help and be helped. The good news is, we all can.
Guest Blog by Caitlin Sislin
As a young environmental attorney, I am fortunate to count Carolyn Raffensperger as one of my most trusted mentors. Carolyn’s advice and guidance deeply inform my work as the Advocacy Director for Women’s Earth Alliance, where I am building and stewarding a new pro bono legal and policy advocacy initiative to support indigenous environmental justice movements. Advocates within the Sacred Earth Advocacy Network apply their skills and expertise in collaboration with indigenous women environmental leaders, working towards justice and sustainability on issues like coal and uranium mining, power plants and waste dumps, and sacred sites desecration.
In facing the seeming intractability of these entrenched, systemic problems – the exploitation of land and concomitant decimation of culture – I have grappled with the question of how my contribution can truly make a difference. In these times I draw solace and inspiration from Carolyn’s way of working. I see her, and her colleagues at SEHN, telling the story of another paradigm. They are patiently and tirelessly describing the contours of a more just, earth-bound, peace-bringing environmental policy framework, thereby offering clear and comprehensive alternatives to our current legal regime that supports the destruction of our mother earth. Watching SEHN so effectively tell these stories – of the precautionary principle, ecological medicine, guardianship, law for the ecological age – inspires me to also be a voice for what is possible. So I asked myself about the deeper potential inherent in environmental justice advocacy; these were my thoughts, in response.
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What is advocacy? Storytelling with a purpose, with an impact. Effective storytelling. What happens when a story is told effectively? People listen, and are moved. Change can occur.
Which stories do we tell?
To whom do we tell them?
How do we tell them?
Advocacy is the narration of a story, in an effort to convince an arbiter that one of two (or more) competing stories is the more correct, the more just. Justice is the arbiter’s choice of the story which most aligns with a shared set of values. Inherent to the achievement of justice is the telling of stories, the assurance that all who are impacted by an injustice may be heard and witnessed in the telling.
A body of law is a narrative describing a shared set of values. This larger narrative defines the parameters according to which individual stories may be told. What are the values that underlie our present system of justice, which in turn shape the way that we tell stories within that system? The maximization of economic value is the highest good; the earth is a collection of resources; people are entitled to employ those resources. What results? The commodification of the sacred. The commodification of all life. Disregard for the humanity and value of people whose lives aren’t worth as much as the land they live upon or the resources in the way of which they stand.
How do we bring about a change in these underlying values? Who are the people we must address, what are the stories we must tell, to bring about a framework of collective rights and balance on earth? Which narratives must we surface in order to alter our shared cultural narrative, moving towards sustainability, balance and peace? And how do we tell those stories when our system of justice is not yet trained to hear and digest them?
The dilemma: withdrawing our complicity from tyranny, while at the same time operating within the parameters of a system that generates and perpetuates tyranny. We recognize that the achievement of true justice is beyond the present capacity of a legal-economic system that relies on injustice in order to function. Simultaneously, we strive for justice according to the terms of that system, in order to protect the land and the people as much as possible while driving systemic change through the introduction of new narratives.
How do we defend a sacred, alive world within the confines of a system that has no concept of the sacred, which instead sees the world as a collection of non-living resources? By telling stories which say no to devastation, according to the terms of the system, and by telling stories which say yes to alternate narratives which transcend the supposed duality between economic progress and environmental sustainability.
Indigenous stories are stories about life. Community, future generations, the interconnectedness of being. The legal system tells stories of ownership of property, competition for scarce resources, separation. These are narratives in opposition to one another. Yet we cannot simply stand outside the gates and demand that the fortress tear itself down. We must enter the fortress and invite the guards and the leaders to see how the structure is crumbling, the architecture is faulty. We do this by telling stories that dance at the edges of the system’s capacity to comprehend and to act. We defer to the internal logic of the system, while laying a pathway for that logic such that it leads inevitably to a new result. We offer paradigm-shifting ideas which are nonetheless digestible and able to be assimilated by the system, like the precautionary principle. We advance ideas and take actions which are like strong shoots breaking through the concrete of man-made law, allowing natural law to meet the light and air once again.
Which stories do we tell? Stories of life.
To whom do we tell them? To those endowed with power who are able to hear.
How do we tell them? In the language of power, in the language of the heart.
By Ted Schettler MD, MPH
Testimony in support of House Bill 33; General Assembly of Maryland
An Act concerning child care articles and toys containing bisphenol A
(Note this legislative testimony provides a brief history of the science on the chemical bisphenol A.)
Thank you for the opportunity to testify today in support of House Bill 33. My name is Ted Schettler. I am a physician and I also have a masters degree in public health. In addition to traditional medical sciences, I have training in epidemiology and toxicology.
This bill addresses an issue of significant public health concern. Exposures to BPA are nearly ubiquitous. More than 90% of people in the US have measureable levels of BPA in their urine. On average, children have levels about 50% higher than adults. Workers making BPA-containing products are exposed to higher levels.
Bisphenol A is a building block of polycarbonate plastic and an ingredient in the resin lining of many food and beverage containers. BPA can leach out, contaminating their contents. BPA from various consumer products also contaminates the general environment, including house dust. This can be a significant pathway of exposure, particularly for children.
By the time it is excreted in the urine, BPA has largely been transformed into an inactive form. But the blood concentration of the active form of the chemical varies with age as well as exposure level. It is higher in developing children. This is because fetuses and infants have not yet fully developed pathways to metabolize BPA as rapidly as adults. As a result, they are exposed to the active form of the chemical for a longer time. The active form of BPA is also present in human amniotic fluid, showing that the developing human fetus is exposed as well.
BPA is weakly estrogenic…that is, it mimics naturally occurring estrogen, though it is less potent. It has other mechanisms of action as well. It interferes with insulin, testosterone, and thyroid hormone signaling, as well as other biochemical pathways.
Extensive laboratory studies show that BPA interferes with normal development after fetal or infant exposures. Among the outcomes, early life exposures in animal studies increase the susceptibility to breast and prostate cancer later in life, accelerate the onset of puberty in females, alter male reproductive tract development and fertility, and change gender-dependent behavior patterns.
Two years ago, after an extensive literature review, a committee of the National Toxicology Program of the NIH concluded that they had concern about the effects of BPA on the developing brain, behavior, and prostate gland in humans at current exposure levels.
At that time, there were no published human studies assessing health effects in people. Since then, a 2008 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, based on the Center for Disease Control’s biomonitoring data, reported a correlation between BPA levels and the likelihood of an individual having diabetes or cardiovascular disease. A more recent analysis with a larger sample size over additional years found the same correlation. Although this kind of correlational study cannot prove that BPA is responsible for the increased likelihood of these common diseases, the findings are consistent with laboratory studies showing effects of BPA on various metabolic functions, including the onset of insulin resistance….the hallmark finding in type 2 diabetes, which is so prevalent in our communities.
A December 2009 study of 229 pregnant women reported a correlation between higher maternal BPA levels during pregnancy and increases in aggressive and hyperactive behavior in their daughters at 2 yrs. of age. As with most epidemiologic studies, this one has its limits and is not conclusive. It needs to be expanded and repeated. But it is consistent with the laboratory animal data showing changes in behavior that caused the NTP committee concern.
In June, 2009 the Endocrine Society, a professional organization of endocrinologists, issued a consensus statement on hormone disruptors including BPA. The statement calls for “regulation seeking to decrease human exposure to the many endocrine-disrupting agents” and specifically cited BPA as a chemical of concern.
Just two weeks ago, the US FDA revised their previous position with respect to BPA and said that the agency now “shares the perspective of the National Toxicology Program that recent studies provide reason for some concern about the potential effects of BPA on the brain, behavior, and prostate gland of fetuses, infants and children.”
In 2008 the National Academy of Sciences published a report titled “Science and Decisions: Advancing Risk Assessment”. They proposed changes to the traditional risk assessment model, using a framework that begins with a “signal” of potential harm….for example, a suspicious disease cluster….or the presence of a hazard. Under the traditional paradigm, the question has been, “What is the probability and consequence of an adverse health effect posed by that signal?” In contrast, the newly recommended framework asks from the outset, “What options are there to reduce the hazards or exposures?”
That is what this bill would do. It would reduce this hazard in consumer products intended for children. And it will likely also reduce exposures in workers who manufacture those products.
Adopting this bill will show that you choose to avoid a problem, rather than attempting to manage it or accept the consequences. Human studies of BPA impacts are only beginning to emerge. Yet, it’s unlikely we will ever really know if early life exposures to BPA increase the risk of prostate or breast cancer decades later. This would be extraordinarily difficult if not impossible to study. With over 90% of the population exposed to this chemical, you do not want to be wrong. Even small increases in risks of diseases spread over a large population have large public health consequences….for which we all pay. I urge your support for this bill.
Thank you.
By Carolyn Raffensperger
A year and a half ago I made a pilgrimage to Acoma Pueblo in New Mexico to deliver my library of Puebloan archaeology and anthropology books to the Haak’u Museum. The museum had no books and I had one of the finest collections in private hands. Since I had gotten most of the books before Amazon.com, it is a mystery how I had amassed these rare and wonderful volumes. The curator of the museum told me that the books had found me. However the books had come into my life, they were the treasured tools of my career as an archaeologist and markers on my path as an environmentalist.
I was lucky or blessed enough to work as an archaeologist on the Dolores Dam Project in the southwest corner of Colorado in the 1980s. The people of Acoma trace their lineage back to the people living at Mesa Verde. The Mesa Verdians were decedents of the people living in the Dolores River Valley. It’s all connected.
This is the letter I wrote to accompany my books. I offer it because the question still resonates: how do we live in a place for generations without destroying it?
Dear Honored Elders, Tribal Council Members, and Staff of the Cultural Center,
Please accept these books as an expression of my gratitude for the lessons you and your ancestors taught me about being an environmentalist. Almost 30 years ago, I began my career as an archaeologist in the southwest. I think of it as my apprenticeship to your great, great grandfathers. How could they – how could you — live in this place for over a thousand years? What was the wisdom of your culture that taught us how to live in the desert without destroying it? What was necessary in a culture to regulate human behavior to the biological world?
I do not profess to understand it all. But I do know that I could not be an environmentalist, working to change both our culture and our laws, without having been a student of the extraordinary life ways of the Puebloan people.
My colleagues at the Indigenous Environmental Network and I are working together to create a legal framework to establish the rights of future generations. Can we put into place as successful a culture and a law as you have lived for so many generations? Will we have guardians of future generations that protect the clay, the fellow plants and animals, the stories, so that those children to come will have a beautiful and healthy world? Perhaps if these things come to pass it will be because your ancestors and your own people lived in such a way that we could learn from you.
I am so grateful to you for everything I have been taught. It is in this spirit that I offer these books as a way of giving back a small portion of what you have given me.
Sincerely,
Carolyn Raffensperger
By Nancy Myers
My colleagues and I at the Science and Environmental Health Network often focus on the problem of complexity in environmental health: the fact that multiple factors figure in health and disease, that these diverse factors often work together and create multiplying effects, that small assaults have cumulative impacts, that genetics and environmental exposures often work together in mysterious ways, and so on.
Environmental Threats to Healthy Aging is a fascinating study of how some of these complex influences work in the human body. Many threats to healthy aging, of course, start before birth in the environments of womb and mother.
We believe the precautionary principle is the best prescription for changing our behavior in the face of this complexity: we must do our best to reduce harmful influences on health, even when science can’t provide all the answers on cause and effect. (There. I just paraphrased the precautionary principle once again. It is true there are many definitions of the principle, as its critics often point out. That is because it is so sensible that anyone can put it in her own words.)
But complexity and interrelation are not only characteristics of environmental health. What is “environmental health,” anyhow, but the health of everything. Health of people in their earth context and health of the context itself. When we talk about environmental health we’re acknowledging that it’s all related. We’re all related. We’re one with everything.
Duh, would say mystics and Indigenous people.
It’s fun to watch serious Western thinkers join us in trying to articulate this obvious truth and prescribe ways to make us stop doing harm to the earth and ourselves.
John Ralston Saul, the Canadian philosopher, calls the perception of oneness “animism” and described it this way in a recent speech:
“Animism is an idea of the world, of the planet, of the Earth, as a seamless web. Everything is one. Thus that severed link—severing us, in effect, from the idea of the Earth as seamless whole—is . . . what makes us think that human beings somehow have rights to change and alter the nature of the Earth and to take non-precautionary risks even though they may be dangerous. That’s the sign that we’re out of control: we’re no longer linked with the Earth. We have cut off the animistic from our ethical, moral, religious, intellectual way of life.”
He prescribes government and social institutions animated by animism but he acknowledges the idea is hard to sell. He’s tried it.
Perhaps he’s using the wrong word. Jeremy Rifkin uses a more scientifically respectable term for oneness: “biosphere.”
“The biosphere is the narrow band that extends some forty miles from the ocean floor to outer space where living creatures and the Earth’s geochemical processes interact to sustain each other. We are learning that the biosphere functions like an indivisible organism. It is the continuous symbiotic relationships between every living creature and between living creatures and the geochemical processes that ensure the survival of the planetary organism and the individual species that live within its biospheric envelope. If every human life, the species as a whole, and all other life-forms are entwined with one another and with the geochemistry of the planet in a rich and complex choreography that sustains life itself, then we are all dependent on and responsible for the health of the whole organism.”
He has a slightly different prescription for changing behavior. He believes we can harness the innate human capacity for empathy (in other words our instinct for oneness) and the oneness of communication to inspire responsible behavior. He asks, “What if our distributed global communication networks were put to the task of helping us re-participate in deep communion with the common biosphere that sustains all of our lives?”
I wonder what that means? I guess I’ll have to read Rifkin’s book, The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis.
Or tramp on my snowshoes to visit a particularly sustaining tree in the middle of my sustaining woodland in Southwest Michigan. And tell you about it.
By Carolyn Raffensperger
My environmental health friends have long argued that the fact that every last person, human and nonhuman, carries a body burden of toxic chemicals is a violation: it is chemical trespass. We were not informed. We did not consent. It is an injustice.
Environmentalists were working off of this equation.
1) Corporations discharged toxic chemicals in the course of doing business.
2) Those chemicals are now in my body.
3) I did not consent.
4) Corporations had no right to contaminate my body as part of doing business.
5) Corporations must be held accountable and the contamination must stop.
The concept of chemical trespass has power because it captures the intuitive sense that it was immoral to put your chemicals in my body without my consent. Given the deep moral outrage that chemical trespass inspires, it is only logical that the courts should stop this. We should be able to walk into court with the evidence of all the toxic chemicals that we carry and if we got true justice the corporations would be forced to change their business plans and we would be restored to our pristine clean selves. But that is not the deal. Scientists can and have documented the number of chemicals in a newborn baby’s cord blood or in the body of a woman with breast cancer but it’s almost impossible to get a court to act and hold the perps accountable.
So why isn’t this injustice translated into legal action? The primary reason is that the plaintiff (the person suing) has to demonstrate that he or she was harmed by the trespass. Harm is really difficult to prove. It is almost impossible to prove that the presence of bisphenol A in the baby’s cord blood led to his birth defect or the presence of dioxin in the adult led to her cancer.
And why do we have to prove harm? Why isn’t it enough to demonstrate that your chemical is in my body and I didn’t consent to the trespass?
Are you sitting down? The reason we have to prove harm is that environmental law is really a form of free-market property law. The presence of a toxic chemical in your body is simply not enough to prove that you have suffered harm.
Economics and property are so deeply embedded in our law that it is difficult to imagine a different way of approaching environmental conflicts. Even the word “trespass” comes to us from property law. Property law is the scaffolding on which we’ve built our legal system. It is so deeply ingrained in our worldview that even the Christian Lord’s Prayer uses property law to describe sin. “Forgive us our trespasses”, it says, unless it has been translated to say, “Forgive us our debts,” another property term.
So most lawyers hear this legal equation when they hear “chemical trespass”:
1) Your body is property.
2) A chemical trespass, if proven to have caused you harm, is a property problem.
3) Trespasses on property that result in harm can be compensated with money.
But what if we didn’t treat chemical contamination of our bodies and the Earth’s body as a matter of property rights? Why should your granddaughter’s body or the whale’s body or the Alaskan native’s body be treated as property just like John McCain’s fourth home?
It doesn’t have to be. Enter stage left: Rights Law. Not property rights –the rights to buy and sell–which dominate the legal system, but inalienable rights that belong to human beings and that can be extended to future generations, nature, and communities. When the slaves were freed, they were not given title to themselves so that they owned themselves and could sell themselves to someone else. We changed the category. They were no longer property; they were human beings and could not be bought or sold by anyone.
The contamination of my body is not a violation of my property right to my body. It is a violation of what should be my inalienable right to a clean and healthy environment. The contamination of my body is also a violation of your inalienable right to a clean and healthy environment because I am breathing, eating, and then excreting that contamination into the air, water, and soil on which your life depends.
This is not a trespass in the property sense. It is a violation of our shared rights to a clean and healthy environment. Forgive us for destroying the Earth, our bodies, our communities, each other.
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