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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.
By Peter Montague
Watch Clean Coal and the PurGen Project to learn about the hare-brained scheme in Linden, NJ to make coal “clean.”
During the past 10 years, a worldwide scientific consensus has developed that global warming is real and mainly caused by humans burning fossil fuels (coal, oil, and natural gas).
The obvious solution is to wean ourselves from fossil fuels. But if you’re in the fossil fuel business, that solution looks like an economic disaster.
So the fossil fuel companies and their biggest customers are looking for a get-out-of-jail free card, and they think they’ve found it: clean coal. Clean coal means capturing carbon dioxide (aka CO2, the main global warming gas), compressing it into a liquid, and burying it a mile below ground. This is called “carbon capture and sequestration” or CCS for short. CCS is the essence of “clean coal.”
That’s what they’re trying out in the ocean off New Jersey.
The coal companies are not the only ones who think “clean coal” is a great idea. There are experimental machines called “artificial trees” that can pull CO2 right out of the air. These machines are electric-powered and can run anywhere. So, if CCS works, the oil companies and the car companies will deploy thousands (perhaps millions) or “artificial trees” to pull CO2 out of the air, intending to bury it below ground. If this worked, they wouldn’t have to shift over to any of these newfangled electric cars or solar power plants. “Clean coal” would be a triumph for “business as usual.”
The railroads favor “clean coal” because 40% of all rail freight (by weight) is coal. The electric utilities favor “clean coal” because they’ve been burning coal for 150 years and they don’t want to change. So, we have a political juggernaut favoring “clean coal” — the coal, oil and natural gas industries, plus railroads, car companies and electric utilities. This is a lot of political muscle.
The only people standing in the way are ordinary citizens who are reluctant to allow CO2 burial beneath their homes and farms — and for good reason. CO2 is a colorless, odorless, invisible gas that is heavier than air. When released in concentrated form, CO2 forms an invisible puddle on the ground, which asphyxiates everything in its path, including plants, animals and humans.
In the U.S., landowners control the sub-surface rights — so “clean coal” projects must buy the right to bury CO2 beneath private property. If the buried CO2 were to leak sideways beneath neighboring property, or if it were to contaminate drinking water, lawsuits could arise.
But these problems would disappear if CO2 could be buried beneath the ocean. That is what has been proposed in Linden, NJ. A project called “PurGen” aims to build a 750 megawatt coal power plant that would capture 90% of its own CO2, plus gather CO2 from other nearby industrial sources, send it through a 100-mile-long pipeline out into the Atlantic Ocean, and then pump it a mile and a half below the ocean floor. The goal would be “permanent” burial of the CO2 beneath the ocean. But what if the CO2 leaks back out 50 years from now, warming the planet uncontrollably? Scientists working on behalf of the coal industry say that won’t happen. But what if they’re mistaken? Are they infallible?
Watch the 11-minute video and tell me what you think.
By Nancy Myers
I run across a lot of ad hoc definitions of the precautionary principle when I’m putting together one of our publications, Rachel’s Precaution Reporter.
First let me make clear that the principle is no mystery. There are several official definitions of the precautionary principle—Principle 15 of the 1992 Rio declaration and the more positive and concise Wingspread definition of 1998 are most widely cited. Since SEHN convened Wingspread we’re pleased that this has now become a standard:
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.
Wingspread continues with corollaries essential to implementing precaution:
In this context the proponent of an activity, rather than the public, should bear the burden of proof.
The process of applying the Precautionary Principle must be open, informed and democratic and must include potentially affected parties. It must also involve an examination of the full range of alternatives, including no action.
All standard definitions have three elements: threats of harm, scientific uncertainty, and protective action (or nonaction).
But the proliferation of informal definitions of the precautionary principle means the idea has infiltrated the culture and people are putting it in their own words, for better or for worse.
In the better category, I thank Indiana activist Mary Jo Matheny for pointing out that “the precautionary principle is based on two ancient, universal maxims. They are: the axiom of reciprocity, or the Golden Rule, ‘Do unto others as you would have others do unto you,’ and the portion of the Hippocratic Oath that reads, ‘First, do no harm.’”
In the same spirit, Jim Milone, a winemaker, says he and his company are “thoughtful, organic by default, and we gauge every decision by how it will affect others – a precautionary principle in practice.”
A hazardous waste manager in Minnesota also stresses consequences when he describes how the precautionary principle applies to his work: “You are aware of the consequences of what you buy, what you discard, and how the item is to be used.” Then he adds one of the Wingspread corollaries: “You choose the least hazardous product when an alternative exists.”
Rafe Mair, a Vancouver, BC columnist, rewords the definition and includes another corollary: “The ‘precautionary principle’ is a moral and political principle which states that if an action or policy might cause severe or irreversible harm to the environment — in the absence of a scientific consensus that harm would not ensue — the burden of proof falls on those who would advocate taking the action.”
Good definitions are not always so wordy. Don Neubacher, superintendent of the Point Reyes National Seashore, said he would follow the precautionary principle in studying whether a proposed development would disturb the shoreline’s ecosystems, and this meant, “If we don’t have enough science maybe we should leave it alone.”
Or, as someone else put it, “The precautionary principle says that if you haven’t a clue what you are doing then what you do could make matters worse.”
Uncertainty, pure and simple.
“Can anyone state for me this so-called ‘Precautionary Principle’? I am sceptical as to its existence,” posts one commenter.
“The Precqautionary [sic] Principle is real and widely known,” answers another. “It is this. Nothing should ever be done for the first time.”
Cute, but not really.
For simplicity it’s hard to surpass “forecaring principle,” a literal translation of the German Vorsorgeprinzip. I invented that one some time ago and “forecaring” seems to have entered the English language, at least in some precautionary principle ordinances.
What’s your definition of the precautionary principle?
By Carolyn Raffensperger
According to an old story told by Sun Tsu at the beginning of The Art of War, a lord of ancient China once asked his physician, a member of a family of healers, which family member was the most skilled at medicine. The famous physician, replied, “My eldest brother is the most skilled since he sees the spirit of sickness and removes it before it takes shape, so his name does not get out of the house. My elder brother cures sickness when it is still extremely minute, so his name does not get out of the neighborhood.” The greatest physician was unknown because he prevented disease rather than having to cure it.
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I have the remarkable fortune of having great genes. Both my parents are alive, well and unusually rascally for Midwesterners. My Dad was in his late 60s when he sailed across the Atlantic and back. He published a novel last year under a pseudonym (so don’t look for it using my name) and regularly paddles out into the ocean in his homemade sea kayak. My Mom was in her mid-70s when she got a new job on the upper Peninsula of Michigan, moved into a log cabin and took up snow-shoeing and nature photography. They have no history of cancer, diabetes, or cardio-vascular problems. Alas, my parents’ medical histories aren’t going to be much help in predicting what I will live with as I age and what I will die of. All the trends in things like cancer, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, and Parkinson’s, suggest that I along with my age cohort are going to be sicker longer and die after lingering, debilitating illnesses.
What’s going on? Basically our diseases are corollaries of our civilization. As Rene Dubos said “each type of society has diseases peculiar to itself — indeed, . . . each civilization creates its own diseases.” Our bodies reflect the interaction of our genes with the manifestations of our civilization — the built, social and natural environments. In fifty years we’ve fundamentally altered all of these systems. We get less exercise, we eat nutritionally-suspect food and we’ve filled our world with toxic chemicals. These changes (and many more) are documented in a report entitled Environmental Threats to Health Aging that we at SEHN did with our colleagues at Greater Boston Physicians for Social Responsibility.
Where are we headed given this trajectory? Here are my four predictions on the future of human health.
1) We will see more chronic diseases such as asthma, diabetes, and Alzheimer’s. The reason is that we have a whole long list of stressors like nutritionally deficient diets, inadequate exercise, and air pollution all of which lead to oxidative stress and inflammation—the biological mechanisms for disease.
2) Diseases that make people fundamentally anti-social will affect a much larger population. These illnesses include autism, Alzheimer’s, and mental illness. These diseases are rising now in the population and render people unable to function within their families and communities.
3) We will suffer from an increased number of rapidly changing infectious, zoonotic pandemics (think swine flu, bird flu, hemorrhagic viruses.) because climate change, modern transportation, and industrial agriculture are disrupting ecologies setting up the conditions for rapidly evolving bacteria, funguses and bacteria that use multiple species as hosts. In addition, we are moving people and stuff around the planet at an ever increasing rate. Infectious agents are hitching rides and zipping around the planet in cargo ships and airplanes.
4) Subtle, difficult to diagnosis malaises like chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, and suppressed immune systems will become the norm. Patients will exhibit multi-factorial, complex symptoms that defy categorization.
If we wanted to alter this course, where would we start? We’d start with decent definitions of health because how we define it determines how we maintain health and cure disease.
Wendell Berry defines health as membership–membership in the community of humans and membership in the Earth community. “Can our present medical industry produce an adequate definition of health? My own guess is that it cannot do so. Like industrial agriculture, industrial medicine has depended increasingly on specialist methodology, mechanical technology, and chemicals; thus, its point of reference has become more and more its own technical prowess and less and less the health of creatures and habitats.” Berry later says, “this, plainly, is a view of health that is severely reductive. It is, to begin with, almost fanatically individualistic. The body is seen as a detective or potentially defective machine, singular, solitary, and displaced, without love, solace, or pleasure. Its health excludes unhealthy cigarettes but does not exclude unhealthy food, water, and air. One may presumably be healthy in a disintegrated family or community or in a destroyed or poisoned ecosystem.”
A related definition to Berry’s idea of membership comes from Aldo Leopold who defined health as the capacity for self-renewal. Leopold was referring to land but it applies equally well to the individual. Leopold means that health is an intrinsic and internal biological process, not a static quality. It is the process of re-membering our communities.
Sun Tsu’s unknown physician must have been working with similar definitions of health in order to prevent the diseases of his day. Today, I imagine he would write a prescription to restore the Earth’s resilience, and repair the social systems to alleviate the debilitating stresses of poverty, racism and hunger, and create built environments that nurtured living beings.
By Nancy Myers
I’ve been reading Stewart Brand’s latest book, Whole Earth Discipline. Before I even got to the controversial parts—he endorses nuclear energy and genetic engineering among other urgent fixes to address climate change—I ran into a snag.
On page 11 Brand reports a 2007 phone conversation with James Lovelock, originator of the Gaia hypothesis, in which Lovelock reportedly said, “The year 2040 is when the IPCC is estimating that Europe, America, and China become uninhabitable for the growth of food.” And Lovelock adds, “They’re grossly underestimating the rate of temperature rise, so that 2040 may be 2025. People don’t realize how little time we’ve got. The planet is really on the move.”
This prediction startled me. Thirty years before “Europe, America, and China become uninhabitable for the growth of food”? The IPCC really said that? Or possibly only fifteen?
I confess that I had not read the 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change clear through. (Have you?) I sat down with it, determined to try. I soon gave up, however, and instead read any possibly relevant section. And then I sent a note to Brand, beginning with the quote and continuing:
If you have read the IPCC reports you realize that the IPCC makes no such predictions; quite the contrary. Their projections on food and agriculture show quite a mixed scenario and nowhere do they suggest that now-temperate climates will become “uninhabitable for the growth of food,” whatever, exactly, that means.
Since you go on to say why you trust Lovelock so much, and make his prediction a basis for the sense of urgency in your book (I agree with the urgency), that statement should be examined, fleshed out.
Lovelock, in an Oct 29, 2007 speech, said, “Few seem to realise that the present IPCC models predict almost unanimously that by 2040 the average summer in Europe will be as hot as the summer of 2003 when over 30,000 died from heat. By then we may cool ourselves with air conditioning and learn to live in a climate no worse than that of Bagdad now. But without extensive irrigation the plants will die and both farming and natural ecosystems will be replaced by scrub and desert. What will there be to eat? The same dire changes will affect the rest of the world and I can envisage Americans migrating into Canada and the Chinese into Siberia but there may be little food for any of them.” (Climate Change on a Living Earth, found on Lovelock’s website)
Lovelock, in short, is putting his own spin on the “IPCC models” and is equating “hot summers” with a climate like Baghdad’s. “Few seem to realize”–including, as is clear from the rest of the speech, IPCC scientists themselves–that Europe, America, and China will be uninhabitable. So OK. Lovelock is making radical statements, and you trust Lovelock, but why should we trust either of you if you can gloss over these very important subtleties?
I went around in a daze for a day before I could look up that assertion. Please, if you’re going to scare us, be sure you know what you’re talking about and do NOT spare the nuances. They’re important.
I’m reading on…
Best,
Nancy Myers
Brand immediately wrote back, thanking me for the comment, but punted to Lovelock. A day later he forwarded me Lovelock’s response:
Dear Stewart,
The prediction: When I was writing the Revenge of Gaia in 2004 and 05, like most of us I took the IPCC as authoritative. My contact with the IPCC was the Hadley Centre at Exeter about 40 miles from Coombe Mill. The guys there had produced a paper for Nature about the intensely hot European summer of 2003, when temperatures rose daily to between 40 and 45 degrees Celsius throughout most of June, July and August. Consequences, more than 30,000 died and agricultural production fell to ca 40% of normal. Agronomists reckoned that if such a climate persisted agriculture would fall to near zero production in a few years. The Hadley Centre prediction for the average European summer temperature of 2040 was the same as that of 2003. The Hadley centre are prominent contributors to the IPCC reports and in my opinion in with the best of the model makers, they even try to include Gaia. Hence my reply during the telephone call with you. Of course the final 2007 IPCC report was far less scary not least because in the interests of consensus it included the predictions of all the climate research centers some of which are based on little more than atmospheric physics.
I am not sure where remarks about 2025 came from. In 2007 it seemed that the IPCC were underestimating climate change, they were 30 or more years wrong in their prediction of the date when more than 50% of floating arctic ice melted. Unwisely, I may have thought that they could also be wrong about the date when 2003 European temperatures became the norm.
Nancy Myers has a point but she tends to value precision more than accuracy.
Best thoughts,
Jim
I’m not sure what that last comment means. I don’t need to know how much time we have left, but the prospect of no food growing in the USA by around 2025 makes some difference, whether it is a matter of “accuracy” or “precision.” It pretty much removes all options and fixes from the picture, nuclear power included.
So I’m breathing a little easier. Whew. We maybe have thirty years instead of fifteen.
If we’re going to be scared, we’d better be scared for the right reasons, not based on off-the-cuff, faulty predictions.
By Carolyn Raffensperger
Over the years I’ve had many young people come up to me and ask how I do this environmental work without collapsing in despair. They are acutely aware of how desperate the situation is. They doubt that the rain forest or ocean or jaguar will be salvageable by the time they are able to dedicate their full gifts to the cause. I’ve even had some students ask why they shouldn’t accelerate the destruction and put the Earth out of her misery.
Many friends and colleagues have written about hope. Derrick Jensen, Rebecca Solnit, Paul Hawken, and Wendell Berry have all said interesting, wise things about hope, pessimism, and optimism. I am grateful for their thoughtful contributions. They have informed my thinking on the problem of hope. And it is a problem because of the avalanche of bad news.
I received a letter a couple of weeks ago from a young woman named Jennifer asking me to write a letter about hope to her friend Kyra. Here is her query and my response.
***
Dear Carolyn Raffensperger,
I’m writing because I have a small favor to ask.
A close friend of mine has a birthday is coming up. She’s very devoted to environmental and social movements. Basically all things that could possibly make the world better. Sometimes, tho, no matter how hard she tries, she feels like things aren’t changing fast enough and that things are headed in a terrible direction. She often asks me, how other people, people who have devoted their life or research to environmental or social topics, deal with this same problem. How do they find hope when sometimes everything seems so hopeless.
This is why, for her birthday, I wanted to do a project where I would ask the people she respects both for their opinions and research into those topics that question. Basically, I want to give her hope.
That’s why I’m writing you. As you are a person who deals with environmental problems I’m was hoping you might write a line or two about how you find hope or cope with the feelings that everything is going downhill and those who care are so few that it seems like nothing will change. That is, if you ever feel that way.
I really appreciate you taking the time to read and consider this. It would mean a lot to both of us if you would write a line or two, but I’ll understand if you can’t.
-ever grateful,
Jenny
***
Dear Kyra, 9/18/09
Jenny asked me to write to you about hope. I don’t know you, but I write to your spirit, the ageless, luminous part of yourself that knows why you have been put on the Earth.
I was put on the planet to serve the Earth and all her beings, especially future generations. I think one of the ways we know our calling is that we can enter the work with all the suffering, with all the losses, with all the craziness, in a way that brings our best gifts to bear. Every single day I wake up knowing that we are screwed and I grin wickedly and say, “I have an idea”. Ideas are my little contribution to the environmental movement, to the Earth and to future generations. I helped bring the precautionary principle to the United States. I coined the term ecological medicine. My recent work has been to create the legal framework to establish the rights of future generations. Imagine a legal guardian for future generations appointed by your governor. Imagine being the first guardian.
I have developed coping strategies for the relentlessly bad news. I don’t take it all in. I can’t really bear to entertain the depths of trouble like the vastness of the plastic continent in the ocean or the death of white pelicans, or the toxic contamination of newborn babies, day in and day out. Yes, I know these facts. And sometimes my grief is overwhelming. But not often.
I suspect most of the sorrow I do take in comes from my personal life — the sufferings of loved ones, my own failings – that kind of thing, rather than the ongoing and terrible environmental catastrophe. I think its because I have developed a world view, and an evolving spiritual life that tempers emotions that swirl around the environmental losses. Both my world view and my spiritual life are predicated on a notion of hope. Not hope as optimism, but hope as defined by Vaclav Havel. Havel said that hope isn’t a belief that everything is going to turn out all right. Hope is the deep orientation of the soul towards what is right. It is like a compass pointing us in the right direction rather than a certainty of the outcome.
I don’t know if anything I do matters in the larger scheme of things. I don’t need to know. I need to set my shoulder to the wheel and put everything I have to the Great Turning. We are at the brink. It is a true crisis. I am given only this one life to dedicate to the cause. I am not given your life, just my little life. I do not know whether I will succeed or whether we will all succeed. That means it is worthy work. If it was easy, if it was a piece of cake, who would care? We don’t know the outcome of our work yet it requires everything we have.
Here’s a little list of what keeps the compass direction of my soul pointed toward hope.
1. My dream life is central. I belong to a dream coop. I listen carefully to my dreams as status reports, as instructions, as symbolic truth. Sometimes I am visited in the dream world by animals, plants or an element, like fire. The dreams are a great comfort.
2. I carve spoons out of branches that fall in my yard. This is a form of prayer. The careful crafting of a spoon stills my mind in such a way that I am more centered. This is only one kind of spiritual practice and I have others, but it gives you an idea of spiritual practices that might anchor hope for you.
3. I try to say many many many more yeses than I say nos. Saying yes as a spiritual practice is a hell of a lot more fun than saying no.
4. I attend to the arts. Poetry and music especially nourish hope. Or if I am grieved over the state of the world, the arts give voice to the particular shadows and assure me that I am not alone.
5. I know that whether the planet and humans survive or thrive is not all up to me. I am just one of the grains of sand that may help initiate a tipping point. Isn’t that wonderful? It isn’t all up to me. Nor is it all up to you. But together? We may give the Earth a sporting chance.
6. Respect the small gesture. Small things add up to big things. Every gallon of fossil fuel not used, or changed light bulb, or local garden, is a gift to the Earth. Each action is one word in the poem of love we offer to all the Beings. Each word is necessary in the poetry of resilience, community, and future generations.
7. Gratitude fortifies hope. Being grateful and expressing it every day helps nourish our souls.
8. Have fun. Hope is so often a desperate business and lacks the spirited play that is essential for vision and imagination. A little trickster play enlivens the work and pinches hope in the butt making it look around to see What is Up.
9. Trust that nothing is wasted. Every person or experience or soul-stirring event is on point. You might not know for 20 years why it is relevant, but it will be.
10. Revel in the mystery. Mystery, like gratitude and fun, flavors hope with an essential ingredient that is beyond words. You know what I mean.
So I end with a question from a Mary Oliver poem: “What will you do with your one wild and precious life?” Root this wild and precious life in hope. Your gifts are essential for the world. Whatever they are. Whoever you will become. You are on Earth for a reason. That you are here at this time gives me hope. Thank you.
Your ally,
Carolyn Raffensperger
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