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Pipelines: Pathological Decision-making
Volume 24 (8) November 2019
"The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only object of good government."
-Thomas Jefferson
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In this issue, SEHN Executive Director, Carolyn Raffensperger, shares updates on the status of multiple pipelines and offers an overview of wise decision-making. We also hear from Akilah Sanders-Reed, a tireless environmental advocate working against the Enbridge Line 3 tar sands pipeline in Minnesota and SEHN Science Director, Ted Schettler, shares the latest chapter in A Story of Health- a multimedia e-book that explores how our environment interacts with our genes to influence our health across the lifespan.
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Table of Contents
IV. In the News
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Friends of SEHN,
Why do some government bodies make fundamentally pathological decisions? By pathological, I mean a decision that threatens the well-being, even the survival of life, on this Earth.
For the past six years we at SEHN have been deep in the weeds on crude oil and tar sand pipelines. Many of you remember the 2016 Indigenous-led uprising at Standing Rock, North Dakota; water protectors tried to protect their drinking water and homelands from the Dakota Access crude oil pipeline. While they don’t make daily news, the pipeline saga is ongoing with more examples, daily, of the pathological mindset that says the short-term economic gains of pipeline construction and operation are worth the monstrous threat to water, climate and communities.
Consider these decisions that are being made now as evidence of a fatally flawed decision-making system, a pathological decision-making system.
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Dakota Access, the crude oil pipeline that crosses the drinking water of the Standing Rock Sioux and further down-line the drinking water of the city of Des Moines, has notified four states that it plans on doubling the oil from 570,000 barrels of oil a day to 1.1 million barrels of oil a day. Not only that, it is arguing that the states that gave it the original permits have no jurisdiction over its choice to increase the oil . Furthermore, it has not notified the federal agency charged with pipeline safety of its business decision to increase the oil.
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South Dakota is in the middle of hearings on Keystone XL, a tar sands pipeline . The question is whether or not to allow TC Energy (formerly known as TransCanada) to take millions of gallons of water to build man camps to house transient construction workers and to use for the construction of this pipeline. Last week, while the hearings were in progress, the existing stretch of the Keystone pipeline leaked almost 400,000 gallons of oil . The governor went to TC Energy and asked them to, please, monitor the pipeline a little more closely.
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Enbridge, another Canadian pipeline corporation, is trying to build a tar sands pipeline across Minnesota and the wild rice beds sacred to the Indigenous community there. The state did an environmental analysis that stated clearly that there would be an increase in sex trafficking during the construction of the pipeline .
These pipeline decisions have been made by dozens upon dozens of agencies that range from the federal state department to local drainage districts. The flaws in the decision-making start from the basic premise of what government is supposed to do. Over the past 50 years the droning mantra has been that government’s job is to grow the economy. The measurement of well-being is the GDP and the number of jobs. The pipeline companies are allowed to present a projected number of jobs to a permitting agency but are not required to actually produce those jobs or verify that they have done so. Yet those paltry number of promised, temporary, jobs are enough to approve a pipeline that now transports oil across the drinking water of many communities and, when burned, accelerates climate chaos.
Carolyn Raffensperger
Executive Director
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We are thrilled to share this conversation with Akilah Sanders-Reed with you all. Akilah is a force of nature, working tirelessly to stop the Line 3 pipeline from being built in Minnesota. A constant advocate and ally, Akilah has been involved in the environmental movement for at least ten years in the intersection of climate justice, economic justice, and social justice.
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Akilah grew up in New Mexico, where she stumbled into climate organizing as a high school student in 2009 and never looked back. In 2012, she moved to Minnesota in to attend college, and joined the budding pipeline resistance movement. She now works with the Power Shift Network as their pipeline resistance organizer, focusing on stopping the Line 3 tar sands oil pipeline and supporting young people to leverage their vision and creativity and collective power to fight for a just and sustainable future. MORE
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SEHN Science Director, Ted Schettler, helped create Sam's Story (cognitive decline): the latest chapter in The Story of Health, a multimedia e-book that explores how our environment interacts with our genes to influence our health across the lifespan.
Increasing forgetfulness, missed appointments, and repeating himself were disturbing changes in Sam’s behavior that concerned his son, daughter-in-law, and two longtime friends. In this newest and fifth chapter of A Story of Health eBook, ( https://tinyurl.com/y4g6ofv9) 72-year-old Sam, his family, friends and health care providers confront Sam’s cognitive decline beginning after his wife’s death and explore how they might be able to slow or reverse it. Is it normal aging? Something more serious that could progress to full-blown dementia? Related to underlying depression or another treatable disease?
Progressive cognitive decline and dementia are among the most feared disorders that people and their families encounter. They are also a growing public health challenge since they become more likely with aging and the number of people older than 65 is increasing in many countries throughout the world.
Studies in the US and Northern Europe, however, find a decrease in age-adjusted dementia incidence in recent years not fully explained by improved education, lifestyle, and cardiovascular health. Environmental risk factors are likely to be involved. This suggests more opportunities for primary prevention.
Sam’s story reviews numerous modifiable risk factors for cognitive decline and dementia, including environmental variables that can be causally related such as air pollution, lead, pesticides, and solvents. The chapter also explores environmental links to Parkinson’s disease that afflicts Sam’s long-time friend George, in whom he confides.
Sam’s story includes his clinical evaluation, discussion of potential interventions, and general recommendations for healthy aging. It is available free online in an easy-to-read PDF format. The eBook uses videos, infographics and articles by experts to illustrate where and how we live, eat, work, and play can influence health across the lifespan. Written for health care providers, health advocates, policy makers and others concerned about environmental influences on healthy aging, the story includes links to additional resources and is fully referenced.
Health professionals can register for free continuing education credits (CE) through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) with ATSDR hosting the CE accreditation pages .
The first four chapters of the eBook featuring asthma, developmental disabilities, childhood leukemia and infertility/reproductive health are also available to download for free . Since their original release, the first three are updated and have additional references.
A Story of Health has been developed in a collaboration among the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) , the Center for Integrative Research on Childhood Leukemia and the Environment (CIRCLE) at the University of California, Berkeley, Commonweal , the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment, California EPA (OEHHA), the Science and Environmental Health Network (SEHN), and the Western States Pediatric Environmental Health Specialty Unit (WSPEHSU) .
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| SEHN's Carolyn Raffensperger was featured on KHOI Community Radio's "Local Talk" show on October 28th (7am listing). In this episode, beginning at minute 19, Carolyn gives an update on the Dakota Access pipeline and the Iowa Utilities Board. LISTEN HERE |
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SEHN board member Bhavna Shamasunder was quoted in a story following a Sacramento woman poisoned by mercury-laced facial moisturizer.
"The face cream that sickened the Sacramento woman was tampered with after manufacture, but some other skin-lightening products made overseas intentionally contain mercury as an active ingredient, said Bhavna Shamasunder, an associate professor at Occidental College in Los Angeles who studies skin-lightening cosmetics. While mercury removes skin pigmentation, Shamasunder said, the side effects are toxic." MORE
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The Science & Environmental Health Network | moreinfo@sehn.org | SEHN.org
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