California Governor Jerry Brown recently moved to restrict the use of some chemicals used as flame retardants, due to their impacts on human health. The ensuing scenario is a now-familiar one — attacks on the science showing these substances can be harmful, uncovering of lobbying efforts to short-circuit any new policies that might threaten profits of the industry concerned, and stalemates resulting in a prolongation of the status quo. Some fine reporting in the Chicago Tribune showed how chemical industry flacks have utilized fear to override science-based restrictions. The result? Stalemate, and continued exposure to industrial chemicals and other things research tells us is not good for us.
Similar scenarios play out on many issues, from nuclear power to genetically modified organisms (GMOs) to oil drilling and hydraulic fracking and on and on. The classic modern precedent is tobacco control — it took decades to institute the kind of policies that objective researchers and health advocates were calling for long ago (and as the California Proposition 29 battle has just shown us again, big money can buy lots of propaganda, which in turn “buys” votes). At this point smoking rates have been halved over a couple of generations, but with a long way to go yet to decrease tobacco-caused sickness and death.
It should go without saying that modern chemicals have been a boon in countless ways; but also that their harms should be minimized. Yet ideology and money get in the way of that balance. As Paul Craig Roberts, a decidedly non-rabid environmentalist and former Wall Street Journal editor, concludes in a recent post:
propaganda is a form of mind control, and controlled minds are indeed the American predicament. In 1962 Rachel Carson caught Monsanto off guard and thus gained an audience. Today she would not get the same attention. Ready and waiting psy-ops would go into operation to discredit her. I just read an article by an economist who wrote that economists have decided that environmentalism is a religion, in other words, an unscientific belief system that preaches ‘religious values.’ This demonstrates what little importance economists attribute to external costs and the ability of externalized costs to destroy the productive power of the planet. Thus, the question, “silent spring for us?” is not merely rhetorical. It is real.
Carson’s landmark book Silent Spring was published 50 years ago this summer. The “tobacco wars” were just getting underway in earnest, many other environmental battles were brewing, and the “climate wars” were not yet conceived (and the climate change deniers have taken their playbook — and even some of the same propagandists — right from the tobacco industry). After all, the catchy slogan of the chemical industry for many years was “Better Living Through Chemistry.”
The crux of the matter in many of these battles is “Is it better to be safe than sorry?” Most people seem to think so. To choose one example of precaution in action in another realm, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration tests proposed medications for both efficacy and safety before they are approved for use. It’s also why even more responsible groups are beginning to look at health and environmental issues through a “precautionary” lens (for one new example, see how the AMA has just urged pre-market testing of GMOs — a surprise to many, although the AMA already endorsed a more precautionary approach to chemicals a few years ago).
So what to do, if one favors a more rational, science-based approach to chemicals and human health? A growing number of informed people are favoring what is called “the precautionary principle” — really just a fancier way of saying, yes, “better safe than sorry.” With regard to the over 80,000 industrial chemicals now in use in modern times, that would pose an overwhelming task. But good scientists, anticipating such a dilemma, have already prioritized a much smaller list of chemicals with known or suspected harm to human health. Pesticides, Carson's nemesis, are among the top suspects. In Europe, new policies are forcing industries to look for less-harmful substitutes — and also prompting American and multinational chemical marketers to follow suit if they want to access the European markets.
Ten years ago, a group of about 50 scientists, doctors, environmentalists, patient representatives, and others gathered at the San Francisco Medical Society to form a new broadened coalition of professionals and informed others concerned about chemicals and health. This group is called the Collaborative on Health and the Environment. CHE’s founding ‘consensus statement’ emphasizes the state of environmental health science, the necessary public health response, and yes, the importance of taking a precautionary approach. Since we started CHE, the weight of the evidence linking chemicals contributors, including very low dose exposures, to a vast range of chronic diseases and disabilities has increased enormously.
CHE's new new 'ten year' anniversary journal is available at the medical society's website — sfms.org . Inside, some of the world's leading researchers and advocates outline their perspectives in user-friendly form. To pick a few
— World-renowned cancer researcher Dr. Margaret Kripke, appointed to the President’s Cancer Panel by George W. Bush, finds she was “naive” to think that we are protected from harmful chemicals by current policies.
— Some of the many respected authors of a new landmark review of chemical impacts on health titled “Large effects of low doses” explains how much smaller exposures than were thought can have lasting and bad effects on us.
— A leading breast cancer researcher and surgeon notes how his own work on the chemical BPA — a hotly-contested element in plastics — has led him to question whether we choose to base our approaches to chemicals on “the scientific state of the art” or on “willful ignorance.”
There’s much more, on chemical links to diabetes, autism, fertility problems, nuclear energy lessons from Japan, and how some experts from the United States and other nations are dealing with these issues in ways that begin to make the USA look a bit behind-the-times (and science). There are also some tips on how to live most healthily in this industrial era.
If we mark Silent Spring as a spark of the modern environmental movement, we are half a century into finding better balances between profits and true progress. And they are not always in conflict, fortunately — many more visionary, and successful, businessmen are finding better ways to prosper without harming our world. Is there room for optimism against the tides of money, propaganda, inertia, and cynicism that sometimes seem to rule our age? Many environmental scientists think so, even if they also sometimes feel naive. And, as they are the real experts, hopefully they will be heard, and heeded, more and more as time goes on.
As for the animals who first alerted Carson to the harmful side-effects of pesticides and other chemicals, it's harder to be hopeful. But that's another story.
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