Environment

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Environment, Public Health, and Technology

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Below is collection of news items and observations pertaining to the environment, public health and tecnology.

article and links. The Bhopal, India Chemical spill has not been cleaned up after 25 years. Union Carbide, whose criminal negligence caused the spill, the Indian government, and Dow chemical, which bought Union Carbide, have done as little to help even as people still die of cancers and respiratory illnesses caused by the spill, and children of victims are born with birth defects and other ailments related to the spill. Dow has even refused to share scientific research on the toxic effects of the chemicals involved. The government of India has backed down on pursuing civil and criminal action against Dow and Union Carbide officials because this would discourage foreign investment in India. Click here

article Near Ponca City, Oklahoma is a plant that burns waste oil from refineries down to fine carbon dust used to make tires. Black carbon dust comes down on everything in the area. For a transcript from a Living on Earth (NPR) program, click here.

article Beginning in the mid-80's, following years of drought and population growth, farmers in Niger began to plow and plant around trees, rather than clearing them as in the past. This gave the farmers branches for fire wood, pods for animal feed and fruit that can all be sold or used at home. The trees' roots fix the soil in place, preventing it from being carried off with the wind and preserving farmable land. The roots also help hold water in the ground, rather than letting it run off across rocky, barren fields into gullies where it floods villages and destroys crops. The roots of some trees also deliver nitrogen, with fertilizing properties, to the soil. And the leaves become fertilizer after they fall to the ground....A factor in tree conservation has been a change in the law, which, since colonial times, had defined trees as state property. The government of Niger, an area twice the size of the state of Texas, lacked means to protect trees against harvesting for construction and firewood. With the emergence of the concept that people owned trees on their land and in their communities, people began to appreciate the advantages of preserving trees....In one village a group of widows put manure in pits they have dug in barren soil. Rainwater carries the manure into the surrounding soil, reclaiming the land for farming....These successes have come from the local people working together, not from international aid groups' management. click here for article

article Proposals and rules of recent years intended to protect consumers of beef from mad cow disease have not been put in place, with the result that calves are still being fed cows' blood as a "milk substitute" and cows are still being fed the litter from chicken farms -- feces, feathers, parasites and so on. Cows and sheep (ruminants) are officially not supposed to consume remains of cows and sheep, but chickens, pigs and other livestock can still be fed brains, spinal cords, nerves, eyes, tonsils and intestines from cows. Thus cows do consume these tissues because they eat chicken litter, and also cows are fed plate scrapings from restaurant plates. Of coarse people are eating all that stuff too. Now the FDA is again making a proposal, that brains and spinal cords from older cows be kept out of animal feed, while still allowing all the above from younger cows. The newly proposed rules are weaker than last year's proposed rules (which weren't adopted.) For article click here.

For an article on the views of the man who killed the only cow with mad cow disease in the U.S. so far, click here. His views raise questions about the governments position on testing beef for Mad Cow. Note: the U.S. government refuses to let distributors who want to test every slaughtered animal do so.

viewpoint In the 1970's and 1980's anti-nuclear activists generally refused to address specific safety issues in nuclear reactors because to do so would be to suggest these hazards could be remedied, and this could be taken to mean that nuclear plants could be made safe. Reactors could not be made safe, they had to be shut down, according to the movement. Two groups that did detail specific reactor hazards are the Union of Concerned Scientists and Friends of the Earth. (Click on name to go to website) (We -- Stopdown.net -- agree that nuclear energy is inherently unsafe, but think it makes sense to show the public how badly the industry is run, and thus discredit the process as well as gain influence and credibility for the anti-nuclear movement.)

article Crops engineered with a gene to withstand heavy doses of weed killer have been found to spread that gene, via cross-pollination, to surrounding plants of various species, including the targeted weed varieties. For an article on a study which has found engineered grass pollen taken up by plants miles away, click here. The ease with which plants pick up each other's pollen, apart from breeding, has been recognized largely due to investigation of bioengineered crops. A similar revelation has been the ability of bacteria to pick up genes from other bacteria, brought to light by studies of bacterial resistance to antibiotics.

For an article on illegal logging in a Mexican refuge for Monarch butterflies click here. Local poor people rely on illegal logging for income and defend it, somewhat like Appalachian locals saying they need the jobs with regard to mining which cuts off mountaintops and dumps the dirt into riverbeds.

For a Wall St. Journal article on water subsidies for California farmers click here. This is a longstanding racket, like crop subsidies. Question: in crop subsidies the corporate farmers are cashing in and driving the small farmers out of business. Do water arrangements share this bias against small farmers?

For NYT's article on air pollution and factory emission control upgrades click here. Included on this page is a letter calling the article phony. Also: the recent Supreme Court decision with respect to the upgrades, favoring industry.

To post comments on any environmental issue click here to go to our environment comment page. We are specifically seeking reader comment on issues cited below. Or e-mail us: ericqb@msn.com

Environment, Technology Public Health....Emerging viruses, including animal-to-human crossovers like HIV and the deadly Asian bird flu now in the news, combined with drug resistance in old microbes, like tuberculosis, hospital staph, and malaria, suggest the possibility of a multi-disease global plague that will run out control in rich countries as well as poor countries. Global warming seems to be accelerating the process. (As the bacteria said, "I think I caught penicillin.") A similar situation exists with respect to agricultural pests and pesticides. Diseases of wild plants including pine forests in the western U.S. and coral reefs in the Caribbean add to the scary picture. .....A Mad Cow-related 1990's ban on feeding cattle remains to cattle did not stop producers from feeding cattle the rendered remains of chickens and pigs which had been fed on cow parts. And feeding calves cow blood as a "milk substitute" continued, and may still be practiced at some operations. Also now officially banned is the practice of feeding cattle "poultry litter", which consists of bedding, spilled feed, feathers and fecal matter (chicken poop). Nice, huh? Europe does not allow feeding meat or animal waste to cows.... .The filthy conditions U.S. livestock are kept in, much worse than in Europe, cause disease, and therefore excess antibiotic use, and from that come resistant microbes like E. Choli, that are transferred to humans in food like chicken and hamburger. (for New York Times article click here.) Furthermore, a lot of antibiotics are fed to livestock merely as a growth enhancer.......If you don't think biotechnology is dangerous, then consider the "terminator" gene, a sterility gene Monsanto wanted to put into seeds it sells so farmers would have to go back to Monsanto for more seeds each planting season, rather than reseed from their prior crop according to the usual practice. Citizen groups stopped it from happening. We would like to discuss the terminator gene issue. The danger in bioengineered crops lies not in eating them, although adverse reactions are possible, but in unwanted cross-pollination. (For outline of hazards of bioengineered crops click here)....The paint industry persuaded the U.S. government to remain silent about the dangers of lead for decades after most European countries had acted to protect people .... Lead was put into gasoline as a combustion enhancer despite the danger of putting lead in the air. Did anyone protest?.....Margarine is made from vegetable oils, which are safe for the arteries, and thus margarine was declared safe, until the truth came out in the 1990's. There were reasons to doubt the alleged safety of margarine that any chemist could see, from the beginning, such as the fact that the process, hydrogenation, turns the oils into a solid at room temperature. The failure to question margarine on the part of media, university scientists, government scientists and others was a coverup. Who protested margarine? We would like to hear from readers....The U.S. government warned Kodak in Rochester New York before they set off a nuclear bomb in Nevada, so that Kodak could avoid damaged film from the radioactive cloud that arrived soon after the test. But people in the immediate vicinity of the tests, who later experienced epidemic cancer rates, were not warned.

The paint industry in the U.S. persisted in using lead in paint decades after France, England, Spain and many other nations had banned its use, in the 1920's and 1930's, because studies had shown it to be very dangerous. To go to a site detailing the lead paint horror story click here. Below is an excerpt from that site...

The Role of the Lead Industry in a Public Health Tragedy, 1900-1955.
A major source of childhood lead poisoning, still a serious problem in the United States, is paint. The dangers of lead were known even in the 19th century, and the particular dangers to children were documented in the English language literature as early as 1904. During the first decades of the 20th century, many countries banned or restricted the use of lead paint for interior painting. Despite this knowledge, the lead industry in the United States did nothing to discourage the use of lead paint on interior walls and woodwork. In fact, beginning in the 1920s, the Lead Industries Association and its members conducted an intensive campaign to promote the use of paint containing white lead, even targeting children in their advertising. It was not until the 1950s that the industry, under increasing pressure, adopted a voluntary standard limiting the amount of lead in interior paints.

Some may find the comments above regarding margarine to be chasing a conspiracy which was not there. Our point is that there was silence when there should have been debate. Many thousands of deaths and much debility resulted from the false belief of consumers that margarine was safer than butter. What kind of review did margarine get from the government, the dairy industry, chemists and so on, when industry made claims that margarine was better than butter for your arteries? The answer appears to be none. We are seeking information about individuals or groups who tried to create an issue of the unproven and questionable margarine claims by industry. .........Hydrogenation, which is what vegetable oils undergo to become margarine, might be expected to turn an unsaturated fat into a saturated one, (because hydrogen would take up the double bonds) -- meaning that the vegetable oil would become like butter. The actual change is a different one ("cis-trans"), that results in "trans-fats," but the "solid at room temperature" change from the liquid oil was an obvious reason to look more closely at margarine. Saturated fats are solid at room temperature -- e.g. butter and lard. There must have been people who said, wait a minute, what are we saying without really knowing what we are talking about, when we say margarine is safe. Please advise this site if you have knowledge.

Note on global warming: Although it takes a master of denial to deny that global warming is happening, there is no proof that it is being caused by industrial and automotive gasses. Most scientists think it is caused by cars and industry, and it seems a grave folly not to take a safe rather than sorry approach and try to radically cut emissions of "green house gasses." But we would like to point out that if the trend is natural, not man made -- and the geological record says such climate swings have occurred before -- we are still stuck with the question of how to deal with the problem, which, untended, could wipe out much of humanity along with many plants and animals. One approach would be to learn to efficiently desalinate ocean water, and thereby grow the ground cover needed to pull in carbon dioxide and emit oxygen. (Plants breath in carbon dioxide and breath out oxygen, the opposite of machines and animals.) Thus we emphasize the importance of learning general science, both for regular citizens, so they can put their political weight behind leaders who think intelligently about the environment, and for those who might become engineers (applied scientists), because scientists and engineers are the ones who must give us means to save the planet, if things continue to get worse and it becomes too late to just stop polluting.

Note on overpopulation: The Catholic Church bases its anti-birth control doctrine on the teachings of St. Augustine, who, upon embarking on a life of purity following a debauched youth, decided it was immoral for people to enjoy sex or much of anything else. He said people should only have sex to make babies. Given that the church hierarchy has recently officially dusted its hands of the child-molesting priest matter, as if to ignore the complicity of bishops and other clergy who have been covering up this travesty for centuries, it is clear the church hierarchy lacks an understanding of right and wrong, at least where their own actions are concerned. And we ask, is the real reason for the Vatican's position on birth control to swell the ranks of the Catholic church, as some claim? In any case, birth control is an essential tool in saving the planet and reducing human suffering. The Catholic Church is a force in the wrong direction.

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