The latest environmental news is striking pretty close to home. Apparently, the latest location where pollution has been discovered is... my body. And yours.
Many women are so polluted it could affect their babies. From Grist:
You weren't thinking of having children, were you? Good: One in five American women of childbearing age may have unsafe levels of mercury in their bodies, according to a new report by the Environmental Quality Institute at University of North Carolina-Asheville.
Half of breast cancer cases may be environmental. From the Oakland Tribune:
As many as half of all new breast cancers may be foisted upon woman by pollutants in the environment, triggered by such items as bisphenol-A lining tin cans or radiation from early mammograms, according to a review of recent science by two breast cancer groups.
The Breast Cancer Fund reports that half of all men and one out of three women will develop some kind of cancer in their lifetime. What do you think of this? Starting to get serious, huh?
How many women have excessively high level of mercury?Across the country, one of every five American women tested had excessively high levels of mercury. But in certain states -- New York, Florida, Colorado, and California -- it is approximately one in three women whose bodies have absorbed so much mercury that their children risk developmental damage.
How does a person get exposed to mercury?
From the Environmental Quality Institute's report, "fish consumption is clearly the primary source of hair mercury exposure for most Americans." Fish consumption is more important than dental fillings, which are commonly assumed to be a very significant source of mercury.
Where does mercury come from?
Again, from the EPA:
When coal is burned, mercury is released into the environment. Coal-burning power plants are the largest human-caused source of mercury emissions to the air in the United States, accounting for over 40 percent of all domestic human-caused mercury emissions. EPA has estimated that about one quarter of U.S. emissions from coal-burning power plants are deposited within the contiguous U.S. and the remainder enters the global cycle. Burning hazardous wastes, producing chlorine, breaking mercury products, and spilling mercury, as well as the improper treatment and disposal of products or wastes containing mercury, can also release it into the environment. Current estimates are that less than half of all mercury deposition within the U.S. comes from U.S. sources.
What happens when women whose mercury levels are too high have babies?
From the EPA:
For fetuses, infants, and children, the primary health effect of methylmercury is impaired neurological development. Methylmercury exposure in the womb, which can result from a mother's consumption of fish and shellfish that contain methylmercury, can adversely affect a baby's growing brain and nervous system. Impacts on cognitive thinking, memory, attention, language, and fine motor and visual spatial skills have been seen in children exposed to methylmercury in the womb.
Take action: determine your own mercury level
Test kits are available here for $20/kit -- you might add in a little extra for Greenpeace.
Take action: avoid dangerous seafood
Greenpeace recommends [PDF] that you:
- Do not eat grouper, marlin, orange roughy, shark, swordfish, king mackerel, or tilefish because they contain high levels of mercury.
- Avoid (eat less than three 6 oz. servings a month) bluefish, croaker, halibut, lobster (American/Maine), rockfish, sea bass, sea trout (weakfish), canned albacore tuna, and tuna steaks.
- Eat sparingly (less than six 6 oz. servings a month) carp, cod, dungeness crab, blue crab, snow crab, mahi mahi, monkfish, freshwater perch, skate, snapper, and chunk light canned tuna.
- Eat in moderation farmed abalone, anchovies, butterfish, calamari (squid), catfish, farmed caviar, clams, king crab, crawfish/crayfish, flounder, haddock, hake, herring, lobster (spiny/rock), Atlantic mackerel, farmed mussels, oysters, ocean perch, pollock, wild salmon, sardines, scallops, shad, shrimp, sole, farmed sturgeon, tilapia, trout, and whitefish.
- Check local advisories about the safety of fish caught by family and friends in your local lakes, rivers and coastal areas. If no advice is available, eat up to six ounces (one average meal) per week of fish you catch from local waters, but do not consume any other fish during that week.
- Fishing and farming practices of selected species have raised environmental concerns. Refer to the Ocean Friendly Seafood Guide to learn more at www.blueocean.org.
Personally, I've decided to almost completely avoid fish. The fisheries are so depleted that I'd rather not add to the problem.
Take action: oppose coal power plants
This is by far the most important action step. How ridiculous would it be if every well-off american stopped eating fish and spent a bunch of money testing themselves and doing some mercury detox program, while neglecting to address the source of the problem?
Bush called for more coal power plants in his SOTU speech. Contact your Congressional representatives and let them know that coal power plants might mean that your children or grandchildren could have developmental delays. Greenpeace even has a form letter for you to send.
What about chemicals and breast cancer?
An American woman's risk of breast cancer has nearly tripled in the last 40 years. Why? To find out, researchers from the Breast Cancer Fund and Breast Cancer Action analyzed more than 350 ecological, epidemiologic, and experimental studies of breast cancer in their report, State of the Evidence 2006.
They found that up to half of all new breast cancers may be caused by environmental factors -- exposure to harmful chemicals in everyday products and in the environment. For this half, lifestyle choices and genetics played no role in their cancer. That means that about 105,620 women last year were diagnosed with breast cancer from environmental causes.
What chemicals?
There is a very long list. It includes:
- Ionizing radiation
- Hormone replacement therapy (HRT) and hormones in oral contraceptives
- Bisphenol-A (BPA), one of the most pervasive chemicals in modern life, used to make polycarbonate plastic;
- Diethylstilbestrol (DES), prescribed for three decades to millions of women to prevent miscarriage, the drug was banned in 1971 because it caused cancer in their daughters;
- Polyvinyl chloride (PVC), used extensively in plastics including food packaging, medical products, appliances, cars, toys, credit cards and rainwear;
- Dieldrin, a pesticide banned from all uses in 1987; and
- Ingredients in many household products, especially cleaning agents, solvents and pesticides.
- Workplace exposures to a variety of solvents in the electronics, fabricated metal, lumber, furniture, printing, chemical, textile and clothing industries
- O-toluidine
- 1,3-butadiene, an air pollutant created by internal combustion engines and petroleum refineries. It is also used in some manufacturing processes and is found in tobacco smoke.
But in large doses, right?
No, actually, for many carcinogenic chemicals, technically there is no safe dose.
Particularly for children and fetuses:
A major study by Tufts University scientists demonstrated the critical importance of early life exposure to chemicals and the profound effects that can occur from very low doses. The scientists found that exposing pregnant mice to extremely low levels of bisphenol-A altered the development of the mammary gland in their offspring at puberty.
What is the government doing about this?
Besides the amazing phaseout of Teflon chemicals just announced, very little action to regulate chemical pollutants of our bodies is occurring.
Heather Sarantis provides a good overview in Truthdig:
Less than 10% of the more than 80,000 chemicals in use nationwide have been tested for their effects on human health.
The American Chemistry Council, the main industry lobby group, has made $21 million in campaign contributions since the beginning of the 2000 election season, $900,000 going directly to President Bush's campaign coffers.
There is one bright note:
[T]he proposed Kid Safe Chemicals Act, is being introduced by Sens. Jim Jeffords (I-Vt.) and Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.) and Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.). The act would be the first reform of federal regulations in 30 years and would require manufacturers to provide detailed health and safety information about the chemical ingredients of consumer products and to disclose such information prior to introduction of products. The bill has attracted several high-profile co-sponsors, such as Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.).
Predictably, the American Chemistry Council immediately opposed the bill, saying it duplicates existing regulations. This position ignores a Government Accountability Office report last July indicating that TSCA fails to identify health and environmental risks before chemicals are used in consumer products.
In the meantime, activists are pressuring states to take action.
What's happening in California?
Despite the evidence above, that even being exposed to small doses of Bisphenol-A while in the uterus can affect the development of mammary glands at puberty (still from Heather Sarantis's article):
On Jan. 19, Californians suffered a discouraging blow with the defeat of a bill in the Legislature that would have banned bisphenol-A and phthalates from products for babies and children....
The bill fell one vote short in a state Assembly Appropriations Committee vote when Leland Yee, a San Francisco Democrat who normally is a supporter of consumer rights and environmental causes, changed his vote to "no" at the last-minute.
But in California good news, the Biomonitoring bill, which would monitor Californians' chemical body burden, is being resubmitted. Thank you to Senators Don Perata, D-Oakland, and Deborah Ortiz, D-Sacramento for keeping the bill alive. It was voted down by the Senate twice and then vetoed last year by Arnold Schwarzennegger.
As we keep discovering, big business -- in this case, the chemical industry -- has the legislatures, or at least certain lawmakers, largely under their control.
Can you end this diary with some extreme call to action?
Yes I can. I hope to have kids one day. So, certain things make me more, let's say, focused than others.
Derrick Jensen has some really interesting, intense thoughts on how we should respond to the attack against us and life on the planet. The situation is certainly critical.
At the moment, I disagree with his call for us to "take civilization down," because I'm slightly more optimistic about the possibility of peaceful change. (The legislative attempts -- failed though they might be -- show that progress is occurring slowly.)
But this passage always gives me some perspective (it's highly condensed -- the entire speech is certainly worth reading):
Q: Can you tell us about your current project (How to bring down civilization)?
Derrick: This book originally was going to be an examination of the circumstances in which violence is an appropriate response to the ubiquitous violence upon which our culture is based....[Some things are worth dying for, some forces can be stopped only by counterforce]....
...whenever I give talks in which I mention violence....the response is always the same. Mainstream environmentalists.....begin to chant "Gandhi, Dalai Lama, Martin Luther King, Gandhi, Dalai Lama, Martin Luther King" in an effort to keep themselves pure.
The most interesting response comes from some of the other people...: survivors of domestic violence....prisoners (For three years I taught....at....a supermaximum security facility...)
A major reason for the difference in response, I realized a long time ago, was that for none of these latter groups is violence a theoretical question to be answered abstractly....The direct experience of violence...often brings these questions closer...so the people are not facing the questions as "activists"....but rather as human beings-animals-struggling to survive...
...I am not convinced that [the] forgiving response is necessarily and generically better, by which I mean more conducive to the survivor's future health and happiness, and by which I mean especially more conducive to the halting of future atrocities.
I also think of a passage from another Jensen speech:
We need to be smart about bringing down civilization. There are things people can hit that would have no moral consequences whatsoever. You can't make a moral argument for leaving a cell phone tower up. You aren't going to kill people by taking them out. On the other hand cell towers kill between five and fifty million migratory songbirds every year.
......
Many of my students at the prison were among the most politicized people I had ever met. A lot of them don't suffer from the belief in the system like we do, or are squeamish about laws. Obviously, or they wouldn't have ended up there. They don't believe the system has any more validity than what comes out of the point of a gun. I think a lot of the revolution is going to come out of the so-called criminal class.
......
You want to know why we don't rebel? We still think we have something to lose. That's what's stopping us. As soon as we realize we have nothing left to lose we'll be dangerous.
......
At what point do we resist? That is the point I try to make with dioxin. Every mother's breast milk in the world is contaminated with dioxin. My grandfather died from pancreatic cancer. I have Crohn's disease.....How close does it have to get before we realize we don't have anything left to lose? When the salmon are gone?.....We draw a line in the sand and say they can't cross it.... Well, ok you can have all my clothes....Ok, just don't cut off my other foot....
Somebody asked me at one of the talks I gave recently, "at what point do you think we'll reach the point where people should use any means necessary?"....The point I tried to make was the point has passed.