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« About that New York Times sunscreen column. . . | Main | Triclosan: Lurking where you least expect it »
Government hard at work - and it isn't pretty
Bad news of the day: It is fast only when it want to be.
One would think that if it takes the government over 30 years to set safety standards for sunscreen, they would be as "effective" on other aspects of their work. But, no, that is not the case with this administration (and unfortunately many others before this one).
The last few months of the Bush administration are being used to push for a rule that would make it tougher to regulate workers' on-the-job exposure to chemicals and toxins. This is all being done at the Department of Labor, by the political appointees of the commander-in-chief.
According to a Washington Post investigation, the Department of Labor did not disclose the proposal (even though that is required) in public notices, and the text of it is still not made public. The Post further states that the proposal would
"call for reexamining the methods used to measure risks posed by workplace exposure to toxins. The change would address long-standing complaints from businesses that the government overestimates the risk posed by job exposure to chemicals.The rule would also require the agency to take an extra step before setting new limits on chemicals in the workplace by allowing an additional round of challenges to agency risk assessments.
The department's speed in trying to make the regulatory change contrasts with its reluctance to alter workplace safety rules over the past 7 1/2 years. In that time, the department adopted only one major health rule for a chemical in the workplace, and it did so under a court order."
Many people are exposed to toxic chemicals at work, and the public as well as those employees often lack knowledge about exposures. A while ago, we did a conducted a nationwide survey of nurses that suggests associations between the health of nurses and their children and the nurses' long-term exposures to the many hazardous chemicals, drugs, and other agents they encounter over the course of a workday. There are so many people that are exposed to toxic chemicals through their professions that the last thing we need is federal action making it tougher to regulate workplace exposures.
I can't help but to think of The Simpsons:
"Lisa, the whole reason we have elected officials is so we don't have to think all the time. Just like that rainforest scare a few years back. Our officials saw there was a problem and they fixed it, didn't they?" -- Homer Simpson
Are we still ignoring one cause of the things that threaten the human community?
Based upon what we can see now, and understand from so many discussions in the EnviroBlog, would it be correct to say unequivocally that an increasing food supply for the human species is the essential factor producing the recent skyrocketing increase of absolute global human population numbers?
Until this relationship is seen (ie, food is the independent variable and human population numbers is the dependent variable), and its implications understood and accepted, the human community cannot respond ably to the global challenges that are looming ominously on the far horizon, I believe. The family of humanity will continue its necessary but insufficient projects at “symptom mitigation” of the global threats without ever taking hold of what is actually causing our difficulties and threatening our very existence. We can identify the problem. We are it.
If the skyrocketing growth of human numbers worldwide is THE number one problem to be confronted by the human community in our time, then ideas for humanely reducing human population numbers makes good sense, I suppose.
To have continuously denied the seminal work of Thomas Malthus and to have castigated the great scientists who have extended his thinking and improved our understanding; to have adamantly demanded that the relationship between food and human population numbers be seen conversely, will be acknowledged as the greatest failure of human perception in human history. At least to me, the implications of this potentially catastrophic perceptual error (ie, human population numbers is the independent variable and food supply the dependent variable) appear to be profound and could have something to do with the existence of the culturally derived functional insanity in the thinking of the leaders of the global political economy and their manipulation of many minions in the mass media who are mainstreaming this primary misperception and other economically expedient and politically convenient mistaken impressions to people everywhere.
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001