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Your body. My body. The Body Toxic.
Like many parents of young children, I don't read books cover-to-cover much anymore. So it was with great pleasure that I read even the appendices in Nena Baker's new book, The Body Toxic: How the Hazardous Chemistry of Everyday Things Threatens Our health's and Well-being.
Baker spent four years researching this book and you can tell. It's chock full of chemical history and the politics that surround it, including tidbits like Teflon's beginnings as a coating for the valves and gaskets in the atom bomb. Her emphasis is endocrine disruptors and she digs deep into five problem areas: the common pesticide atrazine, cosmetics, flame retardants, plastics and perfluorinated chemicals. In each case she not only confronts the major issues head-on, she tells a readable story and even throws in some manageable chemistry. No easy task.
She also wraps her arms around the reason we are all afraid to buy most anything:
The vast majority of [the 10,000 widely used chemicals] have not been tested for potential toxic effects because the U.S. Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) of 1976 does not require it. And the news gets shockingly worse: the EPA cannot take any regulatory action regarding a suspected harmful substance until it has evidence that it poses an "unreasonable" risk of injury to human health or the environment.The barriers to action are so high that, according to a 2005 report by the Government Accounting Office, the EPA has given up trying to regulate chemicals and instead relies on the chemical industry to act voluntarily when concerns arise.
Now that makes me sleep soundly at night - you? But as Baker so reasonably says (and perhaps the reason reviewers are calling her 'balanced'), 'it's not that chemicals are bad per se, and it would be preposterous for even the most ardent environmentalist to suggest such a notion. It's that costly societal problems often arise because we know so little about so many chemicals.' Exactly.
Good thing she covers how we're going to change this, 'cause that's what I'm after. It's high time to move beyond what one researcher calls the chemical du jour approach, where we're fighting s-l-o-w-l-y to ban one bad actor after another: lead, phthalates, BPA, and the list (and time, effort, money) goes on. And that is just where the Kid Safe Chemicals Act comes in. Let's test chemicals before they hit the market, not after they start causing trouble.
If you're more personal than political, Baker's got a terrific section that briefly describes the uses and adverse health effects of the five major chemicals she covers, including common exposure pathways and steps for avoiding them (Appendix 1). Happily for us laypeople, Baker has a knack for translating carbon chains and the like into understandable lingo. But her closing sentence needs no translating: We are the body toxic, and we can no longer afford our ignorance.
Comments
A MATTER OF SCALE
The idea "small is beautiful" is not a new notion; the adoption of such an idea leads to sustainable behavior. Surely the reasonable and sensible embrace of a "beautiful, low-consumption lifestyle" for the sake of a better life for a democratic majority of people; for the promotion of global biodiversity; for the protection of the environment; and for the preservation of Earth as a fit place for human habitation, could be one of the most powerfully sustainable and immediately effective behavioral changes the leaders of the family of humanity have made in a very long time.
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.php
Posted by: Steven Earl Salmony | September 11, 2008 8:51 AM
OIL IS FOR DINOSAURS
I hope that Obama will talk about the true cost of oil. People in this country are complaining that oil gasoline costs them $4 per gallon. However, oil costs us much more. I think that the cost to the environment, which can be calculated in dollars...for example the cost to clean-up oil spills, the cost of dirty air and the health problems it causes, the costs of hurricanes like Ike and Katrina, the cost of global warming in general. I hope Obama has his people calculate these real costs and average them into the cost per gallon for gasoline. I would imagine gasoline actually costs the average citizen more like $50 a gallon!
Just as an addiction to heroin costs much more than the price of the drugs itself, so addiction to oil costs much more than what we pay at the pump.
What about the cost to our beautiful landscapes; the coastal waters, the pristine Alaskan environment. And what should we do with all of these ridiculous drilling rigs after we have sucked all the oil out of the ground and pumped it up into the atmosphere? What about the cost of removing the drilling machines when they are no longer of use...when all the oil is gone...because one day it will all be gone...that is its nature. Oil is non-renwable. Or do all the fanatical born again christians like Palin not care because they are just hoping for Armageddon soon anyway? The policies of the right wing christians will certainly hurry that along!
OIL IS FOR DINOSAURS...and if we keep using OIL we will become dinosaurs.
We need to invest in the energy of the future....in fact solar and wind power are the energies of the present. They already exist! Lets use them more fully and develop a sustainable infrastructure before the religious right (which does not care about the planet anyway) turn Earth into a living hell.
Posted by: Patrick Gasparro | September 13, 2008 11:52 AM