Money Increasingly Made in a Lab, Infused into Food, But at What Price?

As usual, it's been too long since my last post, and this one too will be rushed. Taking that into account I'll try to quickly sum up one general theme on my mind of late.

Food, Inc. is out. I haven't had the pleasure of watching it yet, since I live in a small city and to my knowledge it's not playing anywhere. I did however watch an interview on The Daily Show with film producer Robert Kenner. The issue of food production is intensely important because of its place at the base of our civilization and our connection with the natural environment and because of its universal impact. Everybody eats, as you'll hear again and again among activists. This is a good place to focus one's efforts to link up the environment, health, and social and economic issues.

The one thing that I'd like to see more focus on is the chemical and genetic engineering issues involved. It's not enough to worry about the terrifying scale and impact of industrial food production, the parts of it that are obvious and readily understood just by looking. People need to understand that money is being made by coming up with new chemicals and new genetically engineered plants and animals, that money is increasingly being made in a lab and in patent offices and in questionable legal contracts.

While conservatives complain about our "nanny states" and too much regulation, governments around the world are dropping the ball in the face of "scientific progress." They are letting corporations run wild in the name of profit and job creation, tax revenue and maintaining a hold on power in an increasingly globalized world, one in which poorer countries with cheap labor and less regulation hold the competitive edge in attracting business. Chemicals, biotech and nanotech are highly skilled industries that require plenty of initial investment, but also involve a lot of "value added" to products.

These industries represent what probably looks to governments like one of the last areas in which rich countries might maintain dominance. They also look a lot like a sneaky new form of colonialism or feudalism, where poor countries have their biological resources and indigenous knowledge "discovered", exploited, patented and modified and sold back to them in new systems of agriculture (and perhaps medicine and food generally) that inherently cause dependence and a steady loop of wealth transfer from poor to rich. This wealth transfer occurs within the wealthy nations as well, as farmers caught in a cycle of debt are more and more indebted to and controlled by companies like Monsanto or Tyson Foods. They're no longer farmers, but technicians doing as they're told and only being treated as the true owners and operators when something goes awry and they are held entirely responsible.

It may also be that governments simply do not know how to stop the onslaught of new chemicals and genetically engineered organisms. They are unsure how to regulate these things as they enter the market, "adding value" to products, while simultaneously posing a huge threat. Their long - and even short - term impacts on human health and the natural environment aren't and cannot be known due to their very nature and the scale of their distribution and application in the market and in the environment, in human beings, plants and animals.

Leaving genetic engineering aside, every time I eat something with artificial flavours my complexion seems to show it within days or even hours. My body's not the best at clearing out toxins, and I know plenty of people who can eat endless amounts of junk food and almost no produce and remain completely unblemished, but I take this to mean these things are toxins that need to be excreted. I don't care if they make my food taste better or make the companies producing them a few more bucks. What are they doing to my health?

So what can you do, today, tomorrow? Get away from eating processed foods. Cook at home, so you know what you're eating. When your food bill goes up, think of the savings in health benefits. In case your health isn't enough motivation, I'll confess it's primarily driven by vanity for me in the short run. I stay a decent weight and keep my complexion clear this way. I feel generally better day to day. I'm not thinking about living until I'm 90, I'm just trying to have the best possible existence day to day. Knowing that I'm making an effort to stop this disgusting - or at least poorly thought out - pursuit of profit by corporations at the expense of humanity and the planet at large makes it all the easier to continue to eat this way.

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Art, Culture as Making the Change

Related to my post from yesterday, and the idea that some people have turned away from the ecological problems we face, preferring to live in the moment, I've been meaning to talk more about the current state of the "public consciousness" so to speak. It seems to me, that even in this "turning away" there is a potentially very positive force, even if it's not an active drive towards solutions. Getting people to realize how the world works and how that functioning and those processes diminish our quality of life and our communities is half the battle. Changing how people think, in other words, is a good starting point. I wouldn't say it automatically results in change (for a deeper discussion of this, see Meyer's Political Nature) or change in the "right" direction, but it seems ultimately very necessary to cause a change in worldviews to put into practice the vast lifestyle changes that are required to deal with the issues we're facing. 

Understanding the disconnect between what is good for the economy and what is good for humanity can be as simple as conveying the cycle of processed food and pharmaceuticals to bad health and more pharmaceuticals and treatments and therapies and products to improve appearance and so on. All this injects money into the economy, but you have to wonder if it wouldn't be better if we kept most of that money in our pockets and ate healthier food, exercised and led less stressful lives. But imagine how the economy would contract in the pharmaceutical, processed food and beauty industries. There is a lot of money, and jobs, invested in the current system. The desire for change needs to reach far and wide, and also deep, if it's to get us where we need to go.

On that note, this post signifies my vote of support for a new project, Dark Mountain, just lifting off to try to spur such a cultural change through art. It seems to me there's already probably plenty of potential out there, along with art and cultural objects, tangible and intangible, for this kind of cultural shift. I was amused when I came across Tiesto's Elements of Life tour videos and listened to the opening "message." The crowd cheers after hearing how technology has reached the point where it's causing people to "grow apart, rather than coming together." The voice goes on, telling us that we must "traverse the force" to get back to the "essence of life."All the while you see the crowd with their phones and cameras stretched out overhead to capture whatever is there to be captured in the dark crowd, overcast by lights, waiting for the DJ to come on stage and light the place up with music that is about as technological as it gets as far as its "elements." 

But look at the size of the crowd. The "environmentalist" in me imagines they left a lot of garbage behind, even as I'm sure there's got to be a way to get from A - the message of coming together and "the true meaning of our existence" - to B: a better world. I think there's a lot of support for something better, we just haven't figured out how to get there yet, or what we're trading all our "stuff" in for. People need to be convinced we're getting something better, that's worth the change, that it's not really a "sacrifice." I'm already convinced it's not, but I'm realistic that it's not going to be easy or straightforward to transition and that far more people need to see the benefits. I'm sure there's a ton of this kind of expression of discontent in popular culture, if people look. 

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Oceans Update: Overfishing and the Problem of Plastic

Hopefully I'll be able to post more regularly soon, but in the meantime I thought I'd offer an update on some issues I've already covered. 

A couple years ago I read a book by Carl Safina that opened the door to how big an impact human activity is having on the oceans and marine life. Around the same time a major, and majorly depressing, report was released on the state of global fisheries, suggesting most would collapse by 2048 based on current activities and behaviour. Here's an update on the situation. 

Callum Roberts, a professor of marine conservation at the University of York lays out the situation. The big news is fairly straightforward. There has been a big movement to have fisheries assessed and certified sustainable by the Marine Stewardship Council. This has changed the approach to regulation of fisheries, especially in countries and regions where there has been a lot of certification done. More importantly, as Carl Safina emphasized as being a major problem in the past, when regulators and fishing interests meet to set quotas, there's now increasing pressure to base them on science, rather than on what voters or the fishing industry wants. For decades quotas have been set much higher than what scientists have said was necessary for sustainability, and thus the major(ly depressing) report on the imminent collapse of fisheries. 

The other big development has been a new drive towards protecting large sections of the ocean to function as breeding grounds for marine life, which would spur recovery. Coral reefs are often specifically protected for this reason, preventing bottom trawling nets from harming the reefs and also creating a hub for breeding. This is actually one of the areas where the previous American administration did a good job, getting a series of marine protected areas (MPAs) put in place, which now make up a third of MPAs globally. Roberts argues that quotas need to be put to rest, since they only lead to twice as much dead or injured marine life being thrown overboard as is landed. Rather, 30% of the oceans should be protected to allow for stocks to recover. A great deal of recovery could be accomplished in as little as 20 years.

But in other oceans news, there is the plastic problem. Plastic is a serious environmental and health issue that still isn't getting enough attention. The damage it causes is possibly most apparent in the oceans, where huge plastic garbage patches exist in areas where currents and winds are favourable for such agglomerations. Sea birds and ocean life eat or are entangled in plastic objects and die at a rate of a million a year for sea birds and 100,000 a year for marine mammals. Then there's the fact that plastic's biodegrading involves breaking into smaller and smaller pieces, so that in certain places in the ocean these pieces are more abundant than plankton and on certain beaches they make up a high proportion of the "sand". It seems likely that people, like birds, fish, whales and wildlife on land as well, are ingesting plastic to a certain extent. Plastic in water bodies also tends to attract other toxic chemicals, so that when it's ingested, it often has a toxic punch - aside from anything inherent in the chemicals contained in the plastic itself - that can accumulate and be magnified up the food chain.

In case you're thinking that a lot of the plastic in the ocean comes from refuse from ships or broken ship containers of shoes and toothbrushes, it's believed that 80% of it actually comes from plastic discarded on land, much of it as pellets before it has even had the chance to be made into useful products. The bottom line for most of us is to cut down on using disposable plastic shopping bags by using reusable ones, and to avoid drinking bottled water. Together these two are the worst of the plastic problem, and the easiest to cut back.

This article gives a fairly good history of the discovery of the problem and the history of plastic. It concludes with a commentary on a project led by David de Rothschild, which aims to raise awareness about the issue by sailing a specially designed, low environmental impact boat made entirely of recycled plastic to the plastic garbage patch and a bunch of other plastic "hot spots" in the Pacific, including certain islands and beaches. Mother Jones also recently did a piece that explains the potential, the usefulness and the problems of plastic.

Rothschild picks up on a major theme in the public mind lately, which is that the environmental problems seem so great to many people that they've essentially resigned themselves to just enjoying their own lives while "it lasts". Like him, I understand the pull in this, but I don't think it's an either-or situation. People need to do both. We can't completely absolve ourselves or our political and corporate leaders of responsibility by just "enjoying the moment". So much of the modern lifestyle, aside from any effects it's having on "the environment" and "nature", has impinged on an individual's ability to "enjoy the moment" anyhow, that sitting and putting up with it seems pretty defeatist and maybe just simply lazy and uninspired. But, that's another post. I'll end by saying that enjoying what you've got can also mean enjoying causing and effecting change, and it might be a higher and more lasting level of enjoyment at that.

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Chemicals, Birth Defects, The Future

It's entirely possible I've posted about this study before, but it bears repeating:

Probably one of the most important investigators in this area is a man named Michael Skinner who has shown us that the capacity that pesticides have to alter our lives has been grossly underestimated. In his model a pregnant rat is exposed for just a brief period in the very first phase of pregnancy to one pesticide. Keep in mind that there are no children in America who are exposed to just one pesticide. The average child is exposed to 300 chemicals at the time of conception. But in his model with just one pesticide all the rat babies when they were born did not have any birth defects at all. They looked perfectly normal. That's really important to think about because had the experiment ended there, it would have been declared a safe exposure, not associated with any harm. As he likes to point out, thanks to some inquiring minds he was allowed to keep his experiment going long enough to see how these rats turned out as adults. And there he found that ninety percent of the males were afflicted by a whole host of disorders that we would refer to as adult disorders, adult diseases. They included conditions like low sperm count and infertility, immune disorders, kidney and prostate problems, cancer, high cholesterol and a shortened life span. And if that sounds bad, it's really not as bad as the rest of the experiment. Because the rest of the experiment showed that this condition could be transferred to all subsequent generations without any further exposure. So if one pesticide could do this, imagine what might be happening in our society.

This quote is from Dr. Paul Winchester, a neonatologist who is warning people that it birth defects are much more common in babies conceived in the spring due to the higher concentrations of pesticides in the environment at that time of year. Pesticides are one group of chemicals, but there are many others in our food supply, cosmetics and environment that we have essentially no idea whatsoever what the long term effects might be, especially considering the sheer number of chemicals interacting. The likelihood for harm that accumulates over time seems high.

Update: Here's another example, phthalates are being linked to obesity. Phthalates are used in a lot of products, making it easy for them to be absorbed or even ingested. Note that the article says:

They have raised concerns as possible carcinogens for more than a decade, but attention over their role in obesity is relatively recent.

Ask yourself why they're still being put into products and what happens when a chemical like this is banned or comes to the widespread attention of the public. (Generally they replace it with another chemical. It's a bit like whack a mole, except, every year we might ban a tiny percentage of chemicals compared to the new ones coming on the market all the time.) 

There seems to be more articles like this one everyday. With food additives, as one example, a lot, or even all, of the things chemicals are used for, are superficial or just to ultimately create profit. Consider how new flavors of processed foods are made, and you might start to comprehend how money is created in labs, potentially at the cost of the long-term health of the population at large. The argument for a lot of chemicals has to do with convenience. It's hard to make a decision about whether the convenience is worth it when we don't know the long term cost of that convenience.

And on a vaguely related note, Kim Stanley Robinson talks about the future as related to climate change. What he's saying applies to other environmental threats as well though, such as the unknown impacts of chemicals, biotechnology - specifically transgenic biotechnology -, resource depletion, pollution and degradation at large. It would be nice if the rhetoric of "your children and grandchildren" would be set aside. I'm not sure if it's a nod to the fact that people in their 50s essentially still have so much power, or if it's just a failure to note that harmful effects, possibly catastrophic ones, will likely be felt within this century, but it gets annoying. I'm not anywhere near 50 though, and have no children. It's me I'm worried about, and you should be too, even if you're 50. People need to think more holistically about social justice and the environment, security and safety, and they need to think nearer term. The more complex a system becomes, the more possibilities for (unpredictable) problems there are and the more risk. It's never been more complex than the globalized, highly technologized, increasingly "man-made" (artificial) world we're living in now.

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New Bill Introduced (Again) to Limit Antibiotic Use in Livestock

I've posted a few times about the problem with widespread antibiotic use by people, but also by livestock producers. In fact, livestock is estimated to be getting 70% of the antibiotics given out in the U.S.  The concern you hear about most commonly in the media is that this contributes to antibiotic resistant superbugs like MRSA. The problems you hear less about are those caused by the antibiotics getting into the environment and food supply and the health issues this can cause for the human population as well as for wildlife, and possibly even for plants. Even plants are taking in antibiotics through the water supply or through treated sewage spread on crops as fertilizer. The problem with antibiotics in food or in water for people, never mind for plants and wild or domesticated animals, is that it upsets the natural ecological balance inside the body so that all sorts of bacteria, including good bacteria, are destroyed. Some of these bacteria keep other types of organisms under control, for example certain types of fungus. There are also possible, probable effects caused by the interaction of antibiotics with other pharmaceuticals and chemicals we're taking in. Contemporary people are getting a much wider array of "inputs" than you would have seen even a hundred years ago. The least the government can do is stop factory farmers from giving antibiotics to animals before they are actually needed to treat disease. Currently the drugs are given mainly to prevent disease in the unsanitary, crowded conditions of many of these "farms," and also to promote growth.

Congresswoman Louise Slaughter of New York is introducing a new bill to do just that, and it's apparently the fourth time the bill has been introduced, on an issue that's been on the radar since at least 1980 according to Slaughter.  But of course, factory farmers are trying to stop the bill from passing. Don't be fooled by the headline, food safety is already at risk because of factory farm operations, with the vast amount of manure and their runoff getting into water supplies and contaminating produce, never mind the health of the animals where most of our meat is actually coming from. What is true is that more animals dying because of declining antibiotic use would drive the cost of food up, assuming more animals will in fact die because of this law, and not that they would build up their own resistance to disease and perhaps be healthier overall, considering the effect overuse of antibiotics has in people might be similar for animals. It would possibly force these farms to give these animals more space and cleaner living conditions so that they don't get sick so frequently. There may end up being fewer animals produced overall and the cost of meat would probably go up. But, if you're a green or health-conscious person, you probably already know that we're eating too much meat and not enough plants anyhow, for our health and for the environment (particularly for reducing climate change). If you're in the United States and you'd like to see this bill pass on only its fourth attempt, now's the time to start being vocal about it.

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Cap and Trade: Revenue and Individual Impact

Although I'm way past due for a new post, I still don't really have the time to add anything significant. In the meantime, there's this segment on greenhouse gases cap and trade in the United States from Living on Earth's show this week:

STAVINS: Well there's tremendous support within private industry for the cap and trade approach in general because they see regulation coming and it's the lowest cost approach for them. There is not widespread support for the auctioning of the allowances, because when the allowances are auctioned it means private industry pays not only to their control costs, but they also pay for the right to emit.

GELLERMAN: Well the Obama administration is literally banking on this money. How much money are we talking about?

STAVINS: Well the Obama administration in its recent budget projected that they would obtain revenues on the order of 750 to 800 billion dollars over a period of close to a decade from the auction of the allowances, from selling the allowances to private industry.

GELLERMAN: Would I be able to buy one of these allowances?

STAVINS: Well, that's interesting because under the way at least the previous statutes had been written for the SO2 allowance trading program, whether or not you are regulated by the program – in that case an electricity generator – you can buy an allowance. And, in fact, under the SO2 allowance trading program you can go to the EPA website and see this – a substantial number of the purchases of allowances have been by student groups. And they take that allowance, and you know what they do with it? They tear it up. And something remarkable happens when an individual citizen buys an allowance in cap and trade program and tears it up or hides it. They have actually made more stringent the overall cap that was enacted by the Senate, the House of Representatives and signed by the President.

GELLERMAN: Because they've reduced the number of shares.

STAVINS: That's right. That's right. And it's remarkable. I mean, frankly, I don't know of any other public policy in any sphere where an individual citizen through their actions can actually render more stringent a policy enacted by the Congress.

GELLERMAN: So, can it reduce the greenhouse gas? It may work in the marketplace, buying and selling, but will it actually reduce greenhouse gases?

STAVINS: If the cap is set to bring down the level of CO2 and or other greenhouse gases over time, then as long as monitoring and enforcement is working, then it will definitely work. And our experience with these programs is that they work. Compliance with the acid rain the SO2 allowance trading program is about 99.9 percent.

My grain of salt would be that SO2 wasn't quite as interwoven throughout the economy as greenhouse gas emissions. This will be an enormous undertaking, which is why it's taken so long to even get to this stage of serious consideration.

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Chemical Feminization and Whales Lost in a Noise Cocktail

On the personal front I haven't been feeling well for a couple of weeks, but I finally saw a piece of news that irritated me enough - actually more the way it was presented - that I felt compelled to post.

Recently there's growing concern that common chemicals, pesticides, have a serious impact on reproductive health. These chemicals can mimic estrogen and cause obvious feminization in various species and most likely, in high enough quantities, have a seriously detrimental effect on human male fertility. I may have posted at one point about how fertility levels were found to be much lower in rural areas due to relatively high levels of pesticides in the environment. I've also read about areas, towns, neighbourhoods that are surrounded by various types of chemical facilities or chemical-using operations where the sex ratio of babies is heavily skewed towards girls. The implications of this are probably pretty obvious, over time, at least. As someone close to me - someone not exactly the typical stereotype of the environmentalist - said, "We're going extinct!" So I was somewhat annoyed when I saw this Fox News video about a new study on this problem. I don't know if it's because it's coming from Fox News, a station not known for being very environmentally aware, or if it's because it's become a habit not to raise alarm and always put a positive spin on things that really should just be allowed to remain what they are: negative - but I was sort of irritated by the smiling scientist at the end and all her reassurances. Polar bears and alligators aren't exactly small animals, so I'm not real sure whether her talk about dosage is particularly realistic. Not only that, but animals don't apply or handle full strength pesticides right out of the container. This is not a subject where reassurance is what's needed.

The other story that caught my interest, weeks ago now, is one about whales. If you follow environmental news, you've probably heard about the fight over sonar between those interested in whale conservation and welfare and the military. There's a couple of theories about why sonar causes beaching and death in whales, especially new, more powerful sonar. One theory is that the whales dive too deep and too fast to try to avoid the sonar and this causes pressure sickness (just like in human divers) and internal hemorrhaging. Another theory is that the sonar simply causes the hemorrhaging on its own. I'm not really feeling up to doing a bunch of research to track down the specific science, but there is a lot of information available online. Sonar's only part of the problem though. Noise pollution from ships and seismic work are also making it difficult for whales to communicate, find food and connect with mates. The blue whale's "acoustic range" is said to have been cut back 90%. In an article by the Associated Press on the topic, the effect was described as being like a cocktail party where everyone's speaking at once, so everyone keeps raising the volume of their own voice until eventually it's almost impossible to hear one another. This is what marine life is having to deal with everyday, all day, their whole lives, and many of them need their sense of hearing just to navigate. From an ethical standpoint, what humanity is inflicting on these wide-ranging species is probably far worse than we're even able to imagine, their very existence threatened by it, never mind that it's just plain inconsiderate and inhumane.

The trouble is, while it's nice that some scientists and conservation groups are coming forward to try to restrain the military's use of the worst types of sonar and to try to cut back on ship traffic and enact restrictions, this is a situation where cooperation and mutual agreement and restraint are required. The American military isn't going to agree to stop using sonar or restrict its use if other countries don't do the same. And even if they agree publicly, it's pretty hard to enforce this kind of thing. The same sort of problems come up for ship traffic and seismic work. The bottom line is that the only way to get people to universally recognize the harm these activities cause and then limit them is to change the way people think about these activities and install a strong moral aspect in the common consciousness. And clearly that is possible, because it's been done before. Some of us already think it's wrong to eat much seafood if you live in a landlocked place, no matter how often doctors urge us to.

Since I realize it's one thing to just decide too much shipping, sonar and seismic activity is bad for marine life and another to stop or severely curtail those activities, I'll offer some fanciful and less fanciful ideas about solutions. First, less shipping could be accomplished and probably will happen somewhat naturally as the global economy contracts and relocalizes because of increased energy costs. There simply won't be as much product moving and it probably won't be moving as far, especially the heavy, low value, low density stuff. As for sonar and seismic, go back to the drawing board. The same goes for ship's motors, in fact. Dream big, in other words. Creates more jobs for R&D and then implementation if quieter motors or less energy intensive ships (smaller motors, less sound pollution) and different technology for the military becomes de rigueur or simply regulation. Maybe we could create a whale conservation economy, sort of like one based on green building and energy efficiency. Or we could just stop doing war and learn to cooperate, and then there'd be no need for military sonar and all those endlessly patrolling ships and subs. That's about as fanciful as it gets.

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