The luxury of choice

Ah, we are a free society. Breath that fresh air. Or maybe just pretend to. I was having a little trouble with the literal version of that this morning on my run. The downside of the oil price issue for many around here has turned into everyone running for wood stoves again. So, while the homey scent wafts through the air, I find myself having trouble getting through a 3 mile run. I blame this on the greedy jerks who are charging too much for cleaner burning stoves. Wink, wink.

But I’m also kind of a wimp in this. I imagine that, in China and other sudden-boom nations, people are choking on foul air that barely qualifies as such. I should just suck it up…I guess, and be thankful that I didn’t roll the karmic dice to end up being born in one of those places. We, in this nation, have the luxury of complaining, sometimes loudly and violently, when things are wrong. In China, you protest silently, while standing in front of a tank. Praying that there is a human being driving it, and not an automaton.

I’ve gotten used to being a ecologically-minded person. Our family recycles everything that is possible to recycle here in our town. Every plastic that has the symbol, every scrap of foil, metal, and paper. And a month or so ago, I took another step, by buying red worms to eat the crap we toss out. My garbage disposal is breathing a sigh of relief as I write. I got them from angoraandworms.com, a home business run by two nice ladies in Charleston, RI. It took a few weeks for the food to start getting digested, but now, with a scrap can safely containing what they haven’t eaten yet, we are fully into this.

I have divested myself of almost all “bad” cleaning products (I would just like to know what to disinfect with when the stomach flu comes to town!). I use cloth towels and rags to clean with. We eat organic when we can. We buy locally when we can. For a lot of people, that’s just called everyday life; eating what is right there, using what’s right there, because there is no other option. For us, capitalism first removed our choice in the matter, and then, remarketed it to us. We’re paying through the nose for what our grandparents just accepted as this everyday existence.

On the other hand, our mighty weapons of the dollar, free speech, and the internet have enabled us to take action in ways heretofore undreamed of. Sometimes, fact doesn’t even need to apply, but it’s really effective when it does. Right now, in our current digital age, we have come to believe that we are more contaminated by industrial toxins and chemicals than one hundred years ago. As an archaeologist, I really find that hard to swallow. As someone who watches the evening news, and follows global ecology, I know it’s a bit exaggerated. We are certainly better off than anyone who was working in factories during the industrial revolution (remember the Mad Hatter from Alice in Wonderland? It was a real syndrome; the result of hatmaking or milinery going industrial. Mercury was used in copious amounts, resulting in neurological defects.). We are better off now that medicine and drug manufacturing has some means of being regulated. It used to be that any old quack could hand out arsenic, cocaine, mercury, or laudanum, amongst other things. Women have used arsenic since the days of ancient Rome to whiten their skin. During the 19th century, it was used to embalm, and since we are a dumb species, there were cases of arsenic groundwater contamination as a result. Men actually used to take arsenic as a male enhancement drug. Mercury was used in the Lewis & Clark expedition as a dysentery remedy.

Coal burning in the British Isles has been around since the 13th century or so, when it was so plentiful that it could apparently be carted away, without mining, from its shores. Well, in short, we are our own worst enemy in this regard. We see our bodies as temples, unless we can really make a buck off of something. We look for convenience over the right thing to do. In the town where my parents live, there used to be a powder mill. No, not cosmetics. It was a major war machine facility. They produced gunpowder. And, like many other industries, they operated on a river, making use of natural energy by using a water wheel. And then they dumped all the effluvium of death back into the water, as a way of saying thanks to Mother Nature. They were at the highest productivity during the Civil War, and I have yet to see any studies following the impact of the nastiness pumped into the Scantic at that point. The powder mill was flanked by a “recycling” plant, which basically took waste materials (fabric, primarily) and turned them into something usable again. It sounds great, except the same problem followed. The river was apparently some horrific color for quite a while. Even now, I can’t fathom setting foot in its waters, because the times I let my dog take a drink out of it, found her having acute stomach trouble immediately afterwards. That could, of course, be runoff from the beef farm nearby as well. Yech.

I’m saying all of this because I’m not as worried about being a ticking time bomb of chemicals as I am about what I physically have control over going into my body, or into my kids’ bodies. We’ve cut out trans fats, high fructose corn syrup (corn refiners’ association, go make biodegradable plastics and stop crapping up our food!), preprocessed foods, and basically anything that seems questionable. I have to have a guilty pleasure, so I’m not ready to quit Dunkin’ Donuts yet. Sorry.

I think if we’re all really keen on purifying the planet, we ought to be doing TWO things.

Number One: Put pressure on China and other polluters (their pollution gets to the U.S. eventually), through the power of the dollar, and the power of complaining – to government and trade officials, and to companies who buy Chinese made products, or have their companies producing in China via cheap labor.

Number Two: Develop your compassion for those who are still living in Dickensian filth and despair. It exists even in our country, but mostly overseas, where children work all day, and families languish, dreaming of people like us, who complain that we can’t find cheap cashmere or enough palm oil products.

Links: www.gearthatgives.org
www.mongabay.com/borneo/borneo_oil_palm.html
www.sspconline.org/article_details.asp?artid=art71
www.chicagotribune.com/chi-china-cashmere-htmlstory,0,7007933.htmlstory