[FLPERMACULTURE] [Fwd: Drinking the Mercury]

[Michael Burns]

Drinking the Mercury
We Just Can't Help Ourselves

by Michael I. Niman
ArtVoice 12/7/06
http://artvoice.com/issues/v5n49/drinking_the_mercury


Here’s a true story about a Pennsylvania college
student who, while exploring a seldom traveled wooded
area of campus, stumbled upon an old bottle filled
with a glistening silver liquid. He brought it back to
his dorm room and cleaned it up, but he still had no
clue as to what this shiny fluid was. So he took a
taste. Having never drunk mercury before, the flavor
was alien to him, so he still couldn’t ascertain the
identity of his newfound treasure. That is, until his
digits removed themselves from his neurological
landscape. With no feeling in his hands, he sought
medical treatment and found out he had mercury
poisoning.

A hazmat crew cleaned up his room and his idiocy
became part of the public record. So we can chalk this
sorry tale up to moronics—fodder for News of the Weird
or perhaps a candidacy for a Darwin Award.


Cancer or Dandelions?

Here’s another story. But it’s not about a person.
It’s about a society. We play a game called golf. It’s
quite popular. It involves whacking a small ball
around a large lawn, eventually landing it in a small
hole. Patches of sand and the occasional pond provide
obstacles and break up an otherwise monotonous green
expanse. Dandelions, clovers and native species of
grass are not, however, part of the game. Neither are
obstacles caused by turf variations resulting from
grub and beetle activity. So, to avoid having to roll
our little balls through such untamed micro
wildernesses, we douse golf courses with a variety of
poisons. As a result, people who regularly play golf,
and people who live near golf courses, suffer from
highly elevated instances of brain and other
neurological cancers. Golf courses are now, for
example, the largest source of toxic chemical
contamination in the Great Lakes watershed.

So, for all the Einsteins out there, here’s a few
questions. What’s worse, cancer or dandelions? Should
we adapt to rougher golf courses or large numbers of
cancer deaths? Is it better to poison our watersheds
and drinking water with carcinogens or to adapt to the
occasional golf course clover? And here’s the biggie.
Why is the Pennsylvania college student a moron, but
not us?

Then there’s our toilet paper. Why do we insist on
using virgin timber rather then recycled fiber to make
toilet paper? Why do we use chlorine bleach to whiten
it? We wipe our butts with the carcasses of the very
forests we need to provide our oxygen. That’s not very
smart. And we bleach our toilet paper with a toxic
chemical, chlorine, that causes cancer and, when
released into the environment, depletes the earth’s
ozone layer.


Our Dainty Posteriors

This is a needless folly in a society that has the
technology to make perfectly acceptable toilet tissue
from post-consumer waste paper and non-chlorinated
whiteners. And our dainty posteriors won’t feel the
difference. The earth, however, will. So why do we
allow the existence of a system that floods our
supermarkets with cheap, virgin, chlorinated butt
paper, while charging a premium for a more
environmentally responsible product that should cost
about the same to make?

Ditto on laundry and dishwasher detergents. Almost
every brand on the market today is laced with
persistent environmental poisons. Again, we have the
technology to do better. But we don’t. We leave the
market dominated by tainted products, with the
unadulterated alternative radically overpriced and
hence only available to wealthy consumers. In
actuality, the price difference involved in producing
toxic versus non-toxic detergents is nominal. The tiny
and impoverished nation of Belize, for example,
outlawed the sale of non-biodegradable detergents. The
market adapted. Today Belizeans buy biodegradable
detergent for the same price that they used to pay for
toxic detergent. Why can’t we?

The answer lies in a corporate notion of freedom.
We’re Americans and we cherish our freedoms. So we
don’t have to listen to some tree-huggers tell us they
value their cancer-free brains more than we value a
dandelion-free game of golf. We own the golf course.
It’s ours. According to radical “property rights”
organizations such as the Republican Party, telling us
what we can and cannot do with our property is a
government “taking.” They are taking away our right to
adulterate our property as we see fit, hence they are
taking value from that property, since a
dandelion-laced golf course is less valuable then a
dandelion-free course—so long as we keep golfers in
the dark about brain cancer risks.

But there’s a big gaping hole in this perverted logic.
Toxics migrate. And I consider taking away my right to
drink pure, pesticide-free water to be a taking.
Likewise, I consider irresponsibly destroying my
little piece of the ozone layer of our collectively
owned atmosphere also to be a taking.

Pissing in the Soup

Try this argument on for size. My neighbor is cooking
dinner. There’s a big pot of soup on the stove. I go
into their kitchen, put a chair next to the range,
climb up on it, undo my fly and piss in their soup. If
this is clearly unacceptable, then why can a pesticide
applicator lay down poison, either on a golf course or
a suburban lawn, knowing it will eventually find its
way into my drinking water and my soup, tainting them
with something far more toxic then urine. Why is this
behavior acceptable? Why isn’t it a taking when
someone needlessly takes away my right to clean water
and air?

The list goes on. Why do we manufacture energy-hogging
incandescent light bulbs when switching over to
compact fluorescents would save enough energy to shut
down dozens of power plants while paying for
themselves with savings? The extra tonnage of carbon
dioxide contributes to global warming and takes away
my family’s right to a secure future. The same goes
for all those gas-guzzling SUVs. What gives those
drivers the right to dump their tailpipe wastes into
my atmosphere?

Ultimately that privilege to foul the commons is
protected by a government whose idea of environmental
sustainability is dictated by its belief in a coming
rapture coupled with corporate culture’s worship of
short-term profitability. Fundamentalism and greed.
Corporations can ravage the earth—it’s no biggie since
some of us will be leaving soon anyway. So corporate
polluters get whatever concessions they want—including
a 2003 executive order by the Bush administration
allowing power plants to emit higher levels of, yes,
mercury.

The green alternatives are out there. We’re an
advanced technological society, but sociologically, in
terms of relating to our environment in a sustainable
way, we’re Neanderthals. We shouldn’t be burning the
walls of our house to stay warm. Wind and solar energy
are now feasible. Conservation is possible. Toxic
chemicals are for the most part obsolete and
avoidable. Organic agriculture has come of age. We can
live sanely. We don’t have to foul our own
environment—to turn our dinner table into a litter
box. We don’t have to be drinking the mercury.


Dr. Michael I. Niman’s previous columns are archived
at www.mediastudy.com.


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Michael Burns
http://www.cayuta.org
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Earn your permaculture design certificate.
The Finger Lakes Permaculture Institute
offers affordable local classes.
http://www.fingerlakespermaculture.org
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