1. Dick Danjin -- on GM and its failures and a Betrayal of Trust
2. Jim Fisher -- on why he has written Near Journey's End
3. Joe Blackbourn-- Pollution, pollution and more pollution!
4. Ned Hamson - The Coming Pandemic - Bird Flu or a New Killer Influenza: Will It Get You? -- Updated Jan. 2, 2006
From Dick Danjin on the Rifle River in Michigan. Not exactly a five year vision, except that if GM does not change, its' retirees will not be in a good place in five years.
Betrayal of Trust
UAW-GM Hourly Retirees
On March 26, 2005 an article appeared in the Detroit Free Press entitled "Recalls? Not a Problem for GM." Reality denied. GM argues that its large recall numbers -- 14.5 million vehicles in the past 15 months -- "... are not an indication of poor quality".
Since 2002 GM recalled 18.7 million vehicles. GM's 10-K filing for 2004 states:
* Incentives were 18 to 20 billion dollars
* Recalls cost 9.1 billion dollars
* Warranty costs were 3.9 billion dollars
Every year since Mr. Wagoner, or as Christopher Byron in his article in the New York Post, "GM's Flip is a Flop", calls him, Gee-Ricky, has been at the helm of GM he has lost market share, and had increasing numbers of recalls.
Example: 2003 Recalls were 7.8 million vehicles. In 2004, 10.8 million vehicles were recalled.
Auto writers, why not publish Gee-Ricky's resume for 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003 and 2004? By stating the market share, recalls, cost of recalls, warranty costs, and cost of incentives, it will be simple to see Wagoner is the only single person completely responsible and accountable to the GM Board of Directors, the stockholders, the employees whose job security depends on these numbers, and the car buying public, for this shameful waste of General Motors resources.
John Gapper's piece published in the Financial Times on March 24, 2005 entitled "General Motors Warning to the World", tells us that GM/Gee-Ricky spent 6.5 billion dollars developing new cars and trucks, selling its U.S. vehicles at an average price of $18,991.00, precisely $1.00 per vehicle less than in 2003. GM marketed their 2004 GM vehicles extensively and expensively, only to sell 50,000 fewer vehicles than it did in 2003.
Clearly, "It's the product stupid!
Brian Barron of the BBC News was recently in Detroit and broadcast a story on April 7, 2005. He visited the Renaissance Center GM showroom. His observation was "All that is missing is a prospective purchaser, perhaps wearing a mask and black tights."
Detroit as a city once had a well over 100,000 auto worker population. Barron now observes Detroit as a "wasteland".
This brings us to Dan Neil, Los Angeles Times auto writer, whose April 6, 2005 article, "An American Idle; The Pontiac G6 is a Sales Flop. At General Motors, Let the Impeachment Proceedings Begin." In his article, Mr. Neil writes "However, given recent events, I have to revise my story. To wit: Dump Wagoner." Not only does this statement challenge "The all good loving center of the universe that can do no wrong" culture of General Motors' management philosophy, it challenges the center of the center, Christopher Byron's Gee-Ricky!
So, what does the narcissistically pathological monolithic center do? It irrationally and illogically pulls it's advertising from the 900,000 daily circulation L.A. Times. So the paper's readers now have General Motors eliminated from the LA Times Readers' world! One can only wonder if this is the action of a petulant child, or if just another of the delusions GM suffers from is a William Randolph Hearst complex. Maybe there is method to the totalitarian action of GM.
The message is clear to all auto writers everywhere. If we outright lie, prevaricate, obfuscate, deflect, demure, reverse our positions, or consistently pose GM as "the glass is always half full", you auto writers may never say the glass is half empty. And, if you do, you will suffer the fate of the Los Angeles Times and Dan Neil.
Just what do you suppose is that fate? What is it that Dan Neil said that does NOT reflect GM's reality today? The parable, The Emperor's New Clothes, is certainly applicable to General Motors and Mr. Wagoner. The defense and denial behavior of GM as a corporate entity, its leaders and spokespersons, suggest a pathology in need of psychiatric help.
To the detriment of hundreds of thousands people, General Motors and its "partners" have identified and marketed to the press that the retired hourly workers (who self incarcerated themselves to working life sentences in the caverns of GM plants, with freedom coming at the time of retirement, pensions and health care) are THE problem GM has.
Isn't it interesting that Mr. Wagoner, his sycophants and his "partner" have found a way to dehumanize 250,000 human beings and the expenditure of the majority of the years of their lives by collectivizing 250,000 individuals as "Legacy Costs."
One can find no human meaning in the term "Legacy Cost" or any human meaning to terms "charge off" or "depreciation." Does anyone remember the 1940s when a certain political organization referred to millions of people being victimized as "the final solution"? General Motors retirees literally paid for the cost of the 2003 contract. Retirees are easy targets since they have no voice or vote in what is currently going on. Now Mr. Wagoner and his partner want the hourly retirees to give up the greater part of 1 billion dollars to reduce General Motors health care cost. First a question should be answered. How do you know the GM health care costs are actually, factually, going to be the projected $5.6 billion? Because they "tell you so," because it is in their 10-K filing? Look at Delphi. All the players involved in the FBI's investigation came from where? GM, of course.
Why do auto writers consistently refer to GM UAW hourly workers as costing more for health care? There are two groups of hourly employees receiving contractual health care, 112,000 active workers and over 250,000 retirees.
We retirees are not hourly workers. What we are, is old, worn out from years of industrial work (many prior to OSHA), and have much greater need for constantly increasing access to all aspects of health care. Moreover, we cannot suffer our already fixed incomes to be reduced, money unilaterally and arbitrarily taken from us, under a guise of helping GM.
If you lessen our economic means; if you change our doctors; if you change our health care plans; if you restrict or make all aspects of our health care prohibitively expensive, including drugs (for those of you who still do not understand that prescription drugs are an integral part of health care); if you do not recognize that the resulting stress and hardship of such actions shortens our lives, then you cannot understand what Mr. Wagoner and his partner's final solution of legacy costs is: We, the retirees and spouses, DIE SOONER!
Ask General Motors and their "partner" how many of us died in 2004 and publish that as widely as Legacy Costs are published. Compare the rate at which we die with the rate at which GM is hiring new workers. We are reducing General Motors legacy costs already. We do it every day of the year. WE DIE! Do not be afraid of the unvarnished truth.
Dick Danjin, retired UAW/GM worker, 36 years seniority
James Fisher, Ph.D.
When I was a young man full of myself, fresh out of the industrial chemical research laboratory, working as a chemical sales engineer, I read Silent Spring (1962) by Rachel Carson. Her book was an outcry against the use of DDT and other chemicals affecting our air, land, and water.
With smug arrogance, I agreed with the editorials in Chemical & Engineering News magazine that she was a poor chemist; that her argument didn't hold water much less relevance to industrial progress. It never occurred to question this assessment, or to reflect on the fact that chemists who supported it were primarily industrial chemists and chemical engineers.
Then, still full of myself, and full of youthful success, I traveled for my company to South America, Europe and South Africa.
I remember a conversation with a South African executive who was commenting on companies being cited for dumping pollutants into the Indian Ocean. "They're just ignorant, these reporters and bureaucrats," he said with sadness in his voice, "how could they be expected to understand the ocean absorbs these wastes with ease?"
The chemicals were run offs from automobile and chemical factories. I nodded with approval in my ignorance.
My travels to the bauxite (aluminum) refineries in Jamaica, Surinam, and Venezuela often found me driving through shanty towns, rural villages and open country where I would often pass contaminated rivers and small lakes. Always, I would say to myself, "no problem, they'll purify themselves."
Yet, even then, in the 1960s, I saw dried up river beds, abandoned factories, and parched farms, and gave it no mind. The canary was still in the mind.
In South Africa, I lived in the lap of luxury, a gardener, chauffeur, maid, and man servant to manage the estate, and organize the meals. I was just barely out of my twenties, an Iowa boy completely out of his depth.
The business people were all British, the technical people mainly Afrikaners, and the servants all Bantu, far from their homelands and families. I gave them no mind. It was a leisurely existence entirely in keeping with the somnolent glory of the faded British Empire. This is what it's like to be rich, I thought, this is what it is like when you write your own meal ticket.
Then my gardener was murdered by a neighbor's Bantu servant over the affections of my maid. It was handled as if a dog had died. I attempted to participate in the inquest, but was told it was not necessary. Another neighbor, a British anthropologist, teaching at Witwatersand (white water) University, informed me, "Life is not that precious to the Bantu." I thereafter avoided him as if he was diseased. Suddenly, something kicked in, you might say it was conscience, awareness, or simply my humanity. In any case, I started to notice things, things I denied seeing before, things I hope to write about in a planned novel.
It was also apparent my pastor wasn't concerned about apartheid, nor were the Irish nuns at my children's schools. It was not considered the church's problem. My pastor said to enjoy this beautiful country and its people. That apparently did not include the Bantu. It was as if this, too, was not something for me to think about. And then I had an affair with my beautiful secretary, and my whole world came crashing down on me. I had to escape or die. I was living a lie. I would resign.
That was more than thirty years ago, and now I write. Is it my penance? I don't know. I write out of experience, what I have seen and how it has impacted my life. Is it the truth? It is the truth as I know it, but my truth need not be anyone else's.
We enjoy the elegance of diversity in people, places and situations, along with the rich tapestry of the natural world. It is so easy to take this abundance, this bountiful blessing for granted, not realizing it is all in great jeopardy, as man lives in a precarious balance.
The problems and the opportunities of the world are shaped by people. People draw from the earth's bounty and suffer from its shifting ambivalence with hard times, only to be once again renewed by each generation with new rays of hope and optimism, against a backdrop of punishing denial.
Mega cities of glass and steel go up around the world every year, to house and succor expanding populations in a global economy fueled by never ending narcissistic consumption.
If you freeze time, you might sense that we are at the edge of night on the brink of a nightmare, for all is not well with the state of the planet.
The earth for the last several decades has been sending distress signals which have much to do with human population growth, human economic expansionism, and diminishing ecosystems.
Man is outgrowing the planet earth because of his predilections and perfidy.
I asked myself the question, how could this happen? How could our planet be faced with seemingly unprecedented challenges, challenges that might not be amenable to technological solutions? It was the reason I wrote Near Journey's End, to explain in laymen's terms how man from the beginning, but more notably in the past 2,000 years, has "cut and controlled" his environment to place it in its present precarious condition.
In terms of population growth, it took from our prehistoric ancestors' time until 1800 to reach one billion people.
Incredibly, the world's population grew more in the past fifty years than in the previous four million years.
The most notable population expansion in the world began after W.W.II. The encouraging sign is that the world's population is estimated to grow to 9.5 billion by 2055, and then slowly to fall from that point forward. Meanwhile, the challenge remains.
For example, women in Third World countries walk great distances daily to gather water from tainted ponds and streams, and search barren landscapes for fire wood for heating and cooking, while their men make a meager existence farming small plots of arid land.
It is in this climate where people suffer from extensive poverty and moral deprivation that radicals can stir them up to anger and violence, and even terrorism.
It is not difficult to imagine that after years and years of deprivation, poor sanitation, scarcity of drinking water, and generally degraded environmental conditions that the rage builds up, only taking a small spark to set the population on fire, leading to riots and worse.
It is so easy to forget in a rich country such as the United States that three-to-four billion people on this planet are desperately poor; that three billion people survive on less than $2 a day; and 1.5 billion survive on less than $1 a day (at the currency rate of 2005 dollars).
But the battleground for the planet's survival is not in these Third World countries. It is in the United States. Over the next fifty years because of immigration and low infant mortality rates, the US population is expected to top 420 million.
The implications are enormous:
The question I pondered with Near Journey's End was: can the planet earth provide future generations with the basic necessities of life? The jury is still out.
For example, are we running out of water?
One of the irony of nature is that 20 percent of the world's fresh water supply is located in the remote and sparsely populated Amazon basin of South America.
Meanwhile, many of our greatest rivers are threatened with running dry, among them are the Nile, the Colorado, the Mekong and Yellow River.
Incidentally, a watershed moment occurred in 2005, and that was for the first time the urban population of the globe exceeded the rural population. The world is committed to progress, which means moving toward technology, industrialization, and urbanization, and away from farming and a pastoral society. This is accepted without question, but it doesn't augur well for the planet.
People are abandoning their farms, selling them to urban developers to create factories and cities, and moving into these urban areas to often assume menial jobs, and encounter punishing poverty in make shift urban slums. These slums sit in the shadow of urban glass and steel skyscrapers. There is a sameness of this scenario about the globe.
These numbers have incredible significance in terms of health problems, which is mainly a lack of potable drinking water and adequate sanitation. I outline in Near Journey's End how public health was finally associated with these two factors in late eighteenth century England. Even today, with all the scientific technology, three-to-five million people die every year from water related diseases, or 20,000 to 30,000 a day.
The quality of water rightfully has become a major human rights issue.
In urban slums around the world, especially in Third World countries, with no sanitation systems, raw sewage is dumped into rivers. Haiti is one of the worst offenders as it is also one of the world's poorest countries. Gangs control the potable water supply and charge exorbitant rates for the water. It costs the average person a day's wages for a week's supply of water.
In one African community, the principal of an elementary school built a small dam with his own hands. It took him three years (1992-1995). The dam has created a reservoir designed to collect the spring water, and to allot it out to farmers of the region for irrigation. It has had miraculous results of bringing the vegetation alive.
In another success story, the governments of the United States and Mexico cooperated in creating the Falcon Dam across the Rio Grande River in 1955. This river is a pond compared to the Amazon, but essential to the region. The dam created a reservoir designed to support the water requirements for the region well into the twenty-first century. It has not succeeded. Near Journey's End illustrates how such "cut and control" solutions inevitably create new and more menacing problems.
For instance, in the last fifty years, or since the dam was built, new cities have sprung up on both sides of the border. Commerce has flourished. The population of the Falcon Dam region of the Rio Grande River basin has expanded from a population of 200,000 to 20 million with the demand for potable water increasing proportionately segueing to public health problems related to inadequate sanitation systems, and so on.
The increased water usage is etched in the stone markings aligning the Falcon Dam reservoir's banks. Each year a new water line indicates how the reservoir is shrinking in volume. First and foremost to suffer, however, are the local farmers. When they lose water for irrigation, it means acres of land no longer are available for farming.
Once the world's wetlands amounted to 12 percent of the world's land mass. Now half of the wetlands are gone, victims of rivers running dry due to excessive farming or human settlements. Gone are the breeding grounds for plants and animals. Gone are the ecosystems that cleanse the river waters. Gone are the woodlands that previously eased the burden of flooding by the retention of water.
Little more than a decade ago, however, the loss of the Mississippi River wetlands resulted in a catastrophic flood. A series of storms stalled over the upper Mississippi River basin for months on end. It seemed as if the rains would never stop. The actual amount of rainfall along the Mississippi hasn't changed for thousands of years. What has changed is the loss of more than 90 percent of the flood plain wetlands at the river's source. These wetlands once absorbed the seasonal high waters of the Mississippi keeping the river within its banks. Without the protection of the original wetlands ecosystem, and despite the valiant efforts of citizens along the river's banks to create temporary levies of sandbags, the river won, and cities and farms and factories for miles inland became submerged in its waters.
Another valuable source of fresh water is the aquifer system. It is a veritable underground river protected by limestone beds hundreds to thousands of feet below the surface. These hold 30 percent of the world's fresh water supply. Water tables are falling everywhere, and wells are going dry. Wells are the chief source of water in many Third World countries.
With gas prices rising, we worry about the depletion of oil reserves, but we pay little attention to the fact that we are losing our water reserves. We can live without oil. We cannot live without water.
The Great Plains of the United States are called "the breadbasket of the world" for the production of more than 30 percent of the world's grain. These plains are maintained by an elaborate irrigation system taken from the largest aquifer in the world. To produce this grain, it cuts drastically into our diminishing water supply. It is not an equal tradeoff. For example, the aquifer is reduced by 1.5 feet and replenished only by 0.5 inches in rain water each year. Since 1955, or in the last 50 years, this aquifer has lost a third of its capacity. This has farmers worried.
Another concern considered in Near Journey's End is: do we have enough food to feed the world? The answers is yes and no.
We have enough food but we do not have access to all the people that need food because of political strive, accessibility, and distribution problems, among others. Consequently, 800 million people throughout the world go hungry every day. In a desperate attempt to meet food requirements, many places over cultivate and over graze the land available. But, again, there is hope.
In 1965, more than 30 million died in China due to famine. The nightmare of extreme hunger in China today is long gone. China is booming. Along the Yangtze River Delta, for example, very few people go hungry as rich rice fields and diversified farms are flourishing. However, there is a cloud even to this positive picture. There is intense competition between factory developers and farmers for these rich lands, and farmers always lose. It is a matter of numbers.
If the goal is economic growth and jobs creation, which it is in most industrialized countries, making booming China no exception to this rule, you do not use a scarce water supply to produce wheat at the expense of this goal.
Farmlands are turned into giant industrial complexes, where instead of producing 3 tons of rice per year, a factory may yield a harvest of 120,000 pairs of jeans, ready for affluent American and European consumers for the product.
It is an oft repeated situation from the dawn of industrialization, what I call in Near Journey's End the "cut and control" philosophy of a capitalistic culture, that is, something wanted is gained at the expense of something lost never, which can never be recovered.
Tens of thousands of skilled farmers are rushing into newly created urban communities where the factories are located. They are programmed to do menial repetitive work and become part of the giant industrial machine losing their connection to the land and with nature. Sociologists long ago invented the term alienation and self-estrangement. It has been part of the Western psyche for more than 100 years. Now, Asia is creating its own version of the malady.
Another set of numbers that is relevant to the focus of Near Journey's End is the so-called early warning signals that are creeping up on us in the West. A few years ago, Chicago experienced a ten-day heat wave in which the temperature never dipped below 100 degrees Fahrenheit. It took the life of 750 people.
Heat waves in Paris, London, Calcutta and Melbourne have over the past several years taken the lives of tens of thousands of citizens.
Many are skeptical of global warming even though they acknowledge the carbon dioxide levels of pollution are on the rise. Scientists contend these elevated carbon dioxide levels are the cause of the temperature increases and contributory to static periods of high temperatures in some regions. In the arctic region, scientists claim there are 20 major glaciers compared to 500 in 1855 or 150 years ago. They see an increase in the temperature of the region of 2 to 3 degrees. This has had severe effects on the animals and habitation of the region.
Closer to home, the Louisiana Coastal Marshlands and Wetlands are experiencing drastic changes. It has become the breeding ground for new species of birds, animals, and insects. The rise in the water level of these marshlands has reduced the Louisiana coastline by 25 square miles. They have disappeared into the Gulf of Mexico. Where once stood giant oaks on this delta land nourished by fresh water, they now stand as naked tree stump sculptures in salt water.
Glaciers are melting, sea levels rising, periodic heat waves punctuate summers, and this seems only the beginning of its early warning signals.
Man's ingenuity is being tested. He dabbles with solutions such as the use of wind power in Southern California, solar panels in many parts of the country, while Detroit flirts with fuel efficient automobiles. Will this be enough? The answering is a resounding "no!"
The state of the world is precarious. What happens elsewhere should effect us but it hasn't, not yet anyway.
We hear of climate change, water scarcity, land degradation, the loss of energy, and the depletion of natural resources. The UN Report on Global Warming states that the last place that will feel the influence, the last continent that will suffer the least and suffer last is North America. That means us.
The United States and Canada are protected by two enormous bodies of water, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean, and the currents are favorable to both countries. So, while the rest of the world is choking in its gases, many produced by the US, or are dying from heat, we'll be able to go on the same as ever. We think.
That is why it is difficult to get the attention of Americans and why I wrote Near Journey's End: Can the Planet Earth Survive Self-indulgent Man?
The planet is in a precarious balance, but not yet doomed. It is not yet headed for disaster. It can reverse the trend and Americans could show the way. A writer can do only so much.
One person wrote me, "Give it a rest! Nobody's listening, nobody cares!" Another person wrote, "You must have read or seen something that spurred you t*dump on us again." And yet another person wrote simply, similar to the first comment, "Why do you bother?"
Obviously, I am not including here the favorable comments because that would be like talking to the choir.
A long time ago, I decided that I have an instrumental rather than a terminal mentality; that I do what I do to get a result and not to realize satisfaction in the simply doing.
I admit to having a passionate belief in the book I've written, and as long as I have the energy to do so, I will share this conviction, even when it is claimed, "We are not self-indulgent." I find this comment incredulous.
The eighth pope in my lifetime has just been elected, who claims with candor and conviction that political totalitarianism is bad, but ecclesiastical totalitarianism is good. I will have more to say about this election in a separate missive, something that rose to the surface when I was on my peripatetic walk yesterday.
Since my cousin's death, I have not been doing my 3 to 5 mile walks daily. Instead, I have been playing basketball, and tennis with the ball machine at my daughter's. I follow this by walking up and down her quarter mile driveway a total of ten times. This has not proven conducive to thinking, but is a little exercise along with the basketball and ball machine.
My little book is meant to provide a perspective and to stimulate the reader to read further and reflect on the information provided. Everywhere I turn I see reinforcement and corroboration of the premise of this book.
For example, 1,360 scientists from 95 countries have compiled a report recently that warns that two-thirds of the natural machinery that supports life on this planet is being degraded by human pressure.
People need food, fresh water, timber, fiber and fuel to live. Getting these for six and one-half billion people is putting a serious strain on the natural environment. Since more than half of the people on earth now live in cities, and not in the country, it is hard for them to connect to the natural world.
It is not technology or industry or political rhetoric or ecclesiastical pontification that sustains life on this planet but nature.
Every girl and boy who has had the privilege to grow up in a rural community knows this. Every young person who has hunted with their father knows, too, that a given amount of land will only support so many white-tailed deer. If the deer population increases, malnutrition and disease will thin the herd. A pond that can handle the waste of 30 ducks will die from loss of oxygen if 1,000 ducks inhabit the pond.
In the last missive, I mention that the American population is expected t*increase 150 million, largely from immigration and low mortality rates. This will put increased pressure on the environment, the economy, and on the individual as his spatial world is radically reduced.
Laboratory experiments have shown that rats reduced in spatial comfort attack and kill each other. We have already observed this in our metropolitan areas as they have become killing zones. What will they be like when we go from 370 million to 520 million?
As vital resources dwindle, there is no doubt there will be wars for control of what remains -- food, fresh water, timber, fiber and fuel. Why do we not try to understand the motivation of terrorists? Can we not see the relevance of this unfolding catastrophe in the making?
If the world continues to rely on force rather than cooperation, hiding the force behind a religious mania, the rhetoric of righteous determinism, or strategic vital interests, our children and grandchildren can expect an even more violent future to look forward to than we experienced in the last century, which was the bloodiest in man's history.
I am often politely reminded how indebted I should be to technology. Some suggest that I should lower the heat on my criticism of science and technology.
My problem is that I don't believe we live in Camelot. Nor do I believe technology is the Merlin of the world's political, economic, social and industrial leadership. They may infer that they can wave Merlin's magic wand and solve our problems, but we all know otherwise.
We treat symptoms rather than causes. Public health and social education are a better route to curing AIDS than drugs. The same goes for obesity, diabetes, heart disease, strokes, lung cancer, on and on and on. It is lifestyle, stupid! And nobody wants to change lifestyles.
We seal the Mexican border instead of solving the problem of why tens of thousands of Mexicans and other nationals put their lives in jeopardy to come t*this country. We want to kill terrorists instead of solving the political problems that cause terrorism.
Defining problems take time, patience and persistence. Treating symptoms is expedient. We like to solve problems by force or intimidation or fear rather than through the process of understanding, negotiation, compromise, and cooperation.
We want compliance which is always coercive, rather than cooperation which is always voluntary. Voluntary takes time. Coercion is on automatic pilot.
The arctic region is turning into a toxic sink, according to researchers. All the chemicals that Rachel Carson complained about more than forty years ago are killing the region: DDI, PCB, dioxins, and mercury.
It spreads through the food chain. First the fish are poisoned, then the marine mammals that feed on the fish, and then land animals such as caribou. Now, you ask, how do these chemicals kill caribou?
Scientists call it "the grasshopper effect." Chemical pollutants are released into the environment and carried thousands of miles south, and evaporate in the warm southern climate, ride the winds back to the frigid arctic where they eventually fall to earth in poisoned rain.
The caribou feed upon the tainted moss and grass of the tundra, fish feed upon the tainted plankton, which then are eaten by seals and polar bears.
Polar bears, for instance, are showing up with levels of pollutants which would qualify them to be buried in hazardous waste dumps.
Enter the Inuits, indigenous people to the arctic region who came over from the orient some 4,000 years ago. Seals provide 65 percent of their protein diet. The sea is the greatest source of sustenance. The seal and the sea are integral to their culture, spiritually, emotionally and biologically.
The Inuits live today much as generations past with one exception. They are dying, and infant mortality rates and birth defect levels are increasing. Why?
The answers are found in industrial and technological progress. Industrial pollutants from the United States, Central America, and China find their way into this arctic seafood chain.
Inuit mothers don't have access to formula milk for their babies but must breast feed. Their breast milk is full of pollutants. As a consequence, these babies are showing levels of pollutants the worst on the planet.
The arctic is the early warning system for the rest of the planet. Inuits have contributed nothing to their contamination and are the innocent victims to industrial pollution which carries the name, "progress." The only hope is that industrial countries to the south and west find the will as well as the way to halt the production of these pollutants. Not an easy task.
* * * * *
In Tijuana, Mexico, not far from the border of the United States, there is a tariff free trade zone. More than 300 companies from several nations operate in this zone, and provide the jobs for 140,000 people from Tijuana and the surrounding area. The paradox here is that these workers are producing pollutants that threaten their lives and the lives of their children.
There is an abandon battery company here. It was ordered to clean up its industrial waste. It would cost more than $6 million. Instead, it decided to leave without securing the waste. Left behind were 40 million pounds of toxic wastes in drums rusting from rainfall and baking in the sun. Drums leaked into streams, seeped into the soil and into artesian wells. Fumes have also polluted the air for more than a decade, yet nothing has been done.
A community below this abandon plant, largely a shanty town of 10,000 workers and their families suffers mightily. Every time it rains a nearby stream overflows into a creek that provides water for washing and bathing. It is full of lead oxide, sulfites, sulfuric acid, and arsenic. As this highly contaminated waterway weaves its way through the shanty town, everyone and everything in its path is put in peril.
Over 90 percent of the children tested showed elevated levels of lead in their blood, and an inordinate number of children suffer from birth defects.
For years, this small community petitioned the government to clean up the site, and each time the petitioners were turned down.
What is worse, these children are innocent victims. Less than a mile from the United States, these petitioners have no law on their side as this free trade zone is not subject to compliance with environmental law.
The parents laboring in these factories for $15 for ten hour days have become reluctantly complicit with their employers in this tragedy. They have no sense of communal power.
* * * * *
This is not the case in Barrio Logan, a small ethnic community in San Diego. For forty years, this community saw the region turned into a junk yard sprinkled with industrial factories. People complained but nothing happened.
Instead, the city fathers cut Barrio Logan off from the rest of San Diego by choosing to build a bridge and an elaborate highway system across its boundaries. Once again the neighborhood was under attack.
Each day, hundreds of diesel trucks and tens of thousands of automobiles filled their breathing air with toxic emissions. Next, scores of new industrial plants sprung up around their perimeter further assaulting the air, land and water with toxins.
In a minor protest, Barrio Logan community leaders asked the city fathers to build a park under the bridge. The city fathers promised, and then reneged on the promise citing expediencies. The people rebelled.
They formed a human chain around the perimeter of the would be site for the park, and drew media attention. The city gave them their park. Chicano Park became a rallying cry for people of Barrio Logan. Local artists painted the pylons with ethnic art in celebration of their culture.
Studies have shown that communities of color, or at the lower end of the economic food chain are more likely to be exploited with little recourse as opposed to other more affluent areas.
More than 20 percent of Barrio Logan residence, for example, because of this inclination, have asthma or asthmatic symptoms.
After the success of establishing Chicano Park, now with a sense of communal power, residents took on Master Plating, a factory in the heart of Barrio Logan that used and dumped hexa-valent chromium into the ground. This chemical is a known cancer causing toxin.
Local television got involved and the plant was shut down. Levels of hexa-valent chromium were reduced by 75 percent, another small victory for the people united as community.
* * * * *
Palm Springs, California is a sparkling clean upwardly mobile society of 40,000. Not far away, however, is a harbinger of possible things to come in the Salton Sea. This is the largest internal body of water in California, and a sanctuary for half the species of birds in the United States as they migrate with the seasons in this part of the country. One hundred years ago this was all desert. But in 1905, a violent winter storm caused the Colorado River to go on a rampage. The river jumped its banks and surged into the Salton basin, forming the Salton Sea.
During the hottest four months of the year, the Salton Sea loses six feet of its water level due to evaporation with temperatures above 100 degrees.
Today, It provides a 500,000 acre carpet of irrigated farmland producing 85 percent of winter vegetable crops for the United States. Now we come to the mix blessing.
The Imperial Valley produces a million acre feed, which runs into the Salton Sea, and there is no way for the water to run off. This keeps it from drying up, but it also feeds the Salton Sea with salt and chemicals that are killing it. Over the years this has resulted in the Salton Sea being 25 percent saltier than the ocean.
In the 1980s, the contribution of botulism and algae bloom here killed millions of fish. Then the birds who rested from their long flights in this sanctuary begin to die. In a three month period, conservationists counted 150,000 water fowl birds dead from eating tainted fish.
This frightened the public. Fear won out. Thriving motels, restaurants, resorts, and parks in the area since the 1960s were suddenly abandoned. The rusting, fraying, and naked sculptures of the past pencil the landscape
Meanwhile, farmers agreed to sell off two million gallons originally directed to the Salton Sea to San Diego County at the expense of the Salton Sea. Scientists warn if the Salton Sea gets any saltier or loses anymore volume everything will die.
Farmers considered the needs of developers in the city as precedence over saving it. So, the Salton Sea remains trapped between the conflicting self-interests of farmers and developers. It may be an omen of things to come, as the next little story attests.
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Some forty years ago Samarkand in Uzbekistan was a thriving, ancient city, the silk route 2,500 years ago from the orient to Rome, where an exchange of ideas and cultures accompanied its products.
Today, Samarkand still has the cultural architecture and scholarship of its illustrious past preserved in its medieval section. A few miles to the west, the once bountiful lower end of Uzbekistan's greatest river, the Amu Darya, has been literally sucked dry. It no longer connects to the Aural Sea, the world's fourth largest internal body of water.
The river basin is littered with abandoned irrigation pump stations and lines, the skeletal hulls of abandoned boats, dried up ponds, and ghost towns. The Aural Sea has shrunk to half its size in the last thirty years for its failure to connect with this river. This is all the result of a misguided Soviet Union agricultural policy.
In the 1960s, Russia made Uzbekistan a cotton producing country, second largest in the world, by restructuring 100,000 square miles of desert into irrigated farmland. It did this by redirecting water the lower AMU Darya into canals, then into irrigating ditches filled with pesticides and fertilizers to cotton producing fields along its flanks.
To give a sense of this disaster, the AMU Darya River in this area once was so wide that it took Alexander the Great and his army five days to cross it. Now, a short 30 years later the AMU Darya no longer connects with its source, the Aural Sea, ninety miles away and this is a dry wasteland.
This has been called the greatest ecological disaster of the planet. It could happen to the Salton Sea as its fragile eco system is at the mercy of farmers and developers who would prefer to use the Colorado River to provide drinking water to San Diego and irrigation for farmland.
There are no easy answers. Meanwhile, hundreds of species of birds and fish are disappearing, communities are being contaminated, people, plants and animals are dying, and the policy seems to be "ready, fire, aim." No matter what the community, the country, nor what the political, social, or cultural orientation, there is no wisdom in pointing fingers.
That is why I ask the question of which I do not hold the answer: Can the planet earth survive self-indulgent man?
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D. The Peripatetic Philosopher Website: www.peripateticphilospher.com Check out my blog: peripateticphilosopher.blogspot.com
Pollution, especially that which is virtually unseen (ground water, air) will continue to increase until even the remote part of the country I live in will be significantly effected. Even, the basically harmless pollution (unless you're a bird or a fish) like litter, plastic bags from Wal-Mart, plastic 6-pack rings, and styrafoam will mar my wild woods and fields. Part of this is a second issue: too many people/Too few resources (Didn't Robert Malthus warn us about this ?!!) and the unending rush of industry to keep up with demands (more pollution).
Human unfriendly organizations and government mandates also come to mind as a potential problem. NCLB is a direct descendent of Fredrick Taylor and those who have perpetuated it will see the schools come down in ruins as veteran teachers leave for retirement and fewer persons will choose education as a career. Taylor's Scientific Management was a failure the first time around and this bureaucratic attempt to revive it will be the death of the public schools. Too much time spent in the world of illusion rather than the world of reality (especially by those in positions of power)will become a way of life. The chase for those things that seem so important in our work and political lives, which cannot fail to disappoint us and never deliver the happiness we search for. This while so much of our world lives without the basics of life.
I wish that those in power would understand that: