Reading Comments for Science of Sustainability Week 8

Here are my reading comments, they might be a little depressing, but the articles were depressing, so.... Please to enjoy:

I had the luck of going over "The Pollution Within," by Dan Duncan with you in my Sustainable Design class and I remember being equally as thrilled about my thoroughly toxic modern life then as I am now. These comments might be shortened by the fact that I will start looking around and cleaning my office frenetically of items which are suspect and look toxic, despite the fact that even the ones that look innocent are likely coursing through my veins with a grand chemical vengeance right now. I will likely be calmed by the fact that at least I don't eat meat so there is extra room in that bloodstream for toxins to move since my cholesterol is low. Congratulations to me! As a dietitian, I am regularly asked by people how to get less chemicals in their food; they all think that organic is the yellow brick road to a cancer-free life. Now I can give them this article and tell them that it may only be a minute fraction of the puzzle, but still to stay away from predator fish on menus across NYC since no one knows where the fish came from and it was unlikely clean water anyway. What disturbs me more is that many people think that a modern (read: convenient and sleek) life is worth the risks of having so many chemicals in mix. It seems like playing Russian roulette with your brand of vinyl shower curtain: which morning will the whiff of chemicals finally get you? And even more curious, what will they do to you and where will they do it?

Reading "High-Tech Trash," by Chris Carroll makes me want to take a shower. It is like reading a matched piece to a Burtynsky gallery show and feeling like of all the toxins I read about in the last article, this one makes me feel like the real choking toxin is shame. Seriously, e-waste is so incredibly despicable and damaging on so many levels. I recall when I was a small child, living on a rural farm where I would chase after my father to help him burn the trash. It is a tiny fraction of what Third World e-waste disposers deal with to be honest, it disturbed my breathing and gave me a slight headache and this was 20 years ago. I can only imagine the amount of toxic disturbance e-waste causes for mere pennies to the people disposing of it. And that would not even take into account the seas of e-waste leaching down into the water supplies of said people. Or the fact that for our millions of pounds of off cast electronics each year, most Americans don't know where the waste goes, what is done with it, who does it, or even care in the slightest past having a replacement for said off cast item. The page listing all the chemicals involved in the computer's life, the flame retardants, the cadmium, the lead, kind of make me feel like my eye strain might not be caused by what I think it is, and conversely, that I should be thankful that I am just rubbing my eyes instead of burning off rubber coatings to copper wires to make a dollar.

In "China's Children of Smoke" by Dan Fagin, I immediately thought about the soaring levels of Bronx (largely) and other NYC city kids who have staggering levels of asthma. Neonatologists are quick to point out that the certain areas which are hit the hardest in NYC also show the highest numbers of maternal disregard for prenatal care and diet leading to premature births (and therefore, often underdeveloped lungs), but...the air is still very polluted and i believe it is a direct correlation to the persistent asthma. However, I find molecular epidemiology fascinating and think that there are many merits to the findings. The concept that what a mother breathes translates into the health of the child is not new news. The fact that China is increasingly a coal culture is also not new. What would be new is if the Chinese as a culture attempted to lessen their plight by creating a safer environment, putting down the cigarettes, etc., and/or considering a child with delayed development, retardation, or a smaller head worth a cultural overhaul.