February 8th, 1997

What's The Problem?
By Jackie Giuliano

Why do we have such a difficult time in our society controlling toxic emissions, cleaning the air and water, or protecting our health from known carcinogins? Do we have too few laws? Do we have too many laws? Do we need more studies, more funding, or more activist organizations?

Each week in this column, we are going to examine the possiblity that the answer to all these questions may be "no." We are going to look at new, and sometimes old, ways of "being" in the world.

A growing number of ecologists, biologists, psychologists, writers, theologians, and other thinkers are suggesting that something new (and old) may be at the heart of our seeming inabilitiy to resolve our environmental and health conflicts - an understanding of our relationship to the natural world.

It seems that no matter where you live, your health is compromised by environmental and social degredation. People are getting sick or worse and we are living with more and more assaults on our health. We are told to get water purifiers, air filters, and eye protection, yet the pollution keeps on happening. Why? Each week, we are going to examine this and other questions like it.

A few years ago, the Discovery Channel's Discovery Journal series http://catalog.discovery.com/ aired an hour-long program called The Price of Profit. It was about a Texas border town and the Mexican town on the other side of the U.S. - Mexico border. All towns along the border were, and still are, being tragcally impacted by pollution caused by U.S. companies who moved just a few hundred yards across the border to take advantage of Mexico's lack of environmental regulations. The Price of Profit showed that many of the people in the largely female workforce for the Kemet electronics factory in Matamoros, Mexico were gravely ill. This factory used very toxic chemicals. Birth defects were common in the workers' children.

I was struck by the fact that one particularly horrifying birth defect known as anencephaly, where the baby is born virtually without a brain and the head is imbeded in the torso, was appearing with terrifying frequency, not only in the Kemet workers, but in Brownsville, Texas on the other side of the border. In the U.S. population as a whole, this defect has shown up maybe once every 5 to 10 years. In this tiny border town, anencephaly occured THREE TIMES IN 36 HOURS!

It is believed that toxic dumping from the unregulated industries south of the border has contaminated irrigation canals that eventually enter the Rio Grande River. Toxic chemicals like zylene were found at 52,000 times acceptable levels in these irrigation canals.

Yet the way we practice science, the way we look at the world, the way we examine risks and trade-offs, and the way we percieve reality allowed the finding of "no connection" between the industrial waste and anencephaly to be reported. Something is very wrong.

I have often asked myself why the entire world did not stop and take notice of those horrifying birth defects and do something about it - right then. Why wasn't every headline of every paper in the U.S. dedicated to reporting that situation and every resource put into solving the problem? It wasn't. It was just another TV program reporting just another problem. The next day there was no mention of it in the L.A. Times and the same talk shows appeared on TV.

I keep the issue alive by showing the program to my environmental studies classes, but I constantly wonder why these things keep happening. I have come across a few clues that might help shed some light on this, and I would like to share them with you each week in this column. I will also share with you some resources for further study and some links to other related on-line sites.

A number of new, and old, fields of study have arisen from the flames of our global problems. Ecopsychology http://www.csuhayward.edu/ALSS/ECO/index.html is a merger of ecology and psychology and is examining our relationship to the natural world and the impact on our mental and physical health of the myriad of connections that exist between us and the world.

Ecofeminism http://csf.colorado.edu/lists/ecofem/ is a merger of ecology and feminist thought. Ecofeminism, like ecopsychology, suggests new ways of perceiving our connections with the universe and challenges our perceptions of ourselves and our culture.

Deep Ecologists call for, as do those exploring ecopsychology and ecofeminism, a new ecological paradign that sees the world as organic and connected, not mechanistic and disconnected as most science and technology-based worldviews do.

Spiritual Ecology, http://www.earthlight.org/, in addition to seeing the Earth as a living system, focuses on the transformation of consciousness. Celebrating the seasonal cycles and seeing the air, earth, and water as sacred is a vital aspect of this field which seeks a partnership with nature.

All of these ways of thought, these ways of being, require active participation and an active sense of responsibility from the practitioner. We need to create a mode of living that encompasses elements from all these areas.

Joanna Macy may be directing us to the right path when she suggests that five guiding principles may be helpful as we examine the details of our struggles:

• 1. Feelings of pain for our world are natural and healthy.
  
• 2. This pain is morbid only if denied.
  
• 3. Information [and technology] alone is not enough.
  
• 4. Unblocking repressed feelings for the pain we feel for our world releases energy and clears the mind.
  
• 5. Unblocking our pain for the world reconnects us with the larger web of life.

Our challenge, says Vietnamese Buddist monk Thich Nhat Han, may be to quiet our minds and hearts and "hear the sound of the Earth crying." Only then can we act. And act we must.

Resources Joanna Macy, Despair and Personal Power in the Nuclear Age, New Society Publishers, 1983.
Carolyn Mercant, Radical Ecology: The Search for a Livable World, Routledge Press, 1992.
Benjamin A. Goldman, The Truth about Where You Live: An Atlas for Action on Toxins and Mortality, Random House Publishers, 1991.

{Jackie Giuliano is a Professor of Environmental Studies at Antioch University in Los Angeles, California}