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Contaminating Our Bodies With Everyday Products

IN recent weeks, two major medical organizations have issued independent warnings about toxic chemicals in products all around us. Unregulated substances, they say, are sometimes linked to breast and prostate cancer, genital deformities, obesity, diabetes and infertility.

“Widespread exposure to toxic environmental chemicals threatens healthy human reproduction,” the International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics warned in a landmark statement last month.

The warnings are a reminder that the chemical industry has inherited the mantle of Big Tobacco, minimizing science and resisting regulation in ways that cause devastating harm to unsuspecting citizens.

In the 1950s, researchers were finding that cigarettes caused cancer, but the political system lagged in responding. Now the same thing is happening with toxic chemicals.

The gynecology federation’s focus is on endocrine disrupters, chemicals that imitate sex hormones and often confuse the body. Endocrine disrupters are found in pesticides, plastics, shampoos and cosmetics, cash register receipts, food can linings, flame retardants and countless other products.

“Exposure to toxic chemicals during pregnancy and lactation is ubiquitous,” the organization cautioned, adding that virtually every pregnant woman in America has at least 43 different chemical contaminants in her body. It cited a National Cancer Institute report finding that “to a disturbing extent babies are born ‘pre-polluted.’”

This warning now represents the medical mainstream. It was drafted by experts from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, the World Health Organization, Britain’s Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and similar groups.

Such medical professionals are on the front lines. They are the ones confronting rising cases of hypospadias, a birth defect in which boys are born with a urethra opening on the side of the penis rather than at the tip. They are the ones treating women with breast cancer. Both are conditions linked to early exposure to endocrine disrupters.

The other major organization that recently issued a warning is the Endocrine Society, the international association of doctors and scientists who deal with the hormone system.

“Emerging evidence ties endocrine-disrupting chemical exposure to two of the biggest public health threats facing society — diabetes and obesity,” the Endocrine Society said in announcing its 150-page “scientific statement.” It added that “mounting evidence” also ties endocrine disrupters to infertility, prostate cancer, undescended testicles, testicular cancer, breast cancer, uterine cancer, ovarian cancer and neurological issues. Sometimes these problems apparently arise in adults because of exposures decades earlier in fetal stages.

“The threat is particularly great when unborn children are exposed,” the Endocrine Society warned.

Tracey J. Woodruff of the University of California, San Francisco notes, “One myth about chemicals is that the U.S. government makes sure they’re safe before they go on the marketplace.” In fact, most are assumed to be safe unless proved otherwise.

Of the 80,000 or more chemicals in global commerce today, only a tiny share have been rigorously screened for safety. Even when a substance is retired because of health concerns, the replacement chemical may be just as bad.

“It’s frustrating to see the same story over and over,” Professor Woodruff said. “Animal studies, in vitro tests or early human studies show that chemical A causes adverse effects. The chemical industry says, ‘Those are bad studies, show me the human evidence.’ The human evidence takes years and requires that people get sick. We should not have to use the public as guinea pigs.”

Europe is moving toward testing chemicals before they go on the market, but the United States is a laggard because of the power of the chemical lobby. Chemical safety legislation now before the Senate would require the Environmental Protection Agency to start a safety assessment of only 25 chemicals in the first five years — and House legislation isn’t much better.
Continue reading the main story

“There are almost endless parallels with the tobacco industry,” says Andrea Gore, a professor of pharmacology at the University of Texas at Austin and editor of the journal Endocrinology.

For now, experts say the best approach is for people to try to protect themselves. Especially for women who are pregnant or may become pregnant, and for young children, try to eat organic, reduce the use of plastics, touch cash register receipts as little as possible, try to avoid flame-retardant couches and consult the consumer guides at ewg.org.

The chemical lobby spent the equivalent of $121,000 per member of Congress last year, so expect chemical companies to enjoy strong quarterly profits, more boys to be born with hypospadias and more women to die unnecessarily of breast cancer.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/29/opini ... pe=article

The Unnatural Kingdom

If technology helps us save the wilderness, will the wilderness still be wild?

Excerpt:

More and more, though, as we humans devour habitat, and as hardworking biologists — thank heaven — use the best tools available to protect whatever wild creatures remain, we approach that perhaps inevitable time when every predator-prey interaction, every live birth and every death in every species supported by the terrestrial biosphere, will be monitored and manipulated by the human hive mind.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/13/sunda ... 87722&_r=0

The Global Solution to Extinction

Excerpt:

But today the dream is at risk. Civilization is at last turning green, albeit only pale green. Our attention remains focused on the physical environment — on pollution, the shortage of fresh water, the shrinkage of arable land and, of course, the great, wrathful demon that threatens all our lives, human-forced climate change. But Earth’s living environment, including all its species and all the ecosystems they compose, has continued to receive relatively little attention. This is a huge strategic mistake. If we save the living environment of Earth, we will also save the physical, nonliving environment, because each depends on the other. But if we work to save only the physical environment, as we seem bent on doing, we will lose them both.

So, what exactly is the current condition of the living environment, in particular its biological diversity and stability? How are we handling this critical element of Earth’s sustainability?

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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/13/opini ... ef=opinion

All is One

God is all there is - God includes everything,
all possibility and all action,
for Spirit is the invisible essence and substance of all form.
- Ernest Holmes

Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity;
so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand.
- Henry David Thoreau

Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns,
so that each small piece of her fabric reveals the
organization of the entire tapestry.
- Richard P. Feynman

The fabric of existence weaves itself whole.
- Charles Ives

Today's affirmation:
I am one with the Earth,
with the Water,
with the Fire,
with the Air that I breathe,
with all Living Things,
and we are one with Spirit.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

******
The Saint and the Skyscraper

KARACHI, Pakistan — I live in a neighborhood by the shore made famous by the eighth-century saint Abdullah Shah Ghazi. He has been the city’s designated trouble-shooter since he arrived here as a horse trader. If you have an urgent problem that the living can’t help with, you walk up the stairs of the shrine. You offer a prayer and maybe a handful of rose petals. Your problem may not be solved immediately, but you come out feeling better.

So confident are Karachiites of Ghazi’s power that whenever there is a storm warning, instead of running away, they rush to the sea to have some fun. This city has had its share of troubles — water shortages, ethnic strife, gang wars, criminalized local politics — but for more than 12 centuries Ghazi has protected it from the fury of the Arabian Sea.

Now Karachi’s savior saint is himself in trouble. Ghazi has a new upstart neighbor: the Bahria Icon Towers, a pair of buildings including one 62 stories high that will be Pakistan’s highest building and the country’s first proper skyscraper. The project, though unfinished, doesn’t just dwarf the saint’s shrine; it has surrounded it with ugly prison-like walls, making the shrine invisible and very, very difficult to access.

Like any wise saint living by the sea, Ghazi, according to folklore, chose to set his shrine at the top of a hillock. Its green and white striped dome used to be visible from miles away. Its open courtyards and surrounding empty spaces have hosted thousands of people every day, and hundreds of thousands on public holidays and on the anniversary of Ghazi’s death. People come for prayer, music, food and rendezvous. The shrine hosts a nonstop party for the kind of people who don’t get invited to parties.

Ghazi’s new neighbor will have corporate offices, luxury apartments and shopping malls with international brands. Its ads promise a life full of aromatherapy, desserts decorated with spun sugar and happy, healthy babies bobbing in infinity pools. Bahria Icon Towers is expecting lots of cars, for corporate workers and the residents of luxury apartments. The developers have built a multistory car park and a flyover with a network of underpasses. A “gift to the people,” they never forget to tell us.

The affluent residents of the area resisted initially, but gave up after the developers dug up entire roads around the shrine and went to court to get an injunction so they could keep going. The courts also relented because, frankly, who can resist the lure of a skyscraper?

Now that the flyover and underpasses are complete, the area has become so labyrinthine that if Ghazi himself passed by he would need all his saintly powers to navigate the entrance to his own shrine. That is, if he recognized it all. After citizens warned that the skyscraper might damage the structure of the shrine, the developers decided to build huge sand-colored concrete walls around it. A “gift to the people.”

The green and white dome and the blue and white striped exterior of the shrine that were the emblem of the city have disappeared from its skyline. Ghazi, who once lorded over Karachi, has been practically imprisoned in an ugly giant riad-like villa.

Pakistan is dotted with shrines of saints with great reputations. There’s the one who cures diabetes. The one who will give you a son. The one who can get your son off death row. And all the ones who wrote great poetry and made brilliant music that have survived centuries.

But love for Abdullah Shah Ghazi is so widespread that even people who don’t believe in mosques, prayer or spiritual healing walk up to his shrine with secret wishes and plastic bags full of petals. A suicide attack in 2010, which left at least seven people dead, didn't scare visitors away.

Ghazi’s shrine is a last-chance saloon for those who can’t go to the government and can’t afford a therapist. For those who can’t talk to their sister or whose sister won’t talk to them; for those with sick babies or who are desperate for babies; for newly married couples or for people who want their spouses back. It’s the only public place in Karachi where people can break down and cry and everyone around them will understand.

Many of the regulars here are sweaty, smelly people, and they will never be allowed inside the Bahria Icon Towers. Who will protect them now that property developers are threatening Ghazi? And who will protect all of us from the elements?

There was a time when the Arabian Sea lapped at the shrine’s feet. Over the decades the sea has been pushed back, and all around the shrine miles and miles of land have been reclaimed so that posh mansions and shopping areas could be built.

This is the development model Karachi has followed. There are signal-free corridors for car owners, but hardly any footpaths for the millions who walk to work. There are air-conditioned shopping malls for affluent consumers, but the police hound street vendors claiming they’re a threat to public order.

McDonald’s occupies the prime spot on the beach, and that’s become the smelliest part. Developers cared more about the parking lot than the sewage system, and waste is being dumped in the Arabian Sea.

But then who needs the sea, or a saint to protect us against it, when we can have infinity pools in the sky?

Mohammed Hanif is the author of the novels “A Case of Exploding Mangoes” and “Our Lady of Alice Bhatti,” and the librettist for the opera “Bhutto.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/16/opini ... ef=opinion

The Scourge of the Ivory Trade

The World Wildlife Fund reported early this month that ivory poaching has reduced the elephant population in Tanzania’s Selous Game Reserve — one of the largest wilderness areas in Africa — by 90 percent in just four decades. At this rate, there will be no elephants left in Selous just six years from now. Tanzania isn’t alone: Mozambique lost half its elephants to poachers in the five years before 2015. Between 2010 and 2012 alone, poachers killed off 20 percent of Africa’s elephants.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/22/opini ... d=71987722

Aesthetic Foundations of Ecological Responsibility

by M. Ali Lakhani

God is Beautiful, and He loves Beauty.
(Saying of Prophet Muhammad)

...the earth is beautiful only through its link with Heaven.
(Frithjof Schuon1)

It will seem obvious to anyone considering the issue of ecological responsibility that the subject involves a moral dimension, but it may be less
apparent why at its root it engages an aesthetic sensibility, one that requires us to enquire into the nature of 'beauty' itself. The apparently tenuous connection between our moral responsibility and our aesthetic sensibility may appear less remote when we consider a statement made by Henry David Thoreau (d. 1862) in his Journal (June 21, 1852): "The perception of beauty is a moral test." The basis for this statement is, as traditional philosophers have always known, that our discernment of reality (Truth), our moral core (Goodness), and our aesthetic sensibility (Beauty) are all inter-connected. To enquire into the nature of the world around us therefore requires us to delve into our own inner nature – in fact, to understand the very nature of Nature itself.

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http://www.qscience.com/doi/pdfplus/10. ... ronment.12

Against ‘Sustainability’

Among the many stories that can be told about the origins of the environmental movement in the West, perhaps the most common is that it began with the emergence of Romanticism in the late 18th century. In this version, environmentalism was born as the good twin to evil industrialization. Today, when we talk about ecological sustainability and environmental preservation, we typically still understand them in terms of a battle between nature and industry.

For environmental thinkers, the prequel to this origin story involves Descartes, and he is an arch-villain. By restricting the sphere of knowledge to only “clear and distinct ideas,” Descartes in effect reduced the natural world to its mathematical aspect. In doing so, he set the stage for a purely scientific, technological worldview, cleared the way for the domination of nature by industry, and prepared philosophy for Nietzsche’s dramatic declaration of the death of God.

This story has been told ad nauseam in philosophy classrooms and in books of environmental thought. What is given less consideration is the way that, as the Christian God retreated after Descartes, the attributes traditionally ascribed to Him — goodness, perfection and permanence — were in different ways transposed onto the body of nature.

Such idealizations of nature can be found in the work of the German Romantics (like Schiller, Hölderlin and Goethe), the English Romantics (Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, et al) and later in that of the American transcendentalists, most notably Emerson and Thoreau. Much of this work directly counters the philosophical view of nature that reigned in centuries before them.

For Aristotle, the primary principle of nature — “physis” — is change, and what changes can never be perfect: If a perfect form were to change, it would necessarily become imperfect. For Hobbes, writing in the 17th century, the state of nature was harsh, and man’s life in that pure state, “nasty, brutish and short.” According to Hobbes, a person who chose to live in the woods would thereby renounce the very thing that made her human, and forfeit her ability to reach the divine.

In the late-18th century, though, this framework begins to undergo a reversal — cruel nature is transformed into the Garden of Eden. This identification of nature with the Christian notion of the divine is one foundation of the philosophy of environmental sustainability.

In her 2014 book “The Sixth Extinction,” Elizabeth Kolbert offers an account of just how changeable and anarchic nature, when viewed in terms of planetary history, really is. Some 200 million years ago, she writes, during the extinction at the end of the Permian period, which killed off perhaps as much as 70 percent of vertebrate species, a mysterious “massive release of carbon” turned the oceans purple and the sky green.

Yet one need not go so far back to observe the changing environment. Events like the disappearance of lions from Europe, as well as the extinction of the mastodon and the woolly mammoth (and climate change), all likely resulted from human activity. But the planet has seen mass extinctions of species and significant alterations to the climate before. The fact that they are traced to the behavior of an individual species only makes them particular, not in some way “unnatural.”

When we talk about sustainability, then, what is it that we hope to sustain? We certainly do not sustain nature “in itself.” Rather, we sustain nature as we humans prefer it. More precisely, we preserve the resources needed for human consumption, whether that means energy consumption or aesthetic consumption. In one sense, we preserve nature for industry.

The human activity that has produced these environmental shifts is not isolated to one practice or one epoch, say, the consumption of carbon in the 20th century — though it may be accelerated by this. As Kolbert argues, the rise of Homo sapiens fundamentally altered the planetary ecosystem long before the invention of writing, the birth of René Descartes, or the first diesel pump. By killing off the large fauna, our prehistorical ancestors overturned the food chain that existed before us and began a separate chain of events that is still playing out. It might be that the truest meaning of human being, from the perspective of planetary history, is that we are a mass extinction event.

Mass extinctions are no doubt catastrophic, but they are only tragic if nature is viewed as something perfect that we are destroying, rather than as a state of flux in which we are participating.

Among many, the argument against sustainability elicits an emotional response. As the ecological theorist Timothy Morton writes in his book “Ecology Without Nature,” the environmental movement has become, and perhaps always was, infused with a sense of mourning and melancholia (not to mention nostalgia). This melancholia, I would argue, is connected to the death of God, or the ability to conceive God in a certain way, and stems from that Romantic transference of the divine into nature.

In either case, as with any death, first comes denial — we can save nature! — but it eventually gives way to acceptance. Talk about “sustaining” nature, or “preserving” it, only exacerbates this mourning and indulges our melancholia. Like the bereaved who must learn to speak of the dead in the past tense, if we are to move forward in our habitation of the planet, to face the future and not the past, to say “yes” to the anthropocene, we should change our language.

The contemporary French theorist Bruno Latour has also argued for discarding the idea of nature and the entire framework that puts human culture and the natural world in opposition. In its place he suggests we instead consider a unified network of “actants,” human and nonhuman, animate and inanimate. Nature, after all, includes us in its list of animals, and our products differ in degree, not kind, from those of beavers, bees and spiders. Because we are necessarily engaged with it — with it’s development, history and activity — we cannot simply let nature be, as the deep ecologists wish. And because nature drives and shapes humans in ways we don’t understand, neither can we fully become its “masters and possessors,” as Descartes imagined.

Perhaps the language we now use is a barrier to forging a more constructive (or less destructive) relationship with the rest of the natural world. Rather than talk about preserving ecosystems or animal populations, perhaps instead we should talk about promoting them. We do not preserve a wetland, we promote it; we do not preserve the black rhino, we foster or advance or endorse it. We don’t sustain the climate, we advocate certain carbon levels.

Instead of sustainability, we should instead speak of adaptability, a term that skews away from the idea of a perfect, ordered nature and unchanging industrial-technological conditions, and favors a vision of nature in a state of constant change, even chaos; a vision that values difference and diversity, both biological and cultural. Perhaps this revised language will allow us to see the planet not as a video-game landscape, programmed by God, that we’ve been dropped into and can either preserve or destroy, but as a bustling world of colleagues, both human and nonhuman, animate and inanimate, over whom we have influence, but who also influence us.

Jeremy Butman is a graduate student in philosophy at the New School for Social Research.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/08/opini ... ef=opinion

We Are All Noah Now

HONOLULU — Robert Macfarlane, in his book “Landmarks,” about the connection between words and landscapes, tells a revealing but stunning story about how recent editions of the Oxford Junior Dictionary (aimed at 7-year-olds) dropped certain “nature words” that its editors deemed less relevant to the lives of modern children. These included “acorn,” “dandelion,” “fern,” “nectar,” “otter,” “pasture” and “willow.” The terms introduced in their place, he noted, included “broadband,” “blog,” “cut-and-paste,” “MP3 player” and “voice-mail.”

While this news was first disclosed in 2015, reading it in Macfarlane’s book still shocks me for what it signifies. But who can blame the Oxford editors for dumping Amazon words for Amazon.com ones? Our natural world is rapidly disappearing. Just how fast was the major topic here last week at the global conference held every four years by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, which I participated in along with some 8,000 scientists, nature reserve specialists and environmentalists.

The dominant theme running through the I.U.C.N.’s seminars was the fact that we are bumping up against and piercing planetary boundaries — on forests, oceans, ice melt, species extinctions and temperature — from which Mother Nature will not be able to recover. When the coral and elephants are all gone, no 3-D printer will be able to recreate them.

In short, we and our kids are rapidly becoming the Noah generation, charged with saving the last pairs. (This is no time to be electing a climate-change denier like Donald Trump for president.)

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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/07/opini ... ef=opinion

Temperatures Rise, and We’re Cooked

Extract:

That obstinacy confronts a new wave of research showing that climate change is much more harmful than we had imagined.

Until now, the focus has been on rising seas, more intense hurricanes, acidification of oceans, drought and crop failures. But new studies are finding that some of the most important effects will be directly on our bodies and minds.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/11/opini ... 05309&_r=0

What the ‘sixth extinction’ will look like in the oceans: The largest species die off first

We mostly can’t see it around us, and too few of us seem to care — but nonetheless, scientists are increasingly convinced that the world is barreling towards what has been called a “sixth mass extinction” event. Simply put, species are going extinct at a rate that far exceeds what you would expect to see naturally, as a result of a major perturbation to the system.

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http://www.msn.com/en-ca/weather/topsto ... li=AAggNb9

The Lost Cultures of Whales

Extract:

The whale families we work with, members of the Eastern Caribbean Clan, are shrinking. Their population is declining by as much as 4 percent a year, as we reported last week in the journal PLOS One, largely a result of climate change and the increasing human presence in these waters. (Whales can be hit by ships or become entangled in fishing gear.) We are not just losing specific whales that we have come to know as individuals; we are losing a way of life, a culture — the accumulated wisdom of generations on how to survive in the deep waters of the Caribbean Sea. They may have lived here for longer than we have walked upright.

Sperm whales live rich and complex lives in a part of the world we find difficult to even explore. And many aspects of their lives appear remarkably similar to our own. Grandmothers, mothers and daughters babysit, defend and raise calves together. Family is critical to surviving in the open ocean, and each has its own way of doing things. The whales live in communities of neighboring families in a multicultural oceanic society.

Behavior is what you do, culture is how you do it. All sperm whales do the same things — feed, swim, babysit, defend, socialize — but how they do them is different around the world. Just as humans use forks or chopsticks, they, too, differ in how they eat, what species of squid they eat, how fast they travel and where they roam, their social behavior, and probably many other ways we still do not understand.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/09/opini ... ef=opinion

We Don’t Need a ‘War’ on Climate Change, We Need a Revolution

Extract:

What would winning a “war” against climate change even look like? McKibben suggests a huge mobilization to produce green technologies, solar panels, wind turbines and electric cars. He cites the public seizure and transformation of private factories during World War II that enabled the United States to produce bombers and other instruments that helped win the war.

Certainly greener technologies can help, but solar panels won’t purify Flint’s lead-ridden water or lower asthma rates in the Bronx, some of the highest in the country because of the proximity to trucking lanes. Technology alone can’t address the environmental injustice disproportionately confronting minorities. However, if we understand that the enemy is not our physical environment, but the unjust social relations that allow some to gain at the expense of and risk to others, then technological solutions can be a part, but only a part, of the plan. Crucial to this plan is gaining social control over the private, exploitative and even irresponsible direction of the human-nature metabolism.

For this reason, Naomi Klein has called for solutions that go beyond the technological. She emphasizes, not just green energy, but also “people power.” Her most recent book and film, “This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate,” feature a number of grass-roots movements resisting the forces that threaten people’s relationships with their environment — sometimes even in the name of “green” solutions, such as hydroelectric dam projects. We want to follow Klein’s lead in shifting the conceptual focus from technologies of power to relations of power. Despite his recent rhetoric, McKibben follows a similar course.

We urgently need to motivate action, but given the ambiguities and dangers surrounding war rhetoric, we need better orienting language. Perhaps, as some have suggested, “revolution” is the better path.

While world wars aim to decimate enemies and their capacities for violence, “revolutions” aim to transform violence and oppression by empowering people. Instead of a war against physics, a revolution in the control and direction of climate, natural resources and energy policy could enable democratic participation to redress past harms and guide environmental goals of the future. Such a revolution would affirm the right to a clean, healthy environment for all people; it would transform the relationships that regulate our metabolism with nature, relationships that now allow some to profit by denying this right to others. Solar panels alone won’t transform these relationships and secure this right.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/31/opini ... dline&te=1

Are Your Sperm in Trouble?

Let’s begin with sex.

As a couple finishes its business, millions of sperm begin theirs: rushing toward an egg to fertilize it. But these days, scientists say, an increasing proportion of sperm — now about 90 percent in a typical young man — are misshapen, sometimes with two heads or two tails.

Even when properly shaped, today’s sperm are often pathetic swimmers, veering like drunks or paddling crazily in circles. Sperm counts also appear to have dropped sharply in the last 75 years, in ways that affect our ability to reproduce.

“There’s been a decrease not only in sperm numbers, but also in their quality and swimming capacity, their ability to deliver the goods,” said Shanna Swan, an epidemiologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, who notes that researchers have also linked semen problems to shorter life expectancy.

Perhaps you were expecting another column about political missteps in Washington, and instead you’ve been walloped with talk of bad swimmers. Yet this isn’t just a puzzling curiosity, but is rather an urgent concern that affects reproduction, possibly even our species’ future.

Andrea Gore, a professor of pharmacology at the University of Texas at Austin and the editor of the journal Endocrinology, put it to me this way: “Semen quality and fertility in men have decreased. Not everyone who wants to reproduce will be able to. And the costs of male disorders to quality of life, and the economic burden to society, are inestimable.”

Human and animal studies suggest that a crucial culprit is a common class of chemical called endocrine disruptors, found in plastics, cosmetics, couches, pesticides and countless other products. Because of the environmental links, The New Yorker once elegantly referred to the crisis as “silent sperm,” and innumerable studies over 25 years add to the concern that the world’s sperm are in trouble.

And so are men and boys. Apparently related to the problem of declining semen quality is an increase in testicular cancer in many countries; in undescended testicles; and in a congenital malformation of the penis called hypospadias (in which the urethra exits the side or base of the penis instead of the tip). These problems are often found together and are labeled testicular dysgenesis syndrome.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/11/opin ... d=45305309

World Water Day 2017: Our polluted waters

Slide show at:

http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/photos/wo ... ailsignout

******
New Zealand declares a river a person

The odd legal status is intended to help prevent pollution and other abuses

IT SOUNDS, admits Chris Finlayson, like a “pretty nutty” idea. Yet the new law that designates the Whanganui River, New Zealand’s third-longest, a legal person, in the sense that it can own property, incur debts and petition the courts, is not unprecedented. Te Urewera, an area of forested hills in the north-east that used to be a national park, became a person for legal purposes in 2014. And around the world companies, foundations and assorted units of government have legal rights and responsibilities independent of the people who staff them. All the same, New Zealanders have been joking about whether the Whanganui might now vote, buy a few beers (how old is it?) or be charged with murder if a swimmer drowns.

The law, which was approved on March 15th, stems from disputes over the Treaty of Waitangi, by which New Zealand’s indigenous Maori ceded sovereignty to British colonialists in 1840. The treaty was supposed to have protected Maori rights and property; it was observed mainly in the breach. In recent years the government has tried to negotiate settlements for breaches of the treaty with different Maori iwi, or tribes. For the Whanganui iwi, the idea of the river as person is nothing new. The iwi professes a deep spiritual connection to the Whanganui: as a local proverb has it, “I am the river and the river is me.” The law acknowledges the river as a “living whole”, rather than trying to carve it up, putting to rest an ownership dispute that has dragged on for 140 years. When it was passed members of the iwi in the gallery of parliament broke into a ten-minute song of celebration.

In practice, two guardians will act for the river, one appointed by the government and one by the iwi. Mr Finlayson, the minister in charge of negotiations tied to the Treaty of Waitangi, hopes the change will help bring those who do environmental damage to the river to book. Under the settlement the government will also pay the iwi NZ$80m ($56m) as compensation for past abuses and set up a fund of NZ$30m to enhance the “health and well-being” of the river. It is one of 82 deals that aim to remedy breaches of the treaty, including one with the Tuhoe iwi that made Te Urewera into a person.

Days after the law passed, an Indian court declared two of the biggest and most sacred rivers in India, the Ganges and Yamuna, to be people too. Making explicit reference to the Whanganui settlement, the court assigned legal “parents” to protect and conserve their waters. Local lawyers think the ruling might help fight severe pollution: the rivers’ defenders will no longer have to prove that discharges into them harm anyone, since any sullying of the waters will now be a crime against the river itself. There is no doubt that of the 1.3bn-odd people in India, the Ganges and the Yamuna must be among the most downtrodden.

http://www.economist.com/news/asia/2171 ... lydispatch

Garb age

Looking good can be extremely bad for the planet

Global clothing production doubled between 2000 and 2014

STYLE is supposedly for ever. But the garments needed to conjure up eternal chic are spending less time on shop racks and in homes than ever before. Global clothing production doubled between 2000 and 2014, as apparel firms’ operations became more efficient, their production cycles became quicker and fashionistas got more for their money. From just a few collections a year, fast-fashion brands such as Zara, owned by Spain’s Inditex, now offer more than 20; Sweden’s H&M manages up to 16.

Dressing to impress has an environmental cost as well as a financial one. From the pesticides poured on cotton fields to the washes in which denim is dunked, making 1kg of fabric generates 23kg of greenhouse gases on average, according to estimates by McKinsey, a consultancy. Because consumers keep almost every type of apparel only half as long as they did 15 years ago, these inputs quickly go to waste. The latest worry is shoppers in the developing world, who have yet to buy as many clothes as rich-world consumers but are fast catching up (see chart).

Most apparel companies know that sooner or later, consumers’ awareness of this subject will rise. That is a worry. Various furores in the 1990s and afterwards over the working conditions of people making goods for firms such as Nike, Walmart and Primark badly damaged brands. The clothing industry cannot afford to appear so ugly again.

One obvious way in which firms can answer environmental concerns is to use renewable energy to power their facilities. Beyond that, they can cut back sharply on water and chemical use; and they can develop new materials and manufacturing processes that reduce inputs.

The record in this regard is mixed. H&M was the largest buyer in the world of “better cotton” last year—that is, cotton produced under a scheme to eliminate the nastiest pesticides and encourage strict water management. It grows in 24 countries and represents about 12% of the 25m tonnes of cotton produced each year globally. Kirsten Brodde of Greenpeace also notes that H&M has eliminated toxic per- and polyfluorinated chemicals from its lines (which are used to make garments waterproof). Nike’s Flyknit method of weaving items, including trainers, reduces waste by 60% in comparison with cutting and sewing. Flyknit products have a large following: revenues from the line came to more than $1bn in the last fiscal year.

But for many firms, research and development into new materials and methods is not a priority. Plenty do not measure their overall environmental impact. And introducing green collections can even carry a risk for brands, reckons Steven Swartz of McKinsey. It is possible that a shopper will move on from wearing a consciously green T-shirt to viewing other kinds of clothing as the trappings of planetary destruction.

A handful of brands encourage customers to recycle old clothes by returning them to stores. But almost all apparel today is made of a mix of materials—very often including polyester. Separating them out is difficult and mechanical methods of recycling degrade fibres. Chemical methods are too expensive to be viable. Shipping second-hand clothes off to countries in Africa and Asia is also a bust. Even if local markets are large enough to absorb them, the poorer quality of polyester-mixed garbs means they do not survive long.

More durable apparel could help. Tom Cridland, a British designer, creates men’s clothing that is designed to last three decades thanks to strong seams and special treatments to prevent shrinking. He expects revenues of $1m this year, but admits that his model will be hard to scale. Patagonia, a maker of climbing and hiking gear, sends vans to campuses to help students patch up jackets and trousers. It helps others with greenery, too. After discovering a type of material for wetsuits that, unlike neoprene, requires no oil to make, Patagonia shared the find with surfing brands such as Quiksilver. Such innovation is badly needed. Style may be forever but today’s model of clothing production is not.

http://www.economist.com/news/business- ... lydispatch
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This Earth Day, let’s stop wasting food

Saher Lalani MPH CCRP PMP

21 April 2017

One beautiful summer morning, I took to the trails for a nature walk. I soon found myself absorbed in the sights and sounds that surrounded me: the melodious chirping of birds, a gigantic mulberry tree, dazzling sunflowers. Sadly, in midst of this splendour lay a pile of food waste — half-eaten hamburgers, fries, wrappers and empty soda cans – blemishing the beauty of God's creation.

All major religions hold the environment as sacred, and teach humankind to respect and care for it. According to the Holy Qur'an, humans are the highest form of God’s creation and are held responsible for the wellbeing of our planet. We can consume what we need, but we must do so in moderation: “O Children of Adam! Look to your adornment at every place of worship, and eat and drink, but do not be prodigal. Lo! He loveth not the prodigal!” (7:31).

Clearly, we have responsibilities toward the Earth and the use of its resources, yet we live in an era of colossal food waste. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, approximately one third of the food produced globally is lost each year, which amounts to roughly $990 billion of waste. Per capita, consumers in Europe and North America throw away between 95 – 115 kilograms of food per year. Compare that with consumers in Sub-Saharan Africa, South and South-East Asia, who each dispose of 6 – 11 kilograms of food in a year.
Food, water and air are the building blocks that nourish our bodies — without them, we would cease to exist. These statistics on global food loss and waste are alarming and should serve as a call to action.

Earth Day was established in 1970 to raise awareness about the impact of human activity on our planet. It is celebrated every year on 22 April in over 190 countries, encouraging millions of people across the world to conserve Earth’s limited resources and support its long-term sustainability.

This Earth Day, let’s find ways to consume food more responsibly and be more careful about the resources we use so that we can begin to reduce our staggering levels of food waste. See the accompanying tips on how you can start making a difference today.

http://www.theismaili.org/nutrition/eat ... sting-food

Climate change

The Arctic as it is known today is almost certainly gone

On current trends, the Arctic will be ice-free in summer by 2040

THOSE who doubt the power of human beings to change Earth’s climate should look to the Arctic, and shiver. There is no need to pore over records of temperatures and atmospheric carbon-dioxide concentrations. The process is starkly visible in the shrinkage of the ice that covers the Arctic ocean. In the past 30 years, the minimum coverage of summer ice has fallen by half; its volume has fallen by three-quarters. On current trends, the Arctic ocean will be largely ice-free in summer by 2040.

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http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/2 ... na/26763/n

China Wants Fish, So Africa Goes Hungry

Of all the stresses that humans have inflicted on the world’s oceans, including pollution and global warming, industrial fishing ranks high. For years, trawlers capable of scouring the ocean floor, and factory ships trailing driftnets and longlines baited with thousands of hooks, have damaged once-abundant fisheries to the point where, the United Nations says, 90 percent of them are now fully exploited or facing collapse.

The damage is not just to the fish and the ecosystem but also to people who depend on them for food and income. This is particularly true in Africa. In 2008, in two striking articles, The Times reported that mechanized fleets from the European Union, Russia and China had nearly picked clean the oceans off Senegal and other northwest African countries, ruining coastal economies.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/03/opin ... 05309&_r=0

See God in All Nature

We see God face to face every hour,
and know the savor of Nature.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.
- William Shakespeare

Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every creature is a word of God.
- Meister Eckhart

To commit a crime against the natural world
is a sin against ourselves and a sin against God.
- Patriarch Bartholomew

Everything in Nature contains all the powers of Nature.
Everything is made of one hidden stuff.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Womb Is No Protection From Toxic Chemicals

Until a few decades ago, the popular but falsely reassuring belief was that babies in the womb were perfectly protected by the placenta and that children were just “little adults,” requiring no special protections from environmental threats. We now know that a host of chemicals, pollutants and viruses readily travel across the placenta from mother to fetus, pre-polluting or pre-infecting a baby even before birth.

Toxic chemicals like lead, certain air pollutants, pesticides, synthetic chemicals and infectious agents like Zika can derail the intricate molecular processes involved in a fetus’s healthy brain development. So can physical and social stress experienced by the mother.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/01/opin ... &te=1&_r=0

A Utopia for a Dystopian Age

Excerpt:

We also need to be more careful about what it is that might preoccupy our utopian imagination. In my view, only one candidate is today left standing. That candidate is nature and the relation we have to it. More’s island was an earthly paradise of plenty. No amount of human intervention would ever exhaust its resources. We know better. As the climate is rapidly changing and the species extinction rate reaches unprecedented levels, we desperately need to conceive of alternative ways of inhabiting the planet.

Are our industrial, capitalist societies able to make the requisite changes? If not, where should we be headed? This is a utopian question as good as any. It is deep and universalistic. Yet it calls for neither a break with the past nor a headfirst dive into the future. The German thinker Ernst Bloch argued that all utopias ultimately express yearning for a reconciliation with that from which one has been estranged. They tell us how to get back home. A 21st-century utopia of nature would do that. It would remind us that we belong to nature, that we are dependent on it and that further alienation from it will be at our own peril.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/26/opin ... dline&te=1[/b]

As Beijing Joins Climate Fight, Chinese Companies Build Coal Plants

When China halted plans for more than 100 new coal-fired power plants this year, even as President Trump vowed to “bring back coal” in America, the contrast seemed to confirm Beijing’s new role as a leader in the fight against climate change.

But new data on the world’s biggest developers of coal-fired power plants paints a very different picture: China’s energy companies will make up nearly half of the new coal generation expected to go online in the next decade.

These Chinese corporations are building or planning to build more than 700 new coal plants at home and around the world, some in countries that today burn little or no coal, according to tallies compiled by Urgewald, an environmental group based in Berlin. Many of the plants are in China, but by capacity, roughly a fifth of these new coal power stations are in other countries.

Over all, 1,600 coal plants are planned or under construction in 62 countries, according to Urgewald’s tally, which uses data from the Global Coal Plant Tracker portal. The new plants would expand the world’s coal-fired power capacity by 43 percent.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/01/clim ... d=45305309

'Biological annihilation:' Earth faces sixth mass extinction

During the past 500 million years, there were five "mass extinctions" during which many species rapidly died.

Now scientists say we've entered a sixth mass extinction, and humans are the primary cause, according to a new study.

“This is the case of a biological annihilation occurring globally,” said co-author Rodolfo Dirzo, a professor of biology at Stanford University.

Previous mass extinctions were due to natural climate changes, huge volcanic eruptions or catastrophic meteor strikes. But this one is due to human activities such as deforestation, overpopulation, pollution, poaching and extreme weather events tied to man-caused global warming, the study said.

"The massive loss of populations and species reflects our lack of empathy to all the wild species that have been our companions since our origins," said the new study's lead author, Gerardo Ceballos of the National Autonomous University of Mexico. "It is a prelude to the disappearance of many more species and the decline of natural systems that make civilization possible."

The study suggests that as much as 50% of the number of animal individuals that once shared Earth have disappeared. Researchers determined that billions of mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibian populations have been lost worldwide.

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http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/world/bio ... ailsignout

CLIMATE

The Immense, Eternal Footprint Humanity Leaves on Earth: Plastics

If human civilization were to be destroyed and its cities wiped off the map, there would be an easy way for future intelligent life-forms to know when the mid-20th century began: plastic.

From the 1950s to today, 8.3 billion metric tons of plastic have been produced, with around half of it made since 2004. And since plastic does not naturally degrade, the billions of tons sitting in landfills, floating in the oceans or piling up on city streets will provide a marker if later civilizations ever want to classify our era. Perhaps they will call this time on Earth the Plastocene Epoch.

A new study in Science Advances published Wednesday offered the first analysis of all mass-produced plastics ever manufactured: how much has been made, what kind and what happens to the material once it has outlived its use.

Roland Geyer, the lead author of the study, said, “My mantra is that you can’t manage what you don’t measure, and without good numbers, you don’t know if we have a real problem.”

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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/19/clim ... dline&te=1

The coming sixth extinction

Humans have committed species to extinction at an alarming rate. But hybridisation and speciation is happening quickly too

IN THE central hall of the Natural History Museum in London a dinosaur has been displaced. The skeleton, donated by Andrew Carnegie, had long dominated the nave of the imposing gothic pile intended by its founder Sir Richard Owen as a “cathedral to nature”. “Dippy”, as the Diplodocus was sometimes known, was not merely spectacular. He provided a dramatic illustration of one of the great discoveries of 19th-century science—that most of natural history is, indeed, history.

Until the end of the 18th century hardly anyone believed that the past contained creatures unknown in the present. By 1841, when Owen coined the term “dinosaur”, extinction was an accepted fact. Today it is clear that the species currently creeping, crawling, striding, swimming, photosynthesising—and sometimes just dawdling—across the face of the Earth represent a tiny fraction of those that evolution has created and discarded over the aeons.

Unfortunately, the fraction is shrinking still. Humans have been killing off species for tens of thousands of years, and continue to do so at an alarming rate. Palaeontologists have identified five horrendous “mass extinctions” in the past 500m years of the Earth’s history. Humans, it is now frequently asserted, are causing a “sixth extinction”—a phrase which, in 2014, became the title of an excellent book by Elizabeth Kolbert, a writer at the New Yorker.

It is in this context of quasi-existential dread that the Natural History Museum has replaced Dippy with an arguably even more impressive skeleton (pictured). During the age of industrial whaling, oil-fired ships with explosive harpoons cut through the blue-whale population as a knife through blubber. The whales could easily have gone the way of the dinosaurs. But half a century ago humans decided to stop the killing, and today the whales’ numbers are increasing. The blue-whale skeleton freshly suspended from the museum’s vaulted roof commemorates this turnaround. The whale’s name is Hope.

This is the attitude that Chris Thomas espouses and engenders in his thought-provoking new book, “Inheritors of the Earth”. In 2004 Mr Thomas, an ecologist at the University of York, was one of the authors of a scientific report suggesting that a relatively small amount of global warming could see almost a fifth of the species that live on land “committed to extinction”. Though that estimate came in for some stick, Mr Thomas still reckons he was broadly correct. But at the same time he believes that humans are bringing about a great new age of biological diversity.

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http://www.economist.com/news/books-and ... na/52710/n

Should You Trust Climate Science? Maybe the Eclipse Is a Clue

Eclipse mania will peak on Monday, when millions of Americans will upend their lives in response to a scientific prediction.

Friends of mine in Georgia plan to drive 70 miles to find the perfect spot on a South Carolina golf course to observe the solar eclipse. Many Americans will drive farther than that, or fly, to situate themselves in the “path of totality,” the strip of the country where the moon is predicted to blot out the sun entirely.

Thanks to the work of scientists, people will know exactly what time to expect the eclipse. In less entertaining but more important ways, we respond to scientific predictions all the time, even though we have no independent capacity to verify the calculations. We tend to trust scientists.

For years now, atmospheric scientists have been handing us a set of predictions about the likely consequences of our emissions of industrial gases. These forecasts are critically important, because this group of experts sees grave risks to our civilization. And yet, when it comes to reacting to the warnings of climate science, we have done little.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/18/clim ... d=45305309

In Kenya, Selling or Importing Plastic Bags Will Cost You $19,000 — or Jail

DAR ES SALAAM, Tanzania — Kenya will now punish with up to four years in jail anyone making, selling or importing plastic bags, putting in place one of the world’s toughest bans on the ubiquitous item that is blamed for clogging oceans and killing marine life.

The new rule, announced in March and put into effect on Monday, also means that garbage bags will be taken off supermarket shelves and visitors entering Kenya will be required to leave their duty-free shopping bags at the airport.

Kenya joins more than 40 other countries including China, the Netherlands and France that have introduced taxes on bags or limited or prohibited their use.

In Rwanda, plastic bags are illegal, and visitors are searched at the airport. Britain introduced a 5 pence charge at stores in 2015, leading to a plunge of more than 80 percent in the use of plastic bags. There are no nationwide restrictions on the use of plastic bags in the United States, though states like California and Hawaii ban nonbiodegradable bags.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/28/worl ... d=45305309

shivaathervedi wrote:Look at the name of thread, what plastic bags have to do with spirituality of a person?!!

If you read the first paragraph of the article you will realize the harm done by plastics to the environment. Spirituality has everything to do about protecting the diversity of life and environment.