The Connections That Hurt Us

Today's photos were taken by Jan earlier this week, here in Sheepscot.

One of the cliches of the environmental movement, really the ecological movement, is that everything in the environment is linked. Over and over we marvel at how the mass of life around us depends on connections among the plants and animals and other kinds of living things.

In trying to address huge emissions of toxins into our world, we are saddled with systems that only function by isolating one or two aspects of the interconnected web of life. The two main systems are science, and the law, often both together. These two ways of trying to make things better are worthy and powerful. But they have a lot of trouble dealing with how the world really works. The subtle interactions of various substances, and the development of problems over long periods of time, are extremely difficult to get a grip on.

You may have been reading recently about the use of a sweetener in organic, supposedly healthy foods, that is based on concentrated brown rice. Rice plants stand tall by taking up silicon. Because of chemical similarities, the plants are unable to distinguish between silicon and arsenic. There's a lot of arsenic in our environment.

Worse, supposedly healthy brown rice contains more arsenic than white rice. And by concentrating the rice into a sweetener, the food is made further toxic. There are a few things to note here.

One is that some of the intended consumers of some of those products sweetened by brown rice are children, whose developing bodies metabolize the poisons faster. The amount of arsenic in some kid's foods is 10-15 times or more the permitted legal limit of arsenic in drinking water in the US.

Second, the legal framework, and until recently the scientific framework, didn't notice arsenic in brown rice - it's invisible for the purposes of food safety. Please note, we're talking about organic brown rice. Many of us associate the organic label with food safety and promotion of health. Arsenic is a really serious poison, including for people with neuromuscular diseases like mine. I eat a lot of organic brown rice that I buy in bulk from the food coop.

I rely on labels to guide my food purchasing, so I can avoid neuro-toxins like MSG and its many cousins, and ingest healthier food that may be labeled organic. But the labels break things down into small parts, they don't show how things connect, and they don't show what they don't show - like the hidden arsenic.

When I say, "how things connect," I mean the impossibility of avoiding certain nasty substances, no matter where you live and no matter how hard you try to feed yourself and your family food that will promote and even protect health.

Here's an article about a common flame retardant - pervasive and found in all of our bodies - that apparently causes major behavioral changes in children, along the lines of autism spectrum disorder. The full paper will be presented tomorrow at the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting, which confers a high degree of respectability on this research.

http://www.sciguru.com/newsitem/12826/Common-flame-retardant-linked-social-behavioral-and-learning-deficits

I won't go into the details, you can read the Sciguru article if you want. Let's note that here's a laudable goal - the prevention of suffering and death from fires - that turns out to cause a whole other class of really terrible difficulties. Piecemeal solutions seem to run these risks often: unintended consequences, as well as migration of substances outside the bounds of where they were supposed to be.

So I can live out in rural Maine, shop at the coop, buy locally, organically, and eat low on the food chain. Today's news is a reminder that I'm still connected with all the rest of you, and also with the damaging consequences of our complicated, fast-paced and frequently thoughtless modern life.