There are a number of things we can set as goals, if we want to address the problems of people, not the problems of companies and their client governments. The prevailing mechanisms to address grievances through the legal process may not work well for individuals or groups of people - so we need other approaches to our problems. Here are three.
You undoubtedly know the phrase, "informed consent." In the story in the first installment of this posting, no one consented to the orchard spraying. Yet the water, air, wildlife - and people - around the orchard bore the actual cost of the pesticide shortcut. Believe me, I have found a great deal of information in the last 10 years about certain kinds of agricultural chemicals that act on human nervous systems. However much I may have learned, it does me no good if I live within a society where a citizen can be poisoned as sure as if someone had slipped arsenic into her food - with no consequences at all to the poisoner. Information without power - in this case, a mechanism to say yes or no - isn't worth much to me.
I take powerful medicines because of my myasthenia gravis. Some carry risks of trouble down the line, others produce side effects. My doctors tell me about the drugs and what is known about what they do - good and bad. I then decide what I will let into my body. This is unlike what happened to Mary 22 years ago - that incident lacked both information and consent.
In addition to what I'm told by my doctors, I consult "Dr. Google" regularly as do so many other people. And there are many clusters of people, even for a rare and obscure disease like mine, who combine their experiences over the Internet to validate and debunk claims put forth by vested interests. These discussions are not "scientific." Yet they can provide important and even life-saving information to help people decide what to do.
Goal Number One for me, then, is informed consent: a right to know, arising from the involvement of all stakeholders. No anonymous poisoning allowed.
Second, I'd like us to abandon the misuse of marketplace rhetoric as a means of social decision-making. In our corporation-oriented economy, we're frequently told, let the marketplace decide, the "invisible hand" will act, supply and demand will determine the cost. The problem is, this is nonsense if used to decide public health policy. The orchard owner figured out that spraying organophosphates would cost him less than hiring more laborers to care for the trees. A great deal of American agriculture in the past 75 years has made the switch from employing people to spreading chemicals as the primary method to care for the soil, water and plants.
Defining this move as "cheaper" is only possible if we turn a blind eye to the huge externalized cost of the shortcut chemical. Therefore, we're not consulted about the use of the chemical - and we're also forced pay for the lion's share of it. While some people try, I don't want to put a dollar value on the environmental destruction caused by organophosphates, nor on my wife's indescribable suffering, her death, the traumatizing of an entire extended family. I never even started to add up the actual dollar cost of her illness - the direct medical costs and the draining of our life savings.
I have a slightly better handle on my own illness, because I've learned a few things since my wife's ALS. In my case, in the half year since diagnosis, treatment and surgery and medicines have probably run about half a million dollars. For example, each time I drive on down to the regional hospital for a few hours infusing a helpful medicine into my arm, it costs $23,000. Who pays for that? Everyone does.
Leaving aside the long list of intangibles and just counting the direct medical costs associated with two people's illnesses, it would have been far cheaper to have cultivated those apples without the substitution of chemicals for labor. Maybe we need a new bumper sticker, "Organic Saves Lives." We don't do a true accounting of the cost of spreading toxics into the world around us.
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| Norby Views the Morning Sun |
So I'm suggesting first informed consent, and second, true cost accounting, as important goals in addressing our unjust and dysfunctional way of deciding risks and benefits.
A third idea is to adopt a cautious version of the precautionary principle. For me, this can be summed up by saying, "When in doubt - don't." If we have informed consent and if we have true cost accounting, we have tools to help make better decisions about risk and benefit. When those tools don't do enough for us, we need to hover our foot on the brake pedal.
There are probably a number of cases in which it's worth taking a risk because a threat is great, or the risk seems low in relationship to the benefit. The problem is, our system of decision making about these instances is inadequate. The people who decide risks and benefits often bear the least of the consequences. The much larger group of people who will live with the aftermath aren't given a say in what happens, or the information they're given is so skewed, it makes informed consent a joke.
There are already functioning systems for deciding risks and benefits for individuals, for example in choosing our food or medicines. Our laws and regulations covering pesticides and other introduced substances don't incorporate adequate informed consent, true cost accounting, or the precautionary principle. Our legal and political system is rigged against these kinds of protections working on a wide scale.
Yesterday's post described how a single person can decide to spread dangerous chemicals in his community because he's operating in a society that won't allocate responsibility to him for destruction and death that happens to other people. What I've noted today is he can spray his toxics without having to tell anyone about it or get their consent to assume the risk, and he only runs the risk of being stopped if harm can be proved - after the fact, not if it is predicted in advance.
There are reasons for hope. Tomorrow's post will end this series with what that means.
