in certain baby foods that could cause neurological damage, a House Oversight
subcommittee said in a report released on February 4th
Humanity, arrogant humanity. Today, there are more impoverished people on this planet than ever in history. As my January 28th blog, 300,000 a Day, presents, based on United Nations calculations, there are approximately 300,000 starvation/famine related deaths daily, 821 million “food insecure” human beings, a reality that is particularly exacerbated in conflict zones and regions of extreme and unending drought. Among Malthusian overpopulation, dramatic consequences from climate change, horrific effects from toxic pollutants released into the environment (well beyond greenhouse emissions) and pandemics, it seems that nature is calling humanity to a payback challenge. Man vs nature… and nature never loses. It may take time, but “cause and effect” dynamics, reflecting the immutable laws of physics, chemistry and biology, are always in control.
I have serially written about those “canaries in the coal mine,” indicators in nature, notably other species sharing our environment, that are less than subtle hints of what mankind is actually doing to itself. Unless we accept a going forward period of responsibility, a heavy mantle particularly for the richest nations with the economic strength to deal most effectively with the problem that they mostly caused, the misery will increase manifold, reaching even those who believe that their wealth will insulate them from the pain.
Today, I will take a look at one more “canary” – this time sea lions – in a very wealthy and scientifically advanced coal mine – the San Francisco Bay Area. Rosanna Xia, writing for the February 1st Los Angeles Times, presents the grim details: “On a former Cold War missile base perched high above the Golden Gate Bridge, in what is now the largest marine mammal hospital in the world, Frances Gulland still remembers the shock she felt when she first started working here as a veterinarian 26 years ago.
“A male sea lion had washed ashore in severe pain. His hind flippers were swollen, his lymph nodes riddled with tumors. Cancer had taken over his kidneys and turned his spine to mush. First responders at the Marine Mammal Center told Gulland they saw this in sea lions all the time… ‘Wildlife should not be getting cancer like this, that’s crazy!’ said Gulland, who was new to California. ‘How can that be?’
“Now, after two decades of study, an all-star team of marine mammal pathologists, virology experts, chemists and geneticists say they’ve connected two surprising culprits: herpes and toxic chemicals, like DDT and PCBs, that poisoned the California coast decades ago… The ocean is clearly hurting, researchers say, and this mysterious cancer in so many sea lions carries a troubling warning for humans.
“‘Sea lions, they’re coming up on the beach, using the same waters that we swim and surf in, eating a lot of the same seafood that we eat,’ said Gulland, who has served on the U.S. Marine Mammal Commission since the Obama administration and is now a research associate at UC Davis. ‘They’re predisposed to cancer by these high levels of legacy compounds that are still in the environment — and we are also exposed to these chemicals.’”
Farmers and industry often use chemicals without understanding their long-term risks. We have more advanced research techniques, computer models and artificially intelligent analytics today that were not available until relatively recently, that can generate a higher level of predictability. But even when we know what the consequences are (or should know), money often trumps wisdom. For example, we know that fracking compounds leak into well water and aquifers, but the petroleum lobby is strong enough to make those toxins exceptions to statutory and regulatory restrictions. Multiply that arrogance and economic power across the richest in the land… and understand that nature actually does not care (1) how rich you are, (2) how you vote, and (3) does not apply a cost-benefit analysis to the application of physical laws.
Many of the chemicals we have leached into the environment, even long ago and since banned, simply do not decompose and dilute fast enough to avoid toxic consequences decades later, and for serious nuclear waste (Fukushima and Chernobyl), even millennia. DDT and PCBs linger, and even small amount do an incredible level of damage. DDT was a highly effective insecticide with both agricultural and human benefits. It also is a poison that kills more than bugs. “A polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB) is an organic chlorine compound with the formula C12H10−xClx. Polychlorinated biphenyls were once widely deployed as dielectric and coolant fluids in electrical apparatus, carbonless copy paper and in heat transfer fluids.” Wikipedia. These are two significant chemicals, long-since banned, that continue to wreak havoc to living creatures all over the earth, particularly where they are spread by waterways of every kind and description.
A little research, and scientists discovered that industrial ocean dumping of these toxins had taken place in the immediate area. Xia continues: “Marine mammals, like humans, nurse their young and live relatively long lives. Their long-term health is a window into the lasting effects of chronic exposure to the many chemicals humans have introduced to the sea. They accumulate toxins in their blubber and get sick from the same kinds of viruses that affect humans.
“So the more we understand how certain environmental conditions can turn a seemingly minor disease into widespread cancer in sea lions, the more we might know how to prevent similar cancers from metastasizing in humans… ‘It is extraordinary, the level of pollutants in these animals in California. It is a big factor in why we’re seeing this level of cancer,’ said Dr. Pádraig Duignan, chief pathologist at the Marine Mammal Center and a co-author of the study. He had previously studied sea lions in New Zealand, which have minuscule amounts of DDT compared with what he’s seeing in California.
“‘With all the dumping since the Second World War, right up to the 1970s, that’s a lot of stuff out there,’ Duignan said. ‘These legacy chemicals haven’t broken down anything appreciable in intervening years, and nobody knows if they ever will. This is something that they’re going to have to be exposed to for who knows how long.’
“Cancer is rare in wild animals. The only similar example of widespread cancer that has been scientifically documented in sea mammals seems to be in a beluga whale population in the St. Lawrence estuary in Canada… The river there had been contaminated by polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs, produced by local aluminum smelters. Cancer was identified in 27% of the adult whales that were found dead and examined. But after the pollution went down, researchers noted, the cancer went away.
“In California, persistent chemicals like DDT remain in the environment, both on the seafloor and working their way back up the food chain in fish and other critters of the sea. Efforts to clean up this mess — a complicated and difficult process — have languished for years.
“Eunha Hoh, an environmental health scientist at San Diego State’s School of Public Health, was struck by how clearly the sea lion research, which she was not affiliated with, connected cancer to these supposedly historic chemicals. Hoh, too, has continued to find significant amounts of these pollutants in Southern California dolphins and other animals she has studied… It took more than four decades after these chemicals were banned to prove their connection to the health problems that scientists already suspected, said Hoh, whose work focuses on emerging contaminants in wildlife and humans.”
When you hear voices in Congress, perfectly content to support massive tax cuts for the rich, tell us that we simply cannot afford to take the necessary steps to protect our environment, that it will cost jobs and impose economic hardship on business-America, I wonder if it will be their children or grandchildren, even them, who die prematurely or suffer severe medical consequences from their folly… or you and yours?
I’m Peter Dekom, and exactly how do you run a meaningful “cost-benefit analysis” when you cannot be sure of the long-term consequences, but you know that millions and millions of human beings (billions?), as well as all the plants and animals in nature, face clear risks from these industrial decisions.
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