What goes around...

Last night: garlic, onion, ginger, kuro goma, green pepper, green beans, zucchini, sausages, spices. But this is unrelated to the rant below.


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In an age of rapid globalization, it is ironic that we Americans find ourselves subject to some of the same trade practices that previously were reserved for the underdeveloped countries of the Third World. My first book, Circle of Poison: Pesticides and People in a Hungry World, by David Weir & Mark Schapiro, was published over a quarter-century ago.

It concerned the practice by which many pesticides banned or heavily regulated in the U.S. due to evidence they may cause cancer, birth defects or sterility, were being systematically exported to poor countries, where few if any regulatory restrictions were in place. (Most of these pesticides were being used on cash crops that were then re-exported back to the U.S. Thus, the "circle.")

Over the years, whenever I've checked into this issue, it's become clear that not much has changed substantively. The U.S. may have stopped manufacturing DDT, for example, but other companies stepped into the vacuum and the dangerous trade in hazardous chemicals continues, unabated. Many countries now have laws on the books to prevent or at least limit the use of some of the better-known pesticides, but enforcement is a problem, especially in poor countries.

Meanwhile, the tables are turning. Yesterday, a friend, Mark Dowie, emailed me this link to a story in the L.A. Times. It documents how wood, toys, electronics, pesticides and cosmetics are among the products being imported from overseas with toxic chemical ingredients that are banned or restricted in Japan or Europe, but still are legal for sale here.

Among the reasons these chemicals banned in other countries is evidence that they may raise the risk of cancer, alter hormones, or damage the reproductive and neurological systems.

Karma? Maybe. What's apparent is that the global market adjusts to new initiatives to protect consumers and the environment by redirecting dangerous products to the destinations with the lowest barriers to trade. That the U.S. is becoming a "dumping ground" for goods that are illegal elsewhere in the world is beyond irony. It seems an affirmation of the dark side of the Golden Rule: Do onto others as you would have them do onto you.




In this column pictured above, back in 1978, my brother-in-law Ty Symroski mentioned some of the environmental consequences that concerned us in the late Seventies. He also references work by our mutual brother-in-law, John Culliney, a marine scientist and author who lives in Hawaii. In a way, our mutual concern over these global environmental issues was a question of family values -- the kind of world we as family members hoped to see in the future in contrast to what we feared would happen.

The frightening data that is emerging almost daily in 2006 about the pace of global warming reminds me that our generation, the Baby Boomers, fought to surface these complex issues but we did not succeed in reversing the trends that we opposed so vociferously. It is hard to measure change to a geological timeline when we are a species that has such a short lifespan, relative to the planet we inhabit.

It is a major disappointment to those of us who devoted years to researching, writing, and speaking out about these problems that they have only grown worse during the past few decades. We are leaving a huge mess behind for our children and grandchildren to cope with, and the worst of it is, there may be no way out. No solution. No escape.

I hope that does not prove to be the case. My hope is that the human brain can and will prove capable to meet this challenge to our survival as a species. We cannot take the future for granted. We all share custody of the future while we are alive.

What has each of us done today on behalf of our common global home? That is the question that should hang above our front doors and kitchen windowws, where the wild things know as homilies live...

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