Sunday, March 09, 2025

What Have We Done?


Somebody once observed that while non-profits only make up about 5 percent of the country's GNP, they account for 95 percent of its social conscience. Legions of farmworkers and food handlers get sick and die every year while getting our food planted, harvested, packed and shipped to our tables.

Capitalism is not about compassion, of course, it's about generating profits. And in the process the free-market system generates all kinds of what economists call externalities, like environmental damage and health impacts.

Left to its own devices, capitalism in truth creates a lot of collateral damage.

When we formed the non-profit Center for Investigative Reporting in 1977, we were aware that our work would challenge many entrenched economic interests, and that did happen on many occasions.

One of our earliest and long-running investigations was called the Children's Environmental Health Project. We had determined that the regulatory standards established by such agencies as the EPA and FDA were based on what was good for an average-sized man, not a woman or a child.

For example, the amount of pesticide residues allowed in food products -- despite lab evidence that they caused cancer or birth defects -- was determined by assessing the threat to (say) a 32-year-old man weighing 160 pounds and living in Kansas City. Such a person, BTW, was among the *least* likely to be affected by pesticide poisoning.

At the same time, this process neglected the unique vulnerabilities faced by an 8-pound baby growing up in Birmingham, Alabama. Infants are born with immature organ systems and are therefore much more vulnerable to environmental insults than a fully grown human being.

Our stories were essentially a regulatory critiques and a call to action. We argued that environmental health regulations should be based on the potential damage to the most -- not the least --vulnerable. Over time, we had some positive impacts though today much work remains to be done on this issue.

I often think back to those early investigations we did in the 70s and the 80s when stories turn up now of official concern about the weakening immune systems detected among each succeeding generation living in our highly industrialized, polluted world.

Many problems like food allergies, reduced sperm counts, autism, rare diseases, and the inability to withstand pandemics could reasonably be traced back to the continuous chemical assault on the bodies of our children and their children.

Of course, humans adapt to their environment and have some native abilities to fight off new bacterial and viral threats, but our massive difficulty with Covid-19 causes an old journalist to wonder:

What in the world have we done to ourselves?

(I first published this four years ago today.)

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