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The Teflon Toxin: Dupont and the Chemistry of Deception
The Teflon Toxin: Dupont and the Chemistry of Deception
KEN WAMSLEY SOMETIMES DREAMS that he’s playing softball again. He’ll be at center field, just like when he played slow pitch back in his teens, or pounding the ball over the fence as the crowd goes wild. Other times, he’s somehow inexplicably back at work in the lab. Wamsley calls them nightmares, these stories that play out in his sleep, but really the only scary part is the end, when “I wake up and I have no rectum anymore.”
Wamsley is 73. After developing rectal cancer and having surgery to treat it in 2002, he walks slowly and gets up from the bench in his small backyard slowly. His voice, which has a gentle Appalachian lilt, is still animated, though, especially when he talks about his happier days. There were many. While Wamsley knew plenty of people in Parkersburg, West Virginia, who struggled to stay employed, he made an enviable wage for almost four decades at the DuPont plant here. The company was generous, helping him pay for college courses and training him to become a lab analyst in the Teflon division.
He enjoyed the work, particularly the precision and care it required. For years, he measured levels of a chemical called C8 in various products. The chemical “was everywhere,” as Wamsley remembers it, bubbling out of the glass flasks he used to transport it, wafting into a smelly vapor that formed when he heated it. A fine powder, possibly C8, dusted the laboratory drawers and floated in the hazy lab air.
At the time, Wamsley and his coworkers weren’t particularly concerned about the strange stuff. “We never thought about it, never worried about it,” he said recently. His believed it was harmless, “like a soap. Wash your hands [with it], your face, take a bath.”
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Perfectly Nasty Ocean Storm
The Perfectly Nasty Ocean Storm
The oceans of the world are currently experiencing a “perfect storm” that is nasty, real nasty with too much warming, too much acidification, too much CO2, too much fishing, too many chemicals, too much Ag runoff, too much radiation (Fukushima), and too little ice (Arctic Ocean) bringing on too much methane (CH4). Whew!
How much can the oceans handle?
The answer to that question may be coming to surface. According to ABC News, May 19, 2014, Mysterious Mass Animal Deaths All Over the World: “Millions of birds, fish, crabs and other small marine life have been turning up dead in massive numbers from the United States, through Europe and down to South America.”
Albeit, headlines about mysterious animal deaths must be tempered by evidence of similar events in the past, as for example, “Wildlife die-offs are an ancient phenomenon. One fossil site in Chile revealed recurring mass marine-mammal deaths, most likely from toxic algae blooms, dating back at least nine million years. Aristotle, in his ‘Historia Animalium,’ in the fourth century B.C., remarked on mass dolphin strandings as simply something that the animals were known to do ‘at times’,” J.B. Mackinnon, On Animal Deaths and Human Anxieties, The New Yorker, April 21, 2015.
That is not to downplay the seriousness of the foreboding signaled by the ABC headline about mass deaths. That needs to be taken seriously and studied. Indubitably, it is extremely important to be absolutely sure of correct analyses, connecting the dots is important. Otherwise, news reports and science are constantly on a wild goose chase, not knowing from where, or where to turn next.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Gift of the Maya
The Gift of the Maya
It takes a bit of time for the elegance of a food forest to emerge, something on the order of decades. Strolling the garden through the morning mist in a hot Tennessee summer, we tried to remember what this landscape looked like 21 years ago, when we moved to this site, set up our yurt and started in on our little corner of paradise.
What we see today does not remotely resemble what was here then. Then there was a wire-fenced, stony horse paddock in a re-emerging poplar forest. The deep soil tilth now is blanketed in thick vines, their giant leaves hiding pumpkins, squashes and melons. Bamboo cathedrals twined with akebia and passionfruit arch 70 feet (20 meters) over a duck pond next to our cob henhouse. As we let out our poultry for their daily bug chase, bullfrogs croak and leap away. A snapping turtle submerges beneath the mat of duckweed and hyacinths at the water’s edge. All around us figs, peaches, apples, pears, blueberries, cranberries, cherries, plums and persimmons bend down boughs under the weight of their fruit, rabbits stealing out to grab a windfall and then hop back to cover, while high up in the oaks, beech, butternuts and hickories, squirrel forest wardens check the progress of their winter larder.
All this complexity, shrouded in mist and glistening in dew, would not be called orderly by farmers trained in Ag schools or raised in a tradition of straight rows and powerful machines with air-conditioned cabs. They can pump food from the earth the way you would pump barrels of oil, but not without depleting reserves accumulated over eons. As they pour on chemicals, the genetically monocultured crops gradually but inexorably lose nutrient density and attract predators.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Unprecedented Mass Die Offs as Pacific Ocean “Turning Into a Desert” Off California Coast
Unprecedented Mass Die Offs as Pacific Ocean “Turning Into a Desert” Off California Coast
“Ocean’s dying, plankton’s dying… it’s people. Soylent Green is made out of people. They’re making our food out of people. Next thing they’ll be breeding us like cattle for food. You’ve gotta tell them. You’ve gotta tell them!”
It was the dying cry of Charlton Heston in the creepy 1973 film Soylent Green… and it could resemble our desperate near future.
The ocean is dying, by all accounts – and if so, the food supply along with it. The causes are numerous, and overlapping. And massive numbers of wild animal populations are dying as a result of it.
Natural causes in the environment are partly to blame; so too are the corporations of man; the effects of Fukushima, unleashing untold levels of radiation into the ocean and onto Pacific shores; the cumulative effect of modern chemicals and agricultural waste tainting the water and disrupting reproduction.
A startling new report says in no uncertain terms that the Pacific Ocean off the California coast is turning into a desert. Once full of life, it is now becoming barren, and marine mammals, seabirds and fish are starving as a result. According to Ocean Health:
The waters of the Pacific off the coast of California are a clear, shimmering blue today, so transparent it’s possible to see the sandy bottom below […] clear water is a sign that the ocean is turning into a desert, and the chain reaction that causes that bitter clarity is perhaps most obvious on the beaches of the Golden State, where thousands of emaciated sea lion pups are stranded.
[…]
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
How you make big companies listen | Queen of Green | David Suzuki Foundation
How you make big companies listen | Queen of Green | David Suzuki Foundation.
Companies aren`t required to itemize specific fragrance ingredients, not even known allergens. But with your help we brought this message to the government and companies. (Credit: Lindsay Coulter)
I’m no doctor. But people often ask me, “What cream should I use or make for my rash?”
My advice: Stop using scented laundry soap, dryer sheets, lotions and home cleaners!
You already know scents can make you sick. Many of you have helped the David Suzuki Foundation combat potential allergens like “fragrance” and “parfum” (and other undesirables in household cleaners and cosmetics).
Over the years, we asked you to:
- Avoid the Dirty Dozen
- Write to cosmetics companies asking exactly what is meant by “parfum” or “fragrance” in their product ingredients
- Break up with toxic home cleaners, like Windex
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
