The deadly chemistry set
Studies show that chemicals in the environment are causing
disease and death. It is too high a price to pay for inward
investment, argues Robert Allen
In July 1991, 21 scientists, led by zoologist Dr Theo Colborn of
the World Wide Fund, got together at Wingspread, Wisconsin in the
USA to discuss how the manmade chemical compounds we know as
pesticides and industrial chemicals affect sexual development in
wildlife and humans.
Dr Colborn and her colleagues agreed that when these chemicals
enter the body, largely though the food chain, they mimic
hormones, specifically the body's natural sex hormones. This,
many scientists now believe, is the cause of the 50% drop in the
male sperm count since 1940, the two-fold increase in breast
cancer since 1960, the three-fold increase in testicular cancer
and two-fold increase in prostate cancer since the 1940s, the
phenomenal rise in endometriosis (a disease virtually unknown
outside the 20th century) which now affects five million American
women, and the increasing number of children born with
abnormalities. And this is only one bunch of scientists out of a
Christy Moore sized audience of them who have been saying that
chemical pollution is responsible for a range of illnesses from
asthma to cancer. (For more on Colborn's gathering of the
scientists, see Our Stolen Future, published last month.)
But we don't need science to tell us that toxic pollution is
harming the planet's ecosystem, altering the climate and
gradually poisoning us. We can talk to the communities which live
amidst our chemical industry or listen to the lamentable stories
young mothers tell their friends of their children's respiratory
problems or hear farmers moan about the crazy weather or refer to
the statistics which show 20,000 deaths annually from exposure to
pesticides and three million cases of acute poisonings.
Until US chemical giant Merrell Dow decided not to locate a
pharmaceutical factory in the pastoral heartland of east Cork in
the late eighties, the
anti-pollution/pro-ecology/pro-non-exploitative indigenous
industry debate in Ireland had been filed under subversives,
cranks, greens, communists, anarchists, dreamers and dodgy
republican farmers.
Merrell Dow's decision was regarded as an expedient business
consequence. The sensible people in Cork knew better. Merrell
Dow's failure to locate in a high food-producing region was an
Irish watershed for social resistance to the US-dominated toxic
industry and the 26 County state would not be allowed to forget
it.
Not that they would have forgotten. Some time ago in conversation
with the environmental director of one of our industry
federations the subject of Ireland as an post-industrial,
post-modern, semi-colonial state came up. I made a remark about
environmental standards and enforcement and he replied: ``Do we
want to be organic farmers or waitresses or do we want to get on
with it?''
The problem is: What is it?
Before you tell me I'd like to venture a few suggestions.
- It is encouraging foreign investment from
the chemical industry so that a minority of Irish people can
enjoy a higher standard and quality of living.
- It is encouraging this industry to set its
own agenda to the detriment of the wellbeing of every person
living in the 32 Counties.
- It is ignoring the environmental damage
this particular industry has done and is doing to this country.
- It is dismissing those who believe that
this industry is not only a law unto itself but is belligerent in
the face of criticism, ignorant of scientific studies which show
conclusively that there is a problem with man-made chemical
compounds, arrogant to the point that you get the impression that
only what they say is true, that everyone else is talking
nonsense.
Although there is a forty-tonner load of contemporary studies out
there about pollution and health, the precise effect of pollution
on human health is a contentious issue despite evidence that
virtually every species on the planet is in danger of extinction.