Poorer Living from Better Things

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I’m not an apologist for the chemical industry. Chemical industry has a checkered past in many ways. The pesticide, petrochemicals, and mining industries have left a deep and abiding foul taste in the mouths of many communities. In a previous era, heavy industry has fouled rivers, lakes, air, and ground water. It has lead to illness, death, and loss of livelihood to many people.

But in the modern era much of this wanton issuance of hazardous industrial material into the air and waters has been halted or greatly diminished. At least for the US, Canada, and the EU. And it is not because industry suddenly found religion. The “regulatory environment” became so compelling a liability cost factor that industry set its mind to engineering plants into compliance. 

I would make the observation that today, the major chemical health issues before us are not quite as much about bulk environmental pollution by waste products. Rather, I would offer that the most important matter may have to do with the chronic exposure of consumers to various levels of manufactured products. High energy density foods, particularly, high fructose corn sweeteners; veterinary antibiotic residues, endocrine disrupters, smoking, highly potent pharmaceuticals, and volatiles from polymers and adhesives to name just a few.

Modern life has come to require the consumption of many things.  A modern nation must have a thriving chemical industry to sustain its need for manufactured materials. It is quite difficult and isolating to live a life free of paint and plastics or diesel and drugs. Choosing paper over plastic at the supermarket requires a difficult calculation of comparative environmental insults. Pulp manufacture vs polymer manufacture- which is the least evil? I don’t know.

Our lives have transitioned from convenience to wretched excess. Our industry has given us an irresistable selection of facile ways to accomplish excess consumption. Individualized portions meter out aliquots of tasty morsels that our cortisol-stressed brains cry out for. These same portions are conveniently dispensed in petroleum- or natural gas-derived packages within packages within packages. These resource depleting disposable nested packages are delivered to our local market in diesel burning behemoths because some pencil-necked cube monkey decided that rotund Americans needed yet one more permutation of high fructose corn syrup saturated, palm oil softened, sodium salt crusted, azo dye pigmented, extruded grain product on Wal-Mart shelves.

Enough already.

All Rights Reserved. Copyright 2008.

5 thoughts on “Poorer Living from Better Things”

  1. John Spevacek

    Eat well, sleep enough, exercise and relax. What don’t we get about this? Doctors would be out of business if everybody followed these millenial-aged rules.

    Nobody lives for ever. Because death is a zero-sum game, if you choose to reduce your risk of heart disease (assuming that that choice is real), you are increasing your risk of cancer, stroke,…

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  2. Nick

    “But in the modern era much of this wanton issuance of hazardous industrial material into the air and waters has been halted or greatly diminished”

    You forget to mention we’ve outsourced our pollution to China. There are now vast fields of decomposing plastic in the pacific (which get into fish, etc). It’s doom and gloom after the boom.

    http://www.naturalnews.com/022885.html

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  4. Jordan

    “much of this wanton issuance of hazardous industrial material into the air and waters has been halted or greatly diminished. At least for the US, Canada, and the EU.”

    Very widely reported recent story in the Canadian press a few weeks ago: A flock of migrating ducks land in a Syncrude open oil-sands tailings pond near Fort McMurry, Alberta, the heart of Alberta oil-sands country. The “scarecrows” that are supposed to keep the birds away from the ponds failed that day. A few hundred ducks got coated with oil and died. Syncrude and the Alberta provincial government went into crisis management mode, and the story was dead within a week.

    The sad thing is that filthy Alberta oil is responsible for much of Canada’s resource-driven economic prosperity. It makes me sick, as a Canadian.

    For me, I find that buying used when possible, eating no meat and very little prepared food, and turning off the commercial world (no flyers in my mailbox and very little TV in my living-room) go a long way to reduce the need to “consume”.

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