Dioxin was the poster child for this class of toxicants.  (The phrase “poster child” was derived from the practice of charities raising funds by printing posters with photos cute children who are afflicted with a disease.  Perhaps dioxin is better termed “poster child enabler.”)

In 1991, the Environmental Protection Agency undertook a three-year reassessment of dioxin’s toxicity.  In typical fashion, the first results of that reassessment were released last week, 21 years later (and late on a Friday before a holiday weekend).

The EPA concluded, “current exposure to dioxins does not pose a significant health risk.”  I’m used to my government agencies putting a polluter’s spin on science, but that’s not spin, that’s an out and out lie.  I guess EPA was waiting for all its real scientists to retire or die, so the political hacks that replaced them could shovel this load of manure out the front door.

The EPA says dioxins “naturally exist in the environment.”  There is no evidence of this.  Industrial processes create dioxins; most of those present in our environment have been created since the close of the Second World War.

Dioxin is created whenever chlorine is liberated (which requires substantial energy) in the presence of organic (i.e., carbon containing) chemicals.  Many industrial processes contribute to dioxin formation, but according to EPA last week, “The largest remaining source of dioxin emissions is backyard burning of household trash.”

Huh?  For one, I think that’s extraordinarily unlikely, as I think it’s unlikely many chlorinated compounds go into back yard burn barrels and two, how can such a dispersed and unreported phenomenon be measured with anything approaching accuracy?  EPA’s dissembling is nearly as bad as its science.

Then there’s Dow Chemical, which is probably responsible for more dioxin production than any other single entity in history – and now has a petition before Department of Agriculture (no more politically courageous than EPA) to approve a genetically-engineered variety of corn that can withstand repeated doses of 2,4-D (2,4-Dichlorophenoxyacetic acid).

That might be alphabet soup to the under-40 crowd, but 2,4-D was one half of Agent Orange, the defoliant sprayed over Vietnam during our war there and left generations of Vietnamese and American veterans with crippling disabilities and birth defects.

Agent Orange and 2,4-D manufacture and use were also famous as sources of – you guessed it – dioxin.  Stick that in your burn barrel.  The heinous bastards at Dow Chemical want to soak the cornfields of the Earth with chemical weapons.

They’re evilly smart, I’ll grant them that.  They know if there was even a tiny chance spineless Democrats would do anything to stop them, they won’t do it in a presidential election year.

Thanks, Barry.

© Mark Floegel, 2012

I guess that means there’s no point worrying, because there’s nothing we can do.  Which is fine, because there are people who fill our worry bandwidth to overflowing and no two people do more in that regard than Charles and David Koch.

You may have heard of them.  They’re the billionaire brothers who own Koch Industries, the second largest privately held company in America.  Their main business is oil, although they take your money for everything from toilet paper to cattle.  Much as they’ve tried to keep a low profile, they’ve been outed in the past few years as funders of the Tea Party movement and contributors to such backward-looking politicians as Wisconsin’s Scott Walker.  A prankster even portrayed the Kochs and Mr. Walker as being controlled from Hitler’s bunker.

If only it were all fun and games.  Sadly, the Koch also control 57 facilities that use dangerous chemicals and present threats to the health and lives of an aggregate 4.4 million people who live near them.  Had the 9-11 terrorists – or a future group of terrorists – targeted one of these facilities, they death toll could have been an order of magnitude higher than what it was.
But wait, it gets worse.  Most of these hazards can easily be avoided.  Having huge stockpiles of volatile, dangerous chemicals on site at production facilities is as obsolete as the adding machine.  While some American technology (thanks, Steve Jobs!) races ahead, system engineering at many manufacturing facilities are still controlled by the best minds of the 19th century.  Since the horrendous attacks a decade ago, a coalition of more than 100 environmental and labor groups has lobbied Congress and the Bush and Obama administrations to get these retrograde thinkers to join the present day, not only to protect lives (because we know captains of industry don’t give a crap about you or me) but at least to keep them competitive on a global basis.

As former Senator Jim Jeffords (I-VT) said, these factories are “pre-positioned weapons of mass destruction,” meaning that if someone sets off a little bomb next to one, the entire facility becomes one big bomb.

This week, not one, but two reports – by Greenpeace and the Center for Public Integrity – detail how Koch Industries has lobbied hard and donated lavishly to politicians to keep in place the antiquated rules that endanger the lives of millions of your fellow citizens (and, depending on where you live, your family).

All the key players blocking legislation to make these plants safer (Republicans and Democrats, but mostly Republicans) take campaign cash from the Kochs.  It’s among the clearest indications that the state of our union is now lower than it’s been since the same late 19th century when we first started collecting huge piles of chlorine, anhydrous ammonia and hydrogen fluoride at factories.  Why?  For money, that’s why.  Charles and David Koch care about two things – money and power in their control – and they don’t care who dies so they can have them.

The robber barons are back and they’ve got a gun to your kids’ heads.

© Mark Floegel, 2011

Global warming, overfishing, deforestation, uncontrolled release of genetically modified material, nuclear waste.

So cut it down, make it manageable. Choose a single issue – say the release of toxic chemicals into our air, soil, water and our bodies. Reduce it further; only look the effects on human health – in fact, just look at the effect on the health of children.

Even this, perhaps, is more than we can bear.

Poisoned for Profit by Philip and Alice Shabecoff (Chelsea Green, 2010) tours the landscape and history of post-war America’s poisoning of its population, particularly its children.

How can it be? How can a nation that has attained so much and claims such moral high ground in human rights and social values simultaneously pump out poisons that have sent American rates of birth defects, childhood cancer, asthma and diabetes on an ever-rising trajectory?

Laying out their case in the form of an indictment, the Shabecoffs present the evidence, naming names – at least some of them. General Electric, Monsanto, Dow, Dupont. Poisoned for Profit details the manufacturing processes of each of these companies create the poisons that now infest the nation’s human environment.

Detailed reporting reopens old wounds for anyone who has witnessed or been affected by modern toxification. How the industrial feedstock chemicals get into our air and water, invade our bodies, how the bodies of children are so much more susceptible than those of their parents.

The Shabecoffs show how, worse still, the corporations responsible for this pollution – the Dows and Monsantos – knew early on what the likely effects of their activities would be. How those same corporations act – singly and in industry-wide concert – to shift the blame for their poisons onto the victims themselves, to obfuscate issues, distort science and economics and use cohorts of attorneys and war chests of cash to pervert the justice system – all with the single goal of corporate profit. This is the sea that must be drunk dry, if we as a species are to thrive.

To the PR staff at General Electric or Dupont, childhood illnesses due to environmental poisons (not theirs, they’ll stress, maybe someone else’s), is an “unintended by-product” of this late industrial age. As social commentator Joan Dickenson pointed out, there are no “by-products.” There are only products. Whether the corporation intends them or not, cancers and birth defects are products of the corporation, just as much as Teflon or a quarterly dividend.

Poisoned for Profit shows how state and federal agencies tasked with protecting health and the environment are manacled by the same cohort of attorneys, plus lobbyists, plus trade associations. The politicians of the legislative and executive branches, who should intervene on behalf of citizens – children in this case – are trapped, perhaps too willingly, by the need for constant infusions of campaign cash, of a magnitude multinational chemical companies can afford but sick children cannot.

To hold this ocean – or even, say, the Gulf of Mexico – in one’s mouth seems impossible. Perhaps it is, but parents, their communities, dedicated environmentalists and journalists like Phil and Alice Shabecoff are draining this ocean every day.

The appendices to Poisoned for Profit provide helpful information for protecting yourself and your family, beginning from the moment you plan your family and working outward through your home diet and community. It’s difficult and painstaking and it shouldn’t fall to parents to go to such lengths to protect their children from corporations that would poison them, but it’s the only way to drink the ocean dry.

(c) Mark Floegel, 2010

The dispersant goes by the trade name “Corexit.” It’s supposed to be a pun on the words “corrects it.” Marine conservationist and oil spill expert Rick Steiner says “Corexit” is called “Hidez-It” by insiders because its purpose is not to correct but deceive.

Oil is toxic to marine life. Dispersant is toxic to marine life. Together, their toxicity exceeds the sum of their parts. The people running the spill response for BP are geologists, but what needs protection in the gulf is not geology, it’s biology.

One active ingredient in Corexit is 2-butoxyethanol, which in laboratory tests has been shown to reduce fertility, increase embryo deaths and increase birth defects in animals. Animals are the primary marine inhabitants of the Gulf of Mexico.

Another ingredient is propylene glycol, which you may know as anti-freeze or airplane de-icer. It has high biological oxygen demand, or BOD. This means that as it degrades in the water, it removes oxygen via biological processes. The more propylene glycol in the water, the less oxygen for plankton and fish.

In all, Corexit acts like a surfactant, the same thing that’s in your dish or laundry soap. The oil is more attracted to the surfactant that to the water it’s floating in. The oil forms globules and sinks to the bottom. This is a boon for BP, because it creates less of a photogenic oil slick on the surface of the gulf to be filmed by television news crews.

As we’ve seen in Prince William Sound in the two decades since the Exxon Valdez spill, oil that sinks to the bottom tends to be re-suspended in the water column by storms and with the frequency of hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico, we’ll see BP’s oil belched back up – with damage to the environment – for generations to come.

Why would anyone in their right mind pour chemicals that poison and suffocate fish into an oil spill that already threatens their lives? I think BP executives – in their long and sorry string of explosions, spills and mishaps – have demonstrated clearly that they are not in their right minds.

I’ll hazard a guess, though. The fewer dispersants you use, the more dead, oily birds and turtles you’ll have washing up on shore. The more dispersants you use, the more dead fish you’ll have – some of which will wash up on shore, many of which will sink to the bottom of the gulf and never be seen again. I imagine the PR department at BP prefers dead fish to dead birds and turtles.

If, when the lawsuits come, the plaintiff attorneys show up in court with plastic bags full of dead, oily sea birds, the jury is likely to award a bigger verdict than if the plaintiffs show up with plastic bags full of dead fish. Fish just aren’t as cute as birds. So I imagine the legal department at BP also prefers dead fish to dead birds.

Of course, what do shore birds eat? Fish and shrimp and other marine life and if one kills a good portion of the marine life it inevitably follows that the species that depend on that marine life for sustenance will also die. Just make sure they don’t get oily doing it.

Twenty-one years after Exxon’s huge spill, 20 of the 30 most affected wildlife species have not yet recovered.

People ask me: “Is BP doing enough?” My answer is that there is no “enough.” The tools we have to respond to oil spills are orders of magnitude too small to combat the damage they do. We can’t fix oil spills; we can only prevent them. And we can only prevent them by not drilling in the ocean.

© Mark Floegel. 2010

Meanwhile, here on the Earth’s crust, the Environmental Protection Agency – part of the same federal government as Aegis-class cruisers and Standard Missile 3 rockets, only not as glamorous – has a list of 100 industrial facilities that use chemicals hazardous to public health.

The satellite struck by the missile was called USA-193, also known as National Reconnaissance Office launch 21, also known as NROL-21, also known as L-21. It was a spy satellite. I suppose that accounts for all the aliases. It was launched on 14 December 2006 and the NRO won’t say exactly what L-21 was designed to do, but whatever it was, it didn’t do it. Ground control lost contact with L-21 hours after launch. Rumors that L-21 had gone over to the Russians are just that, rumors. (And John McCain’s dealings with that blonde lobbyist chick were strictly above-board.)

That list over at EPA, however, says if there was an accident or terrorist attack at any one of the 100 industrial facilities, the lives one million or more citizens – also known as taxpayers, also known as consumers, also known as the only people keeping our crappy economy afloat – would be in danger.

Satellite L-21 weighed 5,000 pounds, was the size of a bus and was traveling 17,000 miles an hour when it was struck by the Standard Missile 3 rocket. Of those 5,000 pounds, 1,000 were comprised of frozen hydrazine fuel. According to Marine Gen. James Cartwright, if L-21 had been allowed to enter Earth’s atmosphere and if its hydrazine fuel did not burn up on re-entry and if L-21 had landed in a populated area, then it’s possible the now-gaseous hydrazine could cover an area equal to two football fields. (The odds of this happening are several million to one.) If humans were exposed to the gaseous hydrazine for an extended period, Gen. Cartwright said, they might possibly experience some discomfort breathing.

If there was to be an accident or terrorist attack at an industrial facility using chlorine (many of the facilities on EPA’s list use chlorine), it’s estimated that an urban area of 14 square miles would be affected. The US Naval Research Laboratory estimates that if an accident or attack occurred to a 90-ton chlorine rail car in Washington, DC, (these rail cars pass within a few blocks of the Capitol every day) the death rate could be as high as 100 people per second for the first 30 minutes. An accident or attack at Kuehne Chemical Company in South Kearny, NJ endangers 12 million people in the Newark-New York City region.

The federal government spent $60 million to shoot down L-21 with a Standard Missile 3 rocket. The Navy responded quickly to the threat, before the satellite could fall from orbit. The US chemical industry has spent as much as $74 million lobbying Congress to prevent the drafting of legislation that would force industrial facilities to make their hazardous chemicals secure or convert manufacturing to less-hazardous chemicals. The federal government has reacted slowly. The Department of Homeland Security was founded on September 11, 2002 and has yet to take action to protect citizens from the threat posed by hazardous chemicals at industrial facilities. It has, however, blocked cities and states from taking action on their own to protect citizens.

Of the 17,000 objects we’ve launched into space, this is the first one we’ve shot down. Some say we did it because the Chinese shot down an old weather satellite in 2007 and the US didn’t want the Chinese to look uh…. Um…well, it gets a bit Freudian here. I think we all know what we’re talking about. Others say we shot L-21 down because we didn’t want our non-functioning spy equipment to fall into the hands of the Chinese or the Russians.

Of the 100 plants on the EPA’s list, none have yet had a catastrophic explosion, of the kind that hit the Texas refinery a few days ago, or the Georgia sugar plant a few weeks back. If it does happen and people die, I don’t know what the folks at the Department of Homeland Security will say. They can’t say they weren’t warned.

© Mark Floegel, 2008

This year, you might want to throw the kids in a plane and hustle on down to EPCOT
at Walt Disney World. (EPCOT, btw, stands for “Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow” – a rare “triple redundancy” and evidence of just how limited Disney’s “imagineers” are.)

Last week, Disney and Waste Management, Inc. announced a new “green” EPCOT attraction, in which tourists will be allowed to move trash around with forklifts and burn it in an incinerator. (It’s unclear whether this is real live smelly trash or prettied-up Disney trash.)

Disney and Waste Management call this “converting trash into energy” when it’s actually converting trash into dioxin and other carcinogens and depositing them in your kids’ lungs. If your family is rich and white, going to EPCOT may be your kids’ only opportunity to be crapped on by corporate America in just this way. The rest of the world doesn’t have to leave home for the experience, Waste Management brings it right to their doors.

In a year or so, perhaps Waste Management and Disney will add a exhibit on setting fire to your competitors’ garbage trucks and breaking the legs of people who won’t sign exclusive contracts with your company.

Put some ears on that.

The June in question was 2001, before specific calamities befell the nation and region, but the locus of this story was – and is – in the midst of a long-running calamity. It was New Sarpy, just upriver from New Orleans. The citizens of New Sarpy are low-income African Americans. Over the years their homes have been continuously encroached upon by several oil refineries.

On that June day, Greenpeace was conducting a tour of several communities that were struggling with health effects and pollution that result from the heavy industrialization of the area. One of my colleagues asked me to help with security.

“Security” seems odd and unneeded for a group of activists escorting politicians, celebrities and journalists on a tour of poor neighborhoods, but such tours are distinctly unwelcome in those parishes of Louisiana. All day, as members of the group descended from buses onto narrow streets, we’d had to contend with white men in large pickup trucks, often adorned with confederate flags and/or gun racks, revving their engines and driving perilously close to children. The same trucks seemed to follow us from town to town.

Distracted as I’d been and sandal-shod, I’d twice stepped on fire ant nests and my feet and ankles burned with a hundred bites. Our final stop was at a small evangelical church. By the time the crowd was ushered, the building overflowed. I was content to stay outside and catch my breath.

A low galvanized steel tank brimmed with water, the perfect respite for my ant bites. As my first foot was about to plunge into the pool, it occurred to me that this was probably where the church baptized the faithful and I probably ought not use it to soak my feet.

I withdrew, disappointed. The speeches inside ended soon after and as each person emerged from the sweltering sanctuary, she or he carried a box supper, provided by the congregation. They refused to let anyone come to their house and leave with an empty hand or stomach. A lady from the church who’d seen me outside came and pressed a meal into my hands and thanked me for visiting. (I hoped she hadn’t seen my visit to the baptismal pool.)

I thanked her, but what I really needed was to visit the men’s room. She directed me to the correct place inside and I visited an immaculate little room with a hooked rug on the floor and fresh flowers by the sink. The walls were lined with shelves and the shelves were lined with more toiletries than a chain drugstore. Soap, small bottles of shampoo and mouthwash, razors, deodorants, combs and brushes. It was as if someone with a cleanliness compulsion and wad of cash had gone a little over the edge.

Emerging, I found my new friend and asked what was up in the bathroom. She looked on me with eyes that were kind, but surprised someone could be so naïve.

“Some folks who worship with us don’t have much money, but they’re proud,” she said. “If we leave those things in there, they can slip them into their pockets where no one can see them. Deeds of mercy should be performed in secret.”

That was 2001. Those other calamities have since occurred and members of that congregation may have since been scattered far from home by hurricanes or war. I imagine they’ve taken the compassion of that community with them.

The snow in Vermont is deep and getting deeper by the hour. My back yard looks like a confection of spun sugar, but my thoughts are in that poor community in Louisiana, Bethlehem on the Mississippi.

If we are to survive the calamities that lie before us, the spirit that rekindles light in a time of darkness has to rely on more than a cloying clutch at our heart at the end of a television Christmas special. It’s less about elaborate buying and giving and more about sharing simple necessities. It can be found in every week of the year. It can overtake us in the strangest of places, even in the restroom.

© Mark Floegel 2007