Earth Day + 4
--It's not nice to fool Mother Nature
In making war with nature, there was risk of loss in winning
Read more at: http://www.azquotes.com/author/9897-John_McPhee
Read more at: http://www.azquotes.com/author/9897-John_McPhee
In making war with nature, there was risk of loss in winning
Read more at: http://www.azquotes.com/author/9897-John_McPhee
Read more at: http://www.azquotes.com/author/9897-John_McPhee
In
making war with nature,
there was risk of loss in winning
---John McPhee
The warm, the richly coloured,
the infinitely friendly world of soma-holiday.
How kind, how good-looking,
how delightfully amusing every one was!
--Brave New World,
Aldous Huxley
It is a fiction that science can save us
--Ranger thought
_____________________
there was risk of loss in winning
---John McPhee
The warm, the richly coloured,
the infinitely friendly world of soma-holiday.
How kind, how good-looking,
how delightfully amusing every one was!
--Brave New World,
Aldous Huxley
It is a fiction that science can save us
--Ranger thought
_____________________
If you live in a lovely part of the world, mazel tov. However, if you are drinking water in Flint or Cleveland, not so much.
"Better living through science" was the mantra in the 1950's, and one cannot watch commercial television or read a magazine without exposure to copious advertisements of drugs which will cure what ails you (if it doesn't kill you, first). The scientists can offer fixes, but they are more reticent on the topic of what made you sick to begin with.
The despoiling of our water sources will probably be mankind's undoing. But the water still comes out of the faucet, so it mustn't be all that bad, right? Florida is experiencing the slow catastrophe that is the fouling of its aquifer, but Governor Scott has seen fit to remove most protections and solutions.
Lake Apopka in the center of the state, once a pristine bass fishing area, has been fouled by decades of fertilizer runoff from muck farming by the A. Duda company. (Agricultural interests get a pass in Florida.) Now, it is the home of hermaphroditic frogs, and it has rendered as dead zones the entire Chain of Lakes which emanate from it.
Lisa lives near a Superfund site which, after the top six feet of contaminated earth was scraped and sent up to Georgia, has been converted into "Cascades Park", a capital showpiece. Of course, when she moved into town she read about clusters of illness in the vicinity, but also that doctors were not required to report these observations to any clearinghouse as there was no clearinghouse.
The money today is on chronic illness and lifetime "maintenance drugs". As Ranger observes, there are "well baby" doctor visits, but no "well adult" visits. People are too busy to stop and smell the roses, so they take antidepressants at unheralded levels as a stop-gap measure to keep them working, and working too long without rest and good food, they break down,.
A kindly friend gave Lisa a bottle of COSTCO sublingual B-12 the other day, for nerve health and energy. The pill was unpalatably, sickeningly sweet, creating a radioactive red color in the saliva advertised as a "cherry" flavor. She then read the ingredient list: Sucralose -- a neurotoxin -- and Mannitol, even worse. There is a contradiction here between intent and execution.
The best medical innovations in the last century have probably been antibiotics and vaccinations, which eradicated scourges like polio (something which the privileged anti-vaxxers forget, and village people in Afghanistan and Pakistan never understood, anyway; just don't trust whitey . . . usually sound advice.) But besides those, how do we know that the things that afflict us are not caused by the things that we have created to "better" our lot? We foul and fix, like a dog chasing its tail.
It will be interesting to see the results of lives lived on smartphones, up until the wee hours updating and trolling Facebook and Instagram feeds. Surely Darwinism will remove many of the driving-texters from the gene pool.
We are already noticing young teens demonstrating nascent Dowager's humps as their faces tilt preturnaturally downward, and "Together Alone" is becoming the norm as all 'round the table get their fix on the smartphone.
Will we be able to stay ahead of the power curve resulting from the destruction which lies in our wake?
"Better living through science" was the mantra in the 1950's, and one cannot watch commercial television or read a magazine without exposure to copious advertisements of drugs which will cure what ails you (if it doesn't kill you, first). The scientists can offer fixes, but they are more reticent on the topic of what made you sick to begin with.
The despoiling of our water sources will probably be mankind's undoing. But the water still comes out of the faucet, so it mustn't be all that bad, right? Florida is experiencing the slow catastrophe that is the fouling of its aquifer, but Governor Scott has seen fit to remove most protections and solutions.
Lake Apopka in the center of the state, once a pristine bass fishing area, has been fouled by decades of fertilizer runoff from muck farming by the A. Duda company. (Agricultural interests get a pass in Florida.) Now, it is the home of hermaphroditic frogs, and it has rendered as dead zones the entire Chain of Lakes which emanate from it.
Lisa lives near a Superfund site which, after the top six feet of contaminated earth was scraped and sent up to Georgia, has been converted into "Cascades Park", a capital showpiece. Of course, when she moved into town she read about clusters of illness in the vicinity, but also that doctors were not required to report these observations to any clearinghouse as there was no clearinghouse.
The money today is on chronic illness and lifetime "maintenance drugs". As Ranger observes, there are "well baby" doctor visits, but no "well adult" visits. People are too busy to stop and smell the roses, so they take antidepressants at unheralded levels as a stop-gap measure to keep them working, and working too long without rest and good food, they break down,.
A kindly friend gave Lisa a bottle of COSTCO sublingual B-12 the other day, for nerve health and energy. The pill was unpalatably, sickeningly sweet, creating a radioactive red color in the saliva advertised as a "cherry" flavor. She then read the ingredient list: Sucralose -- a neurotoxin -- and Mannitol, even worse. There is a contradiction here between intent and execution.
The best medical innovations in the last century have probably been antibiotics and vaccinations, which eradicated scourges like polio (something which the privileged anti-vaxxers forget, and village people in Afghanistan and Pakistan never understood, anyway; just don't trust whitey . . . usually sound advice.) But besides those, how do we know that the things that afflict us are not caused by the things that we have created to "better" our lot? We foul and fix, like a dog chasing its tail.
It will be interesting to see the results of lives lived on smartphones, up until the wee hours updating and trolling Facebook and Instagram feeds. Surely Darwinism will remove many of the driving-texters from the gene pool.
We are already noticing young teens demonstrating nascent Dowager's humps as their faces tilt preturnaturally downward, and "Together Alone" is becoming the norm as all 'round the table get their fix on the smartphone.
Will we be able to stay ahead of the power curve resulting from the destruction which lies in our wake?
Labels: Earth Day 2016, maintenance drugs, medicine, water
posted by Lisa at 9:45 PM
1 Comments:
I heard an interesting stat the other day although I haven't fact checked. The US with 5% of the worlds population consumes 75% of the worlds pharmacuticals.
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