Good farmers knows it’s bad business to “treat Earth like dirt.”
Once, we kids dropped our fruit-picking buckets and ran in terror from a crop-dusting plane overshooting its target. (Think Cary Grant in Hitchcock’s spy-thriller, “North by Northwest.”) In Vietnam, our brother relived the terror, but with airborne Agent Orange spray.
Bro wasn’t as lucky that second time. A lot of our brave soldiers weren’t. As Will Rogers saw it, “You can’t say civilization isn’t advancing. In every war, they kill you in a new way.”
One night, while President Nixon’s “secret plan” to end the Vietnam War was still top-secret, Dad was up late. He would give scientific testimony before Congress the next day, for the groundbreaking Clean Water Act.
On the first Earth Day, April 22, 1970, Dr. Margaret Mead, the pioneering scientist and future president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, had declared, “We have to use our scientific knowledge to correct the dangers that have come from science and technology.”
Conserving a healthy environment was such a life-and-death issue that it was also America’s high school debate topic that year. So, between a dad preparing congressional testimony and his kid writing speeches for the next debate tournament, it made for a mutually-enlightening late-night “bull session.”
Dad explained that any proposed environmental protection had to be “cost-effective.” So, he said tongue-in-cheek, the hearing would be like the old Groucho Marx Show: if a witness said the magic word “practicable,” Groucho’s stuffed duck would drop and dangle from the Capitol hearing room ceiling, with a $50 bill in its bill.
But unhealthy air and water are no joke. Before Congress passed the Clean Water Act over Nixon’s veto, rivers kept catching fire – like in today’s “viral” videos of Big Oil’s “fracking” tap water, recklessly napalm-bombing the neighbors’ kitchen sinks.
Playing outdoor sports in smoggy air still more than triples our kids’ risk of developing asthma. Farm-workers’ life expectancy is 49 years. Air pollution causes almost twice as many deaths as traffic accidents do.
This year, the Environmental Protection Agency confirmed that fracking’s injection of deadly chemicals into a drinking water “aquifer” poisoned the water. (Aquifers are watery rock, sand or gravel stretching deep underground. For Fort Ord’s “groundwater”, today’s official estimate is that cleanup “may take as long as 30 years.”)
The State of Ohio’s scientists found that fracking’s high-pressure rock-fracturing caused Ohio’s recent biblical plague of previously unheard-of earthquakes.
And this is California. Who needs more fracking earthquakes here?
American families need not just healthy air and water, but healthy food, too. President Obama’s Food and Drug Administration moved to end the feeding of unprescribed antibiotics – approaching 80 percent of U.S. antibiotics – to uninfected farm animals to fatten them. It leaves their wastewater and the meat we eat infested with antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
In just one year under George W. Bush, 18,650 once-healthy Americans died from infection with just one of the antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria – more than died from AIDS. Losing those productive citizens killed the geese that laid the golden eggs. The blizzard of medical bills helped snow the Bush economy under, too.
The needless killing of healthy Americans is “everybody’s business” – and it’s bad for everybody’s business. The European Union outlawed antibiotic-fattening in the 20th century. Meat-producers got the same results, using good “animal husbandry” practices.
Killer pollution isn’t just bad for business. It can be unpatriotic. For example, a no-nonsense Marine drill sergeant led the fight against a bureaucratic cover-up. They exposed dumping of deadly chemicals into their camp’s drinking water.
For decades, the dumping caused a surge of rare cancers in the Marines, their spouses and their kids, and rare birth defects and still-births. It took years of fighting to uncover similar toxic-dumping at other American military installations.
What’s more unpatriotic than poisoning, killing and deforming American soldiers’ families, and then lying about it? But some big-spending, American-flag-pins in-their-tailor-made-lapels congressmen – who are also anti-science “global warming/climate change-deniers” – sidetracked a bill that would have helped those Marines’ wounded families with their bankrupting medical expenses. Our own veteran-friendly, business-and-eco-friendly Congressman Sam Farr and Assemblyman Luis Alejo would no doubt agree with Mark Twain that “Actions speak louder than words – although not nearly as often.”
But “environmental patriotism” is a value we can all both preach and practice. With healthy personal habits, we can all help scientifically “husband” Mother Earth.
So, as Twain suggested, we’re taking action – first, to wish a Happy, Healthy Earth Day (this Sunday) to your family from ours. And to ask, “Why turn the clock back on conserving Americans’ healthy air and water – since conservation’s good for local business and America’s economy?”
Karen and Tom Lantz
Hollister
