The Brockovich Report

Life is all about cycles. Open up any student biology book and it will show you animal life cycles, cell cycles, water cycles, ecosystem cycles and the like. It is all a balance between producers and consumers, and how energy flows through an ecosystem.

If you look at the big picture of our ecosystem, plants get their energy from the sun; herbivores get their energy from plants; carnivores get their energy from herbivores; and omnivores get their energy from plants and herbivores. It's pretty efficient. Most energy is recycled within our ecosystem, but there is some loss, mostly heat or kinetic. This in spite of that law in physics. The "law of conservation of energy" that states that the quantity of energy in a system is constant.

It seems that our scientists should be able to use that law, somehow, to help us find energy sources as all of this energy is constantly transitioning form one form to another to another to another.

We just have to find that balance, you know the one implied in that Disney Lion King song--Circle of Life. Not that the Circle of Life song goes into physics; but it promises "we find our place/ On the path unwinding/ In the Circle/ The Circle of Life."

For us, nature is the ultimate environmental continuum in our circle of life, one that is not overly destructive--especially as we human beings are conscious of our participation in the dynamics of life-cycles.

We just have to find our place in it.

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I hate to say "I told you so." But it keeps happening.

Scientific Panel Says Erin Brockovich Was Right. "Sixteen years after activist Erin Brockovich first suggested that hexavalent chromium in drinking water might be a health hazard, a federal scientific panel has agreed with her. " That's a direct quote. And to be accurate, you have to add on a year or two more to get to the day I first started looking into and talking about the undocumented underestimated dangers of hexavalent chromium.

Now there's another batch of scientists who are verifying what I've been talking about. Again. There's an article titled AP Probe Finds Drugs in Drinking Water which says "A vast array of pharmaceuticals — including antibiotics, anti-convulsants, mood stabilizers and sex hormones — have been found in the drinking water supplies of at least 41 million Americans, an Associated Press investigation shows."

I won't say I told you so. It only means that it takes science a little while to catch up with what people observe. (Wait...haven't I been saying that too?)

I won't say I told you so. Though I have been talking about the importance of clean water all along. The importance of having clean water should be apparent to everyone who drinks water. (That includes all of us, right?) Where else do all the groundwater contamination lawsuits come from? There is contamination out there. Water contamination is more widespread than any of us would like to believe.

Other people are saying "I told you so" too. Even Environmental Sociologists like Michael R. Meuser, M.A. Take a look at this website that maps 179 groundwater contamination sites in Santa Clara County alone. 179 contaminated sites in a single county. Why isn't everyone up in arms over the contaminated state of our most essential resource?

But I shouldn't say "I told you so." It's not just industrial solvents, like trichloroethylene, or TCE, a potentially potent carcinogen typical of what industry allows to leach into the water table. This latest probe reveals unexpected findings like prescription drugs dissolved into our drinking water. After all, it makes sense. People take pills; pills dissolve and that water eventually re-enters the water system. The probe talks about pharmaceuticals like medications for pain, infection, high cholesterol, asthma, epilepsy, mental illness and heart problems, anti-epileptic and anti-anxiety medications, mood-stabilizers, even sex hormones. Adding chlorine, which kills biotic toxic agents, makes it worse. Reverse osmosis--a water purification method--does remove even pharmaceuticals that we don't test for but it is prohibitavely expensive, and it can't be done at every source of contamination, like leaky private septic tanks.

But I won't say "I told you so."

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In history, they always talk about the pendulum swinging. First we go one way, then we swing back the other. Right now, we're still on the upswing. For years--forever maybe except for a little rebellious blip during the sixties--we have been a consumer society. Way back when our agrarian culture moved from the farms and toward the cities, the substance and spirit of being "successful" transmogrified. Forget actualization. Making it isn't really about developing who we are as much as it is about improving and increasing what we have.

I grew up in a house where if something broke, my father fixed it or had it fixed. If the television quit, we fixed it or did without. We didn't toss it out and run to the store to get a new one. No one of that generation did. Because products weren't built with planned obsolescence. They didn't have unibody plastic insides that couldn't be serviced; they had replaceable parts. They were intended to be archival--built to last. Things have changed. In a way, we are at the mercy of progress. Simply because robotic factories build fast in enormous quantities instead of slowly by hand--making our entire marketplace possible; and because technology changes so fast that we must toss out old devices to access the current thing; but also because we can only buy stuff that we are sold. And we are sold stuff that is expected to be tossed instead of repaired. Simply, products are made to be cheaper to buy than to fix.

I mentioned the buzzword last week: consumerism. Conspicuous consumerism. You know, keeping up with the Joneses. One upsmanship. Having the biggest house, the fastest car on the block. Our whole Horatio Alger rags-to-riches philosophy of life just wouldn't have the same oomph if we didn't get to show off the riches a little bit when we get to be a have instead of a have-not. Make that show off the riches alot.

We are all about shopping. I know because that's what the television tells me. And magazines. And the media.

Last week I was talking about this same thing. Shopping green is a good start--but in a sense, is it not an oxymoron? Because being green is not so much buying new stuff that happens to be organic and recyclable. It isn't so much about being a consumer. It's about being a "conserver." Remember conservation? As in people who repair what they have instead of replace it. As in conservation of resources. Recall the conservation movement: to protect plants, animals and habitats. Energy conservation: reducing energy consumption, and finding renewable resources.

How does all of this shopping we do fit in with the holistic philosophy of reduced consumption and smaller footprints?

The idea of conservation flies in the face of the construct our entire society, which hinges on consumers using up stuff that industry has to make more of. I don't want to put the cogs and wheels out of business; maybe the marketplace will keep chugging along until it finds the happy medium where new unbiodegradable pseudo-disposable-plastic-styrofoam-wasteful junk merchandise is replaced by high quality product that is intended to last. And of course, if industry will clean up after itself, or better yet, devise ways not to be destructive, then that's even better.

But still--buying green is a start; it is certainly better than the alternative. And I wonder is buying green the new gateway drug that will take us one day to a more balanced society? Only the swinging pendulum knows for sure.

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Smell the freshly cut grass. It's the scent of green.

Hear each leaf whisper in the wind. It's the sound of green.

Feel the brush of the willow, the velvet of verdant moss under your bare feet. It's the touch of green.

I don't think it's an accident that green is the symbol and the name of the Green movement. It's the color signature of life. Instant recognition. The media person who coined the metaphor should have his name inscribed up there with the major media geniuses. What better to symbolize the environment and sustainability? And sustaining life--and a better quality of life--is what being green is all about.

The green movement is all about choice. Where we choose to live; how we choose to live. More importantly, it is a lifestyle philosophy. We Americans have that luxury that many other countries do not have: choice. After decades of conspicuous consumerism, how do we now choose to lessen our impact on the earth? The only way we can is to choose the "greener" options. And choose less. Waste less.

We can always choose to buy the item that is sustainable, like bamboo instead of Brazilian Rosewood, for example. Because bamboo grows fast and replaces itself, and Brazilian Rosewood is so rare they don't even import it any more. Or eating Wild Alaskan Salmon (who die when they spawn anyway) instead of slow growing Orange Roughy that can live to be 149 years old. Sometimes it is about buying less, or getting what is locally grown so it hasn't required significant transportation. But living green is not just about shopping.

It's about lifestyle choices--everything from riding public transportation to using organic produce to not using pesticides to creating a wildscape in your yard instead of a lawn to recycling instead of buying new. There's a deeper meaning beneath the action of choice. It is a philosophy of living life "naturally."

Instead of gossiping how some "green" movie star shows up in a gas guzzler, shouldn't we all be talking about groundwater contamination? Why aren't people pushing to get adequate funding for the EPA so that it isn't a failure? Where are the priorities? Without clean water there is no life. We can not live without it. It's time for all of us to make a lifestyle choice too: to write about something significant. Like clean water.

Being Green is not a trend. It's not a popular movement. It is an evolution. The philosophy not new. We've heard it at least three times. It's the philosophy of the Native Americans who lived lightly on the land. It's like the second coming of the hippies (or Sixties revenge if you prefer.) And now it's the science of "environmentalism." If it takes that triangulation to get the idea across that maybe we should waste not want not, then so be it. But whether it is couched in the terms of science, sixties or Native American mythology, the whole movement rises on a backbone of reverence for the earth, for the amazing biology that sustains us. It is amazing; and it is too frail for us to take for granted. We cannot afford for our children to drink water that gives them cancer. We cannot let the green movement fall to the wayside. We must choose Green while we have a choice.

Before it is too late.

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