Subject: B.I.F.'s & haz waste
From: tony tweedale
Date: Sun, 12 Jan 1997 10:11:28 -0600
looks like the thread is dead (or in coma). i tried to post this in
response to a david gossman post a couple days ago, but couldn't.
David Gossman wrote:
>
> Dennis Nelson wrote:
> > My problem with cement kilns is that they receive special treatment under
> > the law because they are classified as recyclers because they use the
> > waste heat to produce cement. They therefor do not have the same requirements
> > for monitoring and minimizing releases as do hazardous waste incinerators,
> > even though they are burning the same things. Both facilities should have
> > the same requirements to meet in minimizing effluents.
>
> This is a myth fabricated by the incineration industry and some
> environmental groups. Check out the 195 pages of 40CFR part 266 vs 4
> pages of part 264 subpart O. Commercial incinerators don't even have
> metal limits in the current regulations. Nor are cement kilns
> classified as recyclers. They are BIFs. How do you require a cement
> kiln to minimize effluents like an incinerator? As has been said before
> they exist as a source wether or not they burn waste. All emissions
> from incinerators are from the waste combustion. If incinerators were
> required to have the net impact that a cement kiln does burning waste
> they would all be shut down.
disinformation and doubletalk, i'm afraid. if you are stupid enough to
try to burn heavy metals and halogens, then you need to be held to a
public health standard, aka subpart O or better. re: bif's vs. haz
waste [hw] incinerator rcra/c regulation: bif's need no cem's, no
automatic cutoff's linked to monitoring of upsets, no waste
characterization, no public input into permiting and no or weak trial
burns and no risk assesment, few limits on residue disposal, and less
stringent emission standards (e.g. the particulate standard, emissions
of which clearly *do* increase when burning haz waste in cement kilns
(ck)). hwi's need to do all these critical things.
bad enough. but what about the fundamental intelligence of burning hw
in cemment & aggregate kilns? (a lot of my argument from here on out
comes from edward kleppinger et al.'s '90 "cement kiln incineration of
haz. waste: a critique", ewk consultants, wash. dc). is the fundamental
design of a ck appropriate for haz waste? despite generally high temp &
residence time, turbulance and oxygen are generally deficient. O2 is
always scarce in the kiln. turbulance, given the large masses involved,
is problematic. these masses also lend to even more pyrolytic
conditions. many hw's are solids, bottoms, sediments & water
containing. in the length of a kiln, with or without hw, there are
large zones of lower temp and minimal turbulence. turbulence is in the
mass, not the flame. the flame in a ck tends to be lazy and is
actually extingushed from time to time. as for [residence] time,
kepplinger says less than 30% is spent @ > 2,000F--a few seconds at most
(and an epa report cited by him apparantly says gas residencce time in
high temp zone is much less), in only 30% of the length. further,
aren't liq.haz wastes injected to travel uphill? upsets *are*
controlable, just not as fast as in a hwi--but the industry fights auto
shut-off.
whereas; hwi's are designed from ground up for more efficient
destruction of hw, incl. afterburners (a near physical impossibility at
ck's, i understand). and ck high temp's are limited to the begining of
combustion only. clearly given a $100 million or more investment, a hwi
is going to try to stay within its permit!
what about management--hwi manager's live, breath & sleep thinking of
haz waste and how it burns; ck mangrs are thinking of producing portland
cement. "why stop the burn just because of an upset? it's not affecting
my portland cement--and screw the hw p.i.c.'s, metals & dioxins.". my
files are replete w/ horrible stories about how hw's are fed into some
ck's, how even the most rudimentary monitoring & alarms are turned off,
etc. etc.
co and hc's are high in non-hw ck's (kleppinger debunks the industry's
theory about co orginating from a hi temp equilibrium w/ co2, showing
that this source of co must drop way down below 2,000F. he summarizes a
controlled experim. data showing it originates from poor combustion).
clearly the ck industry had epa in its pockets. epa earlier was against
the idea. see epa's hugh kaufman's memo's to reilly & their attachments
documnting the industry's illegal (under admin. proceedure act, apa)
influence on the bif rcra/c rule; and its amazingly illegal modification
of the rule post-promulgation. epa also admitted on paper and in public
that the chief attraction of the rule was its lenient regs and money
saving features, not its public health benefits. kleppinger & others
have already refuted epa's assertion that ck's are a good design to burn
hw in.
finally, economics--the real reason for the rule and for this thread.
epa on the one hand says it's not hw (ie under sara '84 it's not
reported as hw generated, it's hw reduced if its sent to a bif (eg ck)
only), but on the other (also sara) requires sufficient national
capacity to handle hw's--thus the drive for ck & bif hw burning. since
cement materials are very cheap, the only motive to burn hw is profit.
the partial high temp of a ck is there to make cement--it isn't
designed, and doesn't work to detroy hw. despite the obviosness that we
can tremendously reduce haz waste generation, even w/ *existing* techn's
(eg u.s. ota '87, that we can do it now (50% reduction)).
tony tweedale
Subject: Humans as Cancer (part 1 of 2)
From: Andrew Nowicki
Date: Sun, 12 Jan 1997 14:11:22 -0600
Humans as Cancer (part 1 of 2)
by A. Kent MacDougall
When a spot on a person's skin changes color,
becomes tough or rough and elevated or ulcerated,
bleeds, scales, scabs over and fails to heal,
it's time to consult a doctor. For these are
early signs of skin cancer.
As seen by astronauts and photographed from space
by satellites, millions of manmade patterns on
the land surface of Earth resemble nothing so
much as the skin conditions of cancer patients.
The transformation of the natural contours of the
land into the geometric patterns of farm fields,
the straightening of meandering rivers into
canal-like channels, and the logging of forests
into checkerboard clearcuts all have their
counterparts in the loss of normal skin markings
in cancer victims. Green forests logged into
brown scrub and overgrazed grasslands bleached
into white wasteland are among the changes in
Earth's color. Highways, streets, parking lots
and other paved surfaces have toughened Earth's
surface, while cities have roughened it. Slag
heaps and garbage dumps can be compared to raised
skin lesions. Open-pit mines, quarries and bomb
craters, including the 30 million left by US
forces in Indochina, resemble skin ulcerations.
Saline seeps in inappropriately irrigated farm
fields look like scaly, festering sores. Signs of
bleeding include the discharge of human sewage,
factory effluents and acid mine drainage into
adjacent waterways, and the erosion of topsoil
from deforested hillsides to turn rivers, lakes
and coastal waters yellow, brown and red. The red
ring around much of Madagascar that is visible
from space strikes some observers as a symptom
that the island is bleeding to death.
If skin cancer were all that ailed Earth, the
planet's eventual recovery would be less in
doubt. For with the exception of malignant
melanoma, skin cancer is usually curable. But the
parallels between the way cancer progresses in
the human body and humans' progressively
malignant impact on Earth are more than
skin-deep. Consider:
Cancer cells proliferate rapidly and
uncontrollably in the body; humans continue to
proliferate rapidly and uncontrollably in the
world. Crowded cancer cells harden into tumors;
humans crowd into cities. Cancer cells infiltrate
and destroy adjacent normal tissues; urban sprawl
devours open land. Malignant tumors shed cells
that migrate to distant parts of the body and set
up secondary tumors; humans have colonized just
about every habitable part of the globe. Cancer
cells lose their natural appearance and
distinctive functions; humans homogenize diverse
natural ecosystems into artificial monocultures.
Malignant tumors excrete enzymes and other
chemicals that adversely affect remote parts of
the body; humans' motor vehicles, power plants,
factories and farms emit toxins that pollute
environments far from the point of origin.
A cancerous tumor continues to grow even as its
expropriation of nutrients and disruption of
vital functions cause its host to waste away.
Similarly, human societies undermine their own
long-term viability by depleting and fouling the
environment. With civilization as with cancer,
initial success begets self-defeating excess.
It's easy to dismiss the link between cancer the
disease in humans and humans as a disease on the
planet as both preposterous and repulsive--or as
a mere metaphor rather than the unifying
hypothesis its leading proponent claims for it.
Only a handful of limited-circulation
periodicals, including this one (see Forencich
1992/93), have granted the concept a respectful
hearing.
Accepting the humans-as-cancer concept comes
easier if one also accepts the Gaia hypothesis
that the planet functions as a single living
organism. To be sure, the Earth is mostly
inanimate. Its rocky, watery surface supports
only a relatively thin layer of plants, animals
and other living organisms. But so, too, is a
mature tree mostly dead wood and bark, with only
its thin cambium layer and its leaves, flowers
and seeds actually alive. Yet the tree is a
living organism. Earth behaves like a living
organism to the extent that the chemical
composition of its rocky crust, oceans and
atmosphere has both supported and been influenced
by the biological processes of living organisms
over several billion years. These
self-sustaining, self-regulating processes have
kept the Earth's surface temperature, its
concentrations of salt in the oceans and oxygen
in the atmosphere, and other conditions favorable
for life.
James Lovelock, who propounded the Gaia
hypothesis in 1979, initially rejected humans'
cancer-like impacts as a corollary, declaring
flatly: "People are not in any way like a tumor"
(Lovelock 1988, p. 177). But before long he
modified this view, observing: "Humans on the
Earth behave in some ways like a pathogenic
micro-organism, or like the cells of a tumor or
neoplasm" (Lovelock 1991,p. 153).
Others have stated the connection more strongly.
"If you picture Earth and its inhabitants as a
single self-sustaining organism, along the lines
of the popular Gaia concept, then we humans might
ourselves be seen as pathogenic," Jerold M.
Lowenstein, professor of medicine at the
University of California, San Francisco, has
written. "We are infecting the planet, growing
recklessly as cancer cells do, destroying Gaia's
other specialized cells (that is, extinguishing
other species), and poisoning our air
supply....From a Gaian perspective... the main
disease to be eliminated is us" (Lowenstein
1992).
Dr. Lowenstein isn't the first physician to
examine the planet as a patient and find it
afflicted with humanoid cancer. Alan Gregg
pioneered the diagnosis. As a long-time official
of the Rockefeller Foundation, responsible for
recommending financial grants to improve public
health and medical education, Dr. Gregg traveled
widely in the years following World War II and
observed the worldwide population boom. By 1954
he had seen enough. In a brief paper delivered at
a symposium and subsequently published in
Science, Gregg (1955) compared the world to a
living organism and the explosion in human
numbers to a proliferation of cancer cells. He
sketched other parallels between cancer in humans
and humans' cancer-like impact on the world. And
he expressed hope--unrealized to this day--that
"this somewhat bizarre comment on the population
problem may point to a new concept of human
self-restraint."
It has fallen to a physician who is also an
epidemiologist to flesh out and fill in Gregg's
sketchily drawn analysis. Warren M. Hern wrote
his Ph.D. dissertation on how the intrusion of
Western civilization has increased birth rates
among Peruvian Amazon Indians. He does his bit to
keep the US birth rate down by operating an
abortion clinic in Boulder, Colorado. Hern (1990)
published a major article that laid out in
detail, and buttressed with anthropological,
ecological and historical evidence, the ways in
which the human species constitutes a "malignant
eco-tumor." He proposed renaming us Homo
esophagus (for "the man who devours the
ecosystem"). Illustrations accompanying the
article included aerial photographs of US cities
juxtaposed with look-alike photos of brain and
lung tumors.
Dr. Hern has delivered papers on the hypothesis
at symposia organized by the Population
Association of America, the American Association
for the Advancement of Science, and the American
Public Health Association. Two papers have
subsequently been published (Hern 1993a, 1993b).
But in general the scientific community doesn't
take his hypothesis seriously, preferring to see
it as a mere metaphor or analogy. Indeed, it has
evoked hostility in some quarters. When Hern
presented the hypothesis at the International
Conference on Population and Development in Cairo
in 1994, listeners reacted angrily, with one
threatening, "Are you ready to die?" A Denver
radio talk show host called Dr. Hern an
"ecoquack" and a "fellow-in-good-standing of the
Sky-Is-Falling School."
Such disparagement can be seen as yet another
parallel between cancer the scourge in humans and
humans as a carcinogenic scourge on the world.
For just as Warren Hern encounters indifference,
denial and downright hostility to his views,
until recently American doctors routinely kept
their cancer patients in the dark about the
nature of their illness. The aim was to spare
patients the shock, fear, anger and depression
that the bad news commonly evokes. Families were
reluctant to admit that a relative had died of
cancer, and newspaper obituaries referred
euphemistically to the cause of a death from
cancer as "a long illness." In Japan, cancer
remains a taboo topic. Public opinion polls
indicate that people would rather not know if
they have cancer and doctors would rather not
tell them. When Emperor Hirohito was dying of
cancer of the duodenum, his doctors lied, telling
both him and the public that he had "chronic
pancreatitis" (Sanger 1989).
In the United States, even some environmentally
enlightened analysts remain in denial when it
comes to the humans-as-a-planetary-cancer
hypothesis. Christopher D. Stone, a law professor
at the University of Southern California and son
of the late leftist journalist I. F. Stone,
authored an influential essay on environmental
law, Should Trees Have Standing? Toward Legal
Rights for Natural Objects. But in his
latest book Stone (1993, p.4) casts doubt on the
proposition that "the earth has cancer, and the
cancer is man." "The interdependency of the
earth's parts does not amount to the
interdependency of organs within a true
organism," he notes. "The earth as a whole,
including its life web, is not as fragile...the
Gaian relationships are not so finely, so
precariously tuned." Even deep ecologists
acknowledge that Earth is qualitatively different
from a true organism, that its legitimate status
as a superecosystem falls short of qualifying it
as a superorganism. Frank Forencich, who argued
in "Homo Carcinomicus: A Look at Planetary
Oncology" (Forencich 1992/93) that "the parallels
between neoplastic growth and human population
are astonishing," concedes that even a nuclear
winter wouldn't completely destroy the living
biosphere, much less the inanimate lithosphere,
hydrosphere and atmosphere. "We can't kill the
host," he says. "Civilization will break up
before the biosphere goes" (Forencich 1993).
Still another objection is that any
generalization about cancer is suspect because
cancer is not a single disease, but rather a
group of more than 100 diseases that differ as to
cause and characteristics. Some cancers--breast
cancer, for instance--typically grow rapidly and
spread aggressively. Others, such as cancers of
the small intestine, usually grow slowly.
Prostate cancer often grows so slowly that it
causes no problem. "It's completely possible for
an organism to have cancer cells for its entire
lifetime and suffer no ill effects" (Garrett
1988, p.43).
The lack of a perfect correspondence between
cancer the disease in humans and humans'
cancer-like effects on the Earth invalidates the
humans-as-cancer concept for some observers. But
Warren Hern insists humans-as-cancer is a
hypothesis because it is subject to verification
or refutation and because it is useful as a basis
for further investigation. Frank Forencich, in
contrast, is content to consider the concept a
metaphor. "That humans are like cancer is
indisputable," he says. "But humans are not
cancer itself."
Whether as metaphor or hypothesis, the
proposition that humans have been acting like
malignant cancer cells deserves to be taken
seriously. The proposition offers a unifying
interpretation of such seemingly unconnected
phenomena as the destruction of ecosystems, the
decay of inner cities and the globalization of
Western commodity culture. It provides a valuable
macrocosmic perspective on human impacts, as well
as a revealing historic perspective in tracing
humans' carcinogenic propensities back to the
earliest times.
The progenitors of modern humans exhibited one of
cancer cells' most significant characteristics,
loss of adhesion, one to two million years ago.
Because cancer cells are attached more loosely to
one another than normal cells are, they separate
easily, move randomly and invade tissues beyond
those from which they were derived. Our direct
ancestors, Homo erectus, demonstrated
this trait in migrating out of Africa. Living in
small mobile groups, these
foragers/scavengers/hunters spread across Asia
and Europe. The next hominid species in the
evolutionary line, Homo sapiens,
extended the dispersal into previously
uninhabitable northern forests and tundra. Their
successors, anatomically modern Homo sapiens
sapiens, have spread to every continent and
major ice-free island. With the aid of clothing,
shelter, technology and imported supplies, they
now occupy forests, wetlands, deserts, tundra and
other areas formerly considered too wet, too dry,
too cold, or too remote for human habitation.
Humans now occupy, or have altered and exploited,
two-thirds to nine-tenths (estimates vary) of the
planet's land surface. It seems only a matter of
time before they take over all the remaining
"empty" spaces.
Humans' ongoing expropriation of the planet has
proceeded apace with the eruption of human
numbers; and the eruption of human numbers has
features in common with the proliferation of
cancer cells. In a healthy body, genetic controls
enable a large number of individual cells to live
together harmoniously as a single organism.
Genetic switches signal normal cells when it is
time to divide and multiply, and when it is time
to break apart and be absorbed by neighboring
cells. When the genetic switches are damaged, as
by chemicals, radiation, or viruses, they can get
locked in the "on" position. This turns normal
cells into malignant cells that divide and
multiply in disregard of the health of the entire
organism.
When humans lived in semi-nomadic bands in
harmony with an environment they did not
dominate, they limited their numbers so as not to
exceed the supply of food they could gather,
scavenge, and hunt. Nor did they produce more
young than they could carry between seasonal
camps. Their contraceptive measures included
coitus interruptus (withdrawal), pessaries, and
prolonged breastfeeding to depress the hormones
that trigger ovulation. When these methods
failed, they resorted to abortion and
infanticide. Like normal cells in a healthy body,
hunter-gatherers seemed to know when to stop
growing.
However, technological and cultural contaminants
upset this delicate natural balance, permitting
humans to multiply beyond numbers compatible with
the harmonious health of the global ecosystem.
The first and still the foremost contaminant was
fire. By 400,000 years ago--perhaps even
earlier--hunter-gatherers had learned to control
and use fire. Thus began the transformation of
humans from just another large mammal in
competition with other fierce predators into the
undisputed overlord of all species, plant and
animal. Addiction to combustion has defined human
existence ever since, and has escalated into the
current orgy of fossil-fuel burning with the
potential of overheating Gaia and jeopardizing
the existence of all her inhabitants.
Fire was generally benign when used by
hunter-gatherers to thin dense forests into more
open and park-like landscapes supporting more
game. But the increase in food supply that more
effective hunting and the cooking of tough meat
and fibrous vegetable matter made possible
swelled hunter-gatherer populations. As humans
proliferated and spread out, overhunted and
overgathered, large game and suitable wild foods
became less abundant. This made hunting and
gathering less efficient, leaving horticulture,
which previously hadn't been worth the extra
effort, as the only viable alternative.
Clearing forests to farm began some 10,000 years
ago in Asia Minor. About 2000 years later,
shifting horticulturists began slashing and
burning their way northwestward across Europe.
They overwhelmed and pushed aside less numerous
hunter-gatherers before giving way in turn to
agriculturalists whose plow cultivation of
permanent fields permitted more intensive food
production and denser populations.
Agriculture condemned peasants to a short, harsh
life of monotonous toil, an inadequate diet, the
constant threat of crop failure and starvation
and exposure to virulent contagious diseases. It
fostered social stratification and sexual
inequality, cruel treatment of animals, despotism
and warfare. And it encouraged further
cancer-like encroachment on wilderness to feed
increased populations and to replace fields and
pastures eroded and depleted of soil fertility by
overcropping and overgrazing. The elites that
came to dominate sedentary agrarian societies
caused still more woodland to be cleared and
marshland to be drained to maximize production
they could expropriate for their own use. This
economic surplus, in turn, helped support an
increasing concentration of people in river
valleys, along seacoasts, and in cities.
The massing of humans into cities is all too
similar to the way crowded cancer cells harden
into tumors. Whereas normal cells in a tissue
culture stop reproducing when they come in
contact with other cells, cancer cells continue
to divide and pile up on top of one another,
forming clumps. Normal cells display contact
inhibition, growing only to the limits of their
defined space and then stopping. Cancer cells
never know when to quit.
Likewise, human populations grow even under
extremely crowded conditions. The very essence
of civilization is the concentration of people in
cities. As scattered farming villages evolved
into towns, and some towns became trading,
manufacturing, ceremonial and administrative
centers, the city was born. Fed by grain grown
in the provinces and served by slaves seized
there, the administrative centers of empires grew
large; Rome may have reached one million people
at its height in 100 C.E. Yet not until
industrialization and the extensive exploitation
of distant resources after 1800 did cities really
begin getting out of hand, and in 1900, still
only one in ten people lived in cities. Half will
in 2000, with 20 metropolitan areas expected to
have 10 million or more people each.
The propensity of modern cities to spread out
over the countryside--absorbing villages,
destroying farm fields, filling in open land, and
creating vast new agglomerations--was noted early
in this century by the Scottish garden-city
planner Patrick Geddes. Geddes (1915) identified
half a dozen such "conurbations" in the making in
Britain, and he foresaw the approach of a
500-mile megalopolis along the northern Atlantic
seaboard in the United States. Geddes compared
urban sprawl to an amoeba, but it fell to his
American protege Lewis Mumford to liken
disorderly, shapeless, uncoordinated urban
expansion to a malignant tumor, observing that
"the city continues to grow inorganically, indeed
cancerously, by a continuous breaking down of old
tissues, and an overgrowth of formless new
tissue" (Mumford 1961, p. 543).
A malignant tumor develops its own blood vessels
as it grows. Similarly, cities vascularize with
aqueducts, electric power lines, highways,
railroads, canals and other conduits. A tumor
uses its circulation network to pirate nutrients
from the body. Similarly, cities parasitically
tap the countryside and beyond to bring in food,
fuel, water, and other supplies. However, just as
a tumor eventually outgrows its blood supply,
causing a part of it, often at the center, to
die, inner city neighborhoods and even older
suburbs often atrophy. Alan Gregg (1955) noted
this parallel 40 years ago, observing "how nearly
the slums of our great cities resemble the
necrosis of tumors."
Subject: Re: Humans as Cancer (part 2 of 2)
From: Andrew Nowicki
Date: Sun, 12 Jan 1997 14:14:22 -0600
Humans as Cancer (part 2 of 2)
by A. Kent MacDougall
Humans are increasingly concentrated along
seacoasts. Sixty percent of the world's people
now live within 100 kilometers of a seacoast. In
Australia, one of the world's most highly
urbanized nations, nine of every ten people live
along the coast. The boom in international trade,
from which coastal areas receive a
disproportionate share of the benefits, helps
explain the worldwide trend; but the pattern goes
back thousands of years and parallels yet another
carcinogenic process: metastasis.
In metastasis, a tumor sheds cancer cells that
then migrate to distant sites of the body and set
up secondary growths. The medium for the
migration of the cells is the blood and lymphatic
systems. In the ancient world of the
Mediterranean, another fluid--water--facilitated
the migration of people and goods. The
Phoenicians, Greeks, Carthagenians and Romans all
took advantage of the relative ease of travel and
transport by water to establish colonies all
around the Mediterranean. At the height of the
Roman Empire, no fewer than 500 settlements
flourished along the African coast from Morocco
to Egypt.
Just as secondary tumors in the human body
destroy the tissues and organs they invade,
colonizers of the ancient Mediterranean
devastated the fertile but fragile ecosystems of
the coastal regions they colonized. They logged
coastal forests for ship timbers and building
materials, to provide charcoal to fire bricks and
pottery and smelt mineral ores, and to create
farm fields and pastures. Overcropping, fires,
sheep and goats prevented regeneration. Intense
winter rains washed the thin, easily eroded soil
down hillsides into coastal plains to smother
farm fields, choke the mouths of rivers, create
malarial marshes, bury port cities and strand
many of them miles from the sea. The slopes, left
barren, have not recovered to this day.
The voraciousness of secondary tumors as they
invade and consume tissues and organs has its
counterpart in the orgies of destruction that
states and especially empires have engaged in for
5000 years. In many cases, the destruction has
exceeded what was in the destroyer's own
self-interest. Many invaders routinely
obliterated the cities they conquered, massacred
their inhabitants, and destroyed their fields and
flocks instead of just taking them over. Carpet
bombing of cities and the mass slaughter of their
civilian noncombatant populations during World
War II constitute the modern equivalent. Ancient
Romans ransacked their empire for bears, lions,
leopards, elephants, rhinos, hippos and other
live animals to be tormented and killed in public
arenas until there were no more to be found.
European invaders of North America and Siberia
did in the fur trade from which they so hugely
profited by the self-defeating overkill of
fur-bearing animals.
Human destruction of ecosystems has increased
relentlessly since industrialization. The
annihilation of 60 million bison on the North
American Great Plains was made possible by the
intrusion of railroads and the invention of the
repeating rifle. The reckless exploitation of
whales was speeded by the invention of the
explosive harpoon, cannon-winch and engine-driven
ship. Enormous nets towed by today's factory
trawlers permit oceans to be strip-mined for
fish--and any other creature unlucky enough to
become ensnared in these curtains of death.
Tractors and other modern farm machinery
alternately compact and pulverize topsoil,
increasing its vulnerability to erosive winds and
rains. Chain saws and bulldozers level forests
faster than axes and hand saws ever could.
Dynamite and drag line excavators permit strip
mining on a scale hitherto unimaginable,
decapitating mountains, turning landscapes into
moon craters, and rendering islands such as
phosphate-rich Nauru in the South Pacific all but
uninhabitable. Boring holes in the earth to get
at minerals, of course, resembles the way cancer
bores holes in muscle and bone. As Peter Russell
(1983, p.33) has observed, "Technological
civilization really does look like a rampant
malignant growth blindly devouring its own
ancestral host in a selfish act of consumption."
Just as a fast-growing tumor steals nutrients
from healthy parts of the body to meet its high
energy demands, industrial civilization usurps
the resources of healthy ecosystems that their
natural plant and animal inhabitants depend on
for survival. In 1850, humans and their livestock
accounted for 5 percent of the total weight of
all terrestrial animal life. Today, that portion
exceeds 20 percent, and by the year 2030 it could
reach 40 percent (Westing 1990, pp. 110-111).
"Never before in the history of the earth has a
single species been so widely distributed and
monopolized such a large fraction of the
energetic resources. An ever diminishing
remainder of these limited resources is now being
divided among millions of other species. The
consequences are predictable: contraction of
geographic ranges, reduction of population sizes,
and increased probability of extinction for most
wild species; expansion of ranges and increased
populations of the few species that benefit from
human activity; and loss of biological diversity
at all scales from local to global" (Brown and
Maurer 1989).
Decline in diversity is common to both cancer and
civilization. In both cases, heterogeneity gives
way to homogeneity, complexity to simplification.
Malignant cells fail to develop into specialized
cells of the tissues from which they derive.
Instead, "undifferentiated, highly malignant
cells tend to resemble one another and fetal
tissues more than their adult normal counterpart
cells" (Ruddon 1987, p.230).
De-differentiation in human societies is at least
as old as agriculture and animal husbandry.
Farmers have been replacing diverse species of
native plants with pure stands of domesticated
crops for thousands of years. Instead of the
thousands of kinds of plants that
pre-agricultural peoples gathered for food, just
seven staples--wheat, rice, maize, potatoes,
barley, sweet potato and cassava--now supply
three-quarters of the caloric content of all the
world's food crops. The world's astonishing
abundance and variety of wildlife is going fast,
with many species soon to be seen only in zoos
and game parks, their places taken by cattle,
sheep, goats, pigs and other domesticated
livestock.
Despite their value in providing wildlife
habitat, modulating flood waters and filtering
out pollutants, more than half of the world's
swamps, marshes, bogs, seasonal flood plains and
other wetlands have been drained, dredged, filled
in, built on or otherwise destroyed. Temperate
forests dominated by trees of many species and of
all ages are giving way to single species,
same-aged conifer plantations supporting far
fewer birds and other wildlife. And the tropical
forests that harbor more than half of all species
on Earth are being mowed down faster than their
bewildering biodiversity can be identified,
leading some experts to warn that we are causing
the greatest mass extinction since the
disappearance of the dinosaurs 65 million years
ago.
The tendency of civilizations to homogenize and
impoverish ecosystems is nowhere clearer than in
urban areas. Major cities are becoming
indistinguishable from one another in appearance
and undifferentiated in function. Central
business districts so resemble one another that
travelers can be forgiven for forgetting whether
they are in Boston, Brussels or Bombay. Shanty
cities in poor countries look alike, as do
suburbs in rich countries. As Lewis Mumford
pointed out more than 30 years ago, the
archetypal suburban refuge in the United States
consists of "a multitude of uniform,
unidentifiable houses, lined up inflexibly, at
uniform distances, on uniform roads, in a
treeless communal waste, inhabited by people of
the same class, the same income, the same age
group, witnessing the same television
performances, eating the same tasteless
pre-fabricated foods, from the same freezers,
conforming in every outward and inward respect to
a common mold, manufactured in the central
metropolis. Thus the ultimate effect of the
suburban escape in our time is, ironically, a
low-grade uniform environment from which escape
is impossible" (Mumford 1961, p.486).
Globalization of the economy is enclosing the
entire world in a single market for machine-made
goods that are increasingly standardized whatever
their country of origin. Western material values
and capitalist commodity culture, led by American
television, movies, music, street fashions and
fast food, are dominant internationally. Local
and regional individuality, along with indigenous
cultures, languages and world views, are fading
fast.
The decline of natural and cultural diversity is
as threatening to the planet as undifferentiated
cells are to the cancer patient. Whereas a
well-differentiated prostate cancer tends to grow
slowly, remain localized and cause no symptoms, a
poorly differentiated one often spreads
aggressively. Similarly, traditional farmers who
keep weeds, pests and plant diseases in check by
rotating crops, fertilizing naturally, and
maintaining the tilth of the soil don't threaten
Earth's health the way single-crop plantations
relying on pesticides, synthetic fertilizers and
heavy machinery do. Unfortunately, monocultural
agriculture is becoming the norm on every
continent.
Hemorrhaging is still another symptom of the
carcinogenic process. The first sign of cancer is
often spontaneous bleeding from a body orifice,
discharge from a nipple, or an oozing sore.
Vomiting can warn of a brain tumor or leukemia.
Signs that Earth, too, has cancer abound. Cities
vomit human sewage and industrial wastes into
adjacent waterways. Mines and slag heaps ooze
mercury, arsenic, cyanide and sulfuric acid.
Wells gush, pipelines leak and tankers spill oil.
Farm fields discharge topsoil, fertilizers,
pesticides and salts to silt up and poison rivers
and estuaries. Cattle feedlots add manure. Most
serious of all, deforested, eroded hillsides
hemorrhage floods of mud.
Fever is another symptom of cancer in both humans
and the planet. Cancer patients become fevered
because of increased susceptibility to infection
caused by a depressed immune system. Chemotherapy
and irradiation can also cause fever, as can
temperature-elevating substances released by a
malignant tumor. Global warming is the planetary
counterpart. Waste products released by industry
and motor vehicles, deforestation and other
feverish human activities pump inordinate
quantities of carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide,
methane, chlorofluorocarbons and other greenhouse
gases into the atmosphere where they trap heat
and raise temperatures.
Wasting, or cachexia, is still another sign of
advanced cancer. A cancer patient becomes
fatigued and weak, losing both appetite and
weight as the tumor releases toxic hormones and
makes metabolic demands on the body. "Many cancer
patients die not of cancer itself, but of
progressive malnutrition" (Rosenbaum 1988,
p.264). The planetary counterpart includes loss
of forests, fisheries, biodiversity, soil,
groundwater and biomass.
It's not in a tumor's self-interest to steal
nutrients to the point where the host starves to
death, for this kills the tumor as well. Yet
tumors commonly continue growing until the victim
wastes away. A malignant tumor usually goes
undetected until the number of cells in it has
doubled at least 30 times from a single cell. The
number of humans on Earth has already doubled 32
times, reaching that mark in 1978 when world
population passed 4.3 billion. Thirty-seven to
40 doublings, at which point a tumor weighs about
one kilogram, are usually fatal (Tannock 1992,
pp. 157, 175).
Like a smoker who exaggerates the pain of
withdrawal and persists because the carcinogenic
consequences of his bad habit don't show up for
20 or 30 years, governments generally avoid the
painful adjustments needed to prevent social,
economic and environmental disasters in the
making. "Governments with limited tenure, in the
developing as well as in the developed countries,
generally respond to immediate political
priorities; they tend to defer addressing the
longer term issues, preferring instead to provide
subsidies, initiate studies, or make piecemeal
modifications of policy" (Hillel 1991, p. 273).
So it usually takes a crisis, often a
catastrophe, before even the most commonsensical
action is taken--and then it is often too late to
avoid irreversible ecological damage.
Is the prognosis for the planet as grim as it is
for a patient with advanced cancer? Or will
infinitely clever but infrequently wise Homo
sapiens alter geocidal behaviors in time to
avoid global ruin? Even the most pessimistic
doomsayers concede that humans have the capacity
to arrest Gaia's deteriorating condition. Cancer
cells can't think, but humans can. Cancer cells
can't know the full extent of the harm they're
doing to the organism of which they are a part,
whereas humans have the capacity for planetary
awareness. Cancer cells can't consciously modify
their behavior to spare their host's life and
prolong their own, whereas humans can adjust,
adapt, innovate, pull back, change course.
Gaia's future, and humans' with it, depends on
their doing so.
REFERENCES
Brown, James H. and Brian A. Maurer 1989.
Macroecology: The Division of Food and Space
Among Species on Continents.Science
243:1145-1150.
Forencich, Frank. 1992/93. Homo Carcinomicus: A
Look at Planetary Oncology. Wild Earth 2(4):
72-74.
Forencich, Frank. 1993. Personal communication.
Garrett, Laurie. 1988. The Biology of Cancer. In
Mark Renneker, editor, Understanding Cancer,
third edition. Bull Publishing, Palo Alto, CA.
Geddes, Patrick 1915. Reprinted in 1968. Cities
in Evolution: An Introduction to the Town
Planning Movement and to the Study of Civics.
Ernest Benn, London.
Gregg, Alan. 1955. A Medical Aspect of the
Population Problem. Science 121(3,150):
681-682.
Hern, Warren M. 1990. Why Are There So Many of
Us? Description and Diagnosis of a Planetary
Ecopathological Process. Population and
Environment 12(1): 9-39.
Hern, Warren M. 1993a. Is Human Culture
Carcinogenic for Uncontrolled Population Growth
and Ecological Destruction? BioScience 43(11):
768-773.
Hern, Warren M. 1993b. Has the Human Species
Become a Cancer on the Planet? A Theoretical View
of Population Growth as a Sign of Pathology.
Current World Leaders 36(6): 1089-1124.
Hillel, Daniel J. 1991. Out of the Earth:
Civilization and the Life of the Soil. Free
Press, New York.
Lovelock, James. 1988. The Ages of Gaia: A
Biography of Our Living Earth. W. W. Norton, New
York.
Lovelock, James. 1991. Healing Gaia: Practical
Medicine for the Planet. Harmony Books, New York.
Lowenstein, Jerold M. 1992. Can We Wipe Out
Disease? Discover November 1992: 120-125.
Mumford, Lewis. 1961. The City in History: Its
Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects.
Harcourt, Brace & World, New York.
Rosenbaum, Ernest. 1988. In Mark Renneker, editor
Understanding Cancer, third edition. Bull
Publishing, Palo Alto, CA.
Ruddon, Raymond W. 1987. Cancer Biology second
edition. Oxford University Press, New York.
Russell, Peter 1983. The Global Brain J. P.
Tarcher, Los Angeles.
Sanger, David E. 1989. Tokyo Journal: A Fear of
Cancer Means No Telling. New York Times Jan. 20,
1989.
Stone, Christopher D. 1993. The Gnat Is Older
Than Man: Global Environment and Human Agenda.
Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J.
Tannock, Ian F. 1992. In Tannock and Richard P.
Hill, editors, The Basic Science of Oncology,
second edition. McGraw-Hill, New York.
Westing, Arthur H. 1990. In Nicholas Polunin and
John H. Burnett, editors, Maintenance of the
Biosphere: Proceedings of the Third International
Conference on Environmental Future. St.
Martin's, New York.
=================================================
A. Kent MacDougall (911 Oxford St., Berkeley CA
94707) is professor emeritus of journalism at the
University of California, Berkeley. He completed
his 25-year newspaper reporting career in 1987
with a 24,000-word series of articles for the Los
Angeles Times on deforestation around the world
and through the ages. The series won the Forest
History Society's John M. Collier Award for
Forest History Journalism.
Subject: Re: Chicken Little nature-haters: wrong again, -- ho hum....
From: gurugeorge@sugarland.idiscover.co.uk (Guru George)
Date: Sun, 12 Jan 1997 23:22:25 GMT
On Thu, 09 Jan 1997 22:13:58 -0700, Mark Friesel
wrote:
>Guru George wrote:
[snip]
>What kind of decision it is is a side issue. Anything can be labelled
>'slight reshuffling' if your prerequesite for it to be anything else is
>that it clear the debt.
Perhaps it's my fault in not making clear enough that I am not
defending Republican justifications for downsizing, but libertarian
ones. Clearing the debt is a tertiary (?) consideration to justice
and a sound economy, to me.
[snip]
>
>When you refer to 'the state' I assumed you meant the government - which
>is not the same as the general public.
I am speaking of the State as the suppposed tool of the general will,
when the rule of law is forgotten, and it is conceived that might
makes right, and the majority may decide what the law should be.
>
>You continue:
>...
>>
>> How can the present intstitutions carry out social functions? You
>> really seem to think that government action necessarily does more harm
>> than good, don't you?
>
>I reply:
>
>How? How do they carry out social functions? THey have a
>responsibility which they have periodically attempted to meet, to a
>greater or lesser degree. A lesser degree when the country has been
>hornswoggled like it is now. As to your assertion about what I think, I
>have never intended to say or imply what you assert. What have I
>written that indicates this?
>
Ooops! Sorry that was a mistype that passed the proofread: I meant of
course that you really seem to think that government action
necessarily does more good than harm, don't you? Evidently you do,
otherwise my question wouldn't have ruffled your feathers in quite the
way it did!
[snip]
>I tend to be an experimenter rather than a theorist. I do theory for
>fun, experiment to obtain information.
What you or I prefer isn't germane: I like potatoe you like po-tah-to.
The fact remains that any political notion that things could be other
than they are presupposes a theory about how things really are; that
theory can be criticised counterfactually. And this is an important
thing. So cries of "But that's just theory!" are dumb. It was just
theory (Austrian economic theory) that communism would result in
economic stagnation at a time when every Yahoo was plumping for
greater efficiency and productiveness from communism. It was still
just theory when everyone was so dumbfounded at the collapse of
communism. But then it became a theory that perhaps has some claim to
plausibility.
>
>You continue:
>
>> The trouble with Leftist
>> arguments is that they do not produce, and never have produced, good
>> results in counterfactual debate.
>
>I note:
>
>I haven't heard a leftist argument in almost twenty years - I'm assuming
>I'd recognize one but I can't be sure. Lot's of things people >say< are
>leftist...
Anything that proposes political control of the economy is towards the
Left hand side of the political spectrum, to a greater or lesser
degree, yes or no?
>
>You continue:
>
>> And Leftist policies have borne
>> this out whenever they have been enacted in the real world. This is
>> what you can't stand, isn't it, that the Left has been vastly wrong in
>> many important ways (not totally wrong about everything, of course).
>
>I reply:
>
>This is really wierd. I don't know how I suddenly became a leftist,
>whatever you mean by this. I know hot air when I hear it about 80% of
>the time.
I quote you at random: "I've never read Heinlein, but there is no
difference between a properly managed SS fund run by the government
and a private fund, except that if the government goes bankrupt the
whole nation is in trouble, while if the private firm goes bankrupt,
only those expecting to get their social security investment back
lose. I prefer the former."
Sounds like you're on that side of the political spectrum to me. You
think the economy needs political intervention to make it work
properly. You seem to take the view that it is possible for government
to find a correct solution. That is Leftist in my book: you are
intellectual heir to a long tradition of similar thinking, some more
extreme, some less, that claims that the economy cannot be left to
itself.
>
>You continue:
>
>> I say: admit that you were wrong about some stuff, then you may begin
>> to be able to understand what libertarians are saying.
>
>I note:
>
>Ok, let's try it. I was wrong to think you're going to make sense in
>this discussion....AHHHH! NOW I understand what libertarians are
>saying. What are you saying, by the way?
I was being perhaps too elliptical: I am saying that you share an
absolutely crucially definitive central idea with the Left: that the
economy requires political control. Your acceptance of this idea
makes you part of an intellectual tradition, whether you like it or
not.
I say that government is incapable of controlling the economy
politically, therefore it should get the fuck out of the economy.
Therefore it should withdraw its tentacles from every orifice of the
body economic, as fast as humanly and morally possible. That is to
say, it should 'downsize'. Withdrawing a tentacle here and slipping
it in deeper somewhere else is not downsizing. The debt is still
growing.
>
>You continue:
>
>>
>> Yes there is a large contingent that doesn't want to pay for
>> semisocialist experiments, sometimes their opposition is principled,
>> sometimes selfish. They are quite happy to pay for semifascist
>> experiments though, aren't they?
>
>I reply:
>
>When you through out semi-fascism and semi-socialism in this context you
>completely lose me. I have other fish to fry.
Semifascism = Republican policies. Semisocialism = Democratic
policies. I am presuming that you are a Democrat. I may have been
labouring under a delusion. If so, sorry for wasting your time.
>
>You continue:
>
>> Libertarianism says: neither
>> semisocialist nor semifascist social engineering ought to be allowed.
>>
>
>I reply:
>
>Well....tough luck.
Ah, so you don't mind s & s s eng., then? Or are you just saying
"cope!" like some fool with no mind of their own?
>
>You say
>
>> Capital can be generated? How? What are the way/s?
>>
>
>I reply:
>
>The mint.
If you aren't joking, then you are wrong. What comes out of the mint
is not capital, it's just paper and metal. Capital is: real objects
that satisfy real wants - intelligence, energy, skill, materials,
goods. If your paper and metal isn't satisfying real wants, then it
isn't capital. If you print more than people need to satisfy real
wants, a given portion of it satisfies fewer and fewer wants. That is
called inflation, and it is bad for grannies.
>
>You continue:
>
>....(re: right-wing propaganda)
>>
>> And of the Left since the 19th century.
>
>I note:
>
>I wasn't around then. I haven't heard as much as a whimper from any
>organization that I would classify as the left, much less any
>propaganda.
The Democratic party is on the Left of the political spectrum: true or
false?
>
>You continue:
>>
>> BTW, I think you must learn to distinguish libertarianism, which is
>> the continuation of pure classical liberalism, from Right
>> libertarianism, from the Right.
>
>I reply:
>
>I really couldn't care less about libertarianism, however you define it.
>I'm not in a position to use them as a political tool, I don't see that
>they have much political power, I haven't heard that their programs
>would benefit me in any tangible way, and I'm really to busy to go
>hunting down the scoop on every noisy political sect that thinks they
>have all the answers.
Sounds to me like you have no interest in politics at all. Nice of
you to admit you're only in it for what you can get out of it. You
also sound pompous and arrogant.
>
>You continue:
>
>....
>
>> Glad you admit that you don't get it! There's hope for you yet. :-)
>>
>
>I reply:
>
>I also don't get why downsizing has occurred but so many seem to want to
>deny it, why it has been detrimental and promises to be worse yet so
>many seem to support it, why the Republicans can rob the public blind
>yet so many of their victims want to excuse it. I haven't noticed >you<
>saying that you don't get it. Does this mean there's no hope for you?
>Too bad. 8^(
>
See my first comment above, if you can be bothered.
My final comment (for this is getting boring) is that you seem to me
to be far more interested in looking good, in saying something that
appears to be cool and fashionable, than you are in intellectual
debate. Fair enough. I'm not interested.
- Guru George
******************************************************************
"Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law." - ALi40
"So with thy all: thou hast no right but to do thy will." - ALi42
"Do that and no other shall say nay." - ALi43
******************************************************************
Subject: Re: Ozone hole=storm in a teacup
From: ianl@curie.dialix.com.au (Ian Lowery)
Date: Mon, 13 Jan 1997 01:24:44 GMT
bwynn wrote:
>The ozone depletion is causing increaed skin cancer - not global
>warming.
There is no evidence to support your first statement, and the second
is disputed. If you were to change the second statement to "not
significant global warming", then I would tend to agree with you.
You have to remember that the Earth is spherical, and so, all other
factors aside, the average UV intensity on the Earth's surface is
highest at the Equator, and lowest at the Poles.
This effect is evened out by the fact that most ozone generation takes
place in tropical latitudes in Summer. This leads to less UV reaching
the Earth's surface there. Balancing the equation a bit.
Further balancing occurs through ozone depletion which occurs at the
Poles. When this ozone depleted air moves from the poles, it dilutes
the ozone in the air at lower latitudes (ie., closer to the equator),
and this results in an increased amount of UV reaching the ground at
middle latitudes such as Tasmania and further north. Once again there
is a partial balancing out.
So, the curvature of the Earth means that there is a greater
concentration of UV hitting the equator than at the poles. At the same
time, ozone production in the tropics decreases the amount of UV
reaching the ground, and ozone depletion towards the poles increases
the amount of UV there, and so there is a partial balancing out.
The question is, how much of a balancing out is there.
The ozone `hole' over Antarctica starts to break up in Spring, and
drift north in a set of smaller `pieces'. In the 80s, part of the hole
moved over Buenos Aries. Despite the fact that the hole had almost no
ozone in it, the measured UV intensity at the ground, was less than
that of Rio de Janerio.
The bottom line of this is that if the incidence of skin cancer is
directly related to UV levels, then if you want to avoid skin cancer,
you are better off staying in Tasmania than in North Queensland, even
if an ozone depleted hole sat permanently over Tasmania.
There are two major problems with linking the incidence of skin cancer
to stratospheric ozone depletion, not the least of which is that we
don't actually know what causes skin cancer.
It is well known that excessive exposure to UV B causes sunburn, but
whether or not this causes skin cancer is another thing altogether.
One large problem is the fact that skin cancers generally take 20 or
30 years to develop. This makes it difficult to determine what
precisely has caused them.
A theory which seems to be gaining general acceptance, is the idea
that it is not the continual exposure to sunlight which causes skin
cancer, but it is the severe sunburn on a small number of occasions in
childhood, which seems to be the trigger. Later, excessive exposure
may increase the liklihood of skin cancers developing.
Furthermore, I don't think it is clear that UV B is actually the
culprit. From memory, there seems to be evidence that UV A has been
implicated as the causative factor for these skin cancers. UV A levels
are generally directly related to UV B levels, so that the more there
is of one, the more there is of the other.
This is not the case with ozone depletion, for ozone depletion simply
lets more UV B through the atmosphere, and (from memory) has very
little effect on UV A levels, for, if I remember correctly, ozone does
not block UV A.
So, if my memory serves me correctly, and UV A is the culprit, then
ozone depletion will not lead to an increase in the incidence of skin
cancer.
The situation is likely to be a bit more complex than that. The
problem is taht with the length of time it takes these cancers to
develop, and the fact that the hole was only discovered about 20 years
ago, we do not have enough data to be able to draw a definite
relationship between the incidence of skin cancer, and stratospheric
ozone levels.
In my opinion, an uninformed and sensationalist media has been
responsible for generating what I would almost describe as paranoia,
and an increase in the incidence of Doomsday prophets, with respect to
the ozone layer. Irresponsible scaremongering would be one way of
putting it.
This is not to say that there is not a problem, it is saying that the
problem is not nearly as great as many people seem to believe. Nor am
I in any way suggesting that people ignore the "Sun Smart" campaigns,
for they would be fools not to do so. Australia has the highest per
capita rate of skin cancer in the world.
While I do not believe that there is a real problem with ozone
depletion, I must also stress that I also believe that if we had not
acted quickly on the issue, then we would have a very big problem on
our hands.
So, the bottom line is that it is far too early to link skin cancer
incidence to stratospheric ozone levels, and I suspect that many other
factors may mask any such relationship, if it exists.
At the same time, we may be looking at the effects of ozone depletion
in terms of the global reduction in frog and related amphibia
populations. No satisfactory explanation has been given for this, it
is quite conceivable that increased UV levels place further stress on
species already stressed by other factors.
>The biggest environmental disaster in the world today is overpopulation.
I thought it was politicians, but I will give you the benefit of the
doubt. :-)
Ian
