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experiencelifemag.com
Print › | Back ›
Learning From Nature
Four concepts about which every health-invested, biosphere-dependant human
should know.
By Experience Life Staff |
April 2006 |
The Precautionary Principle
When young doctors recite the modern Hippocratic Oath — “I will prevent disease whenever I can, for prevention is preferable to cure” — they invoke the precautionary principle. The principle suggests that it is inherently better and more efficient to prevent harm from occurring than it is to attempt to remedy negative effects after the fact.
When applied to new-product testing, for example, the precautionary principle calls for a product to be proven beneficial and not harmful before it is released to the market — as opposed to taking a “wait and see” attitude about whom it might affect and attempting to correct these problems after the fact. The precautionary principle also applies to release and use of toxic substances, the exploitation of resources, and physical alterations to the environment — virtually anything that might have substantial unintended consequences affecting human and environmental health.
The precautionary principle tends to shift the burden of proof from the general public to the industry stakeholder that stands to most benefit economically from the proposed product or action. It would call for a manufacturer to prove a new chemical is safe before it is made available for use — as opposed to assuming it is safe, and then forcing those who claim to have been made sick by it to pay for research proving the chemical produced toxic residue in streams or breast milk, for example.
Finally, under the precautionary principle, creators of a new process or product must not only prove that it is safe, but must also show that they have examined a full range of proven alternatives in an effort to minimize potential damage and maximize effectiveness. The decision process must include all affected parties and it must be open, informed and democratic.
This sounds logical enough. But in the competitive worlds of industry and business, it all-too-rarely works this way. One challenge is that such extensive testing can be time consuming and expensive on the front end. The other problem is that because there are so many variables at play in our current environment and in our population, it’s virtually impossible to account for all the potential interactions — of drugs, chemical additives, environmental toxins and so forth — that might occur in all people. For these reasons, opponents of the principle (which has been rejected by the U.S. government but accepted by the European Union) object that it is impractical and a deterrent to progress and profit.
Supporters of the principle, meanwhile, assert that treating the human population — and the biosphere — as “lab rats” in order to speed new products to market is deeply dangerous and morally indefensible. For lack of a formal adoption of the precautionary principle, they note, many classes of known toxins (parabens, dioxins and phthalates, for example) are currently widely employed and released into the environment — despite the fact that they are known hazards to human health. Picking up the public health and environmental expenses of such experiments on the back end (think hazardous waste Superfund sites or global climate change) creates far more prohibitive risks and costs, they note. And the vast majority of these costs will ultimately be shouldered paid by taxpayers, not the industries who have already booked the profits.
In Europe, the precautionary principle has decadeslong history. The Germans developed the precautionary principle in the ’70s when acid rain was widely believed to be destroying its forests. While lacking absolute proof, the government cited the voluminous circumstantial evidence in its decision by restricting power-plant emissions to prevent further damage.
Other European nations followed Germany’s lead. The Swedish government banned DDT in 1975 and flame-retardants in 1998 because they were present in breast milk — without waiting for absolute proof that the chemicals caused harm. In November 2005, the European Union Parliament approved legislation that would force industries worldwide to test any chemicals produced in significant quantities for effects on human health and the environment. This new REACH (Registration, Evaluation and Authorization of Chemicals) legislation would set the world’s strictest standards, possibly leading to global bans.
Here in the United States, there’s evidence that the precautionary principle, while not yet widely embraced, is enjoying an increased measure of respect in both the public and private sectors. In 2002, the L.A. Unified School District adopted the Integrated Pesticide Management policy, based on the precautionary principle, to govern pesticide use in schools. In 2001, upon learning of potential cell phone danger to children, Verizon sent a brochure to parents suggesting that they adopt the principle and limit children’s calls.
Many corporations have adopted green-business, sustainability and other environmental-policy initiatives consistent with precautionary-principle logic — in part because it helps to minimize their legal exposure, and in part because they are beginning to realize that a reputation for responsible corporate citizenship is a worthwhile investment.
To find out more about the precautionary principle, visit www.sehn.org/precaution.html.
Biomimicry
One of the key lessons of the precautionary principle is that working against nature (trying to interrupt natural processes of decay with artificial preservatives or synthetic materials, for example) almost always results in unanticipated and undesirable consequences. Meanwhile, working with nature (say, using a balance of probiotic microorganisms or antioxidants to resist spoilage) generally works much better.
“What would nature do here?” is the guiding principle of biomimicry, which Janine M. Benyus, author of Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature (HarperCollins, 2002) calls the “conscious emulation of life’s genius.” The concept of biomimicry — seeking solutions and design inspiration from nature — is contributing to an astonishing array of industry advances and helping to create sustainable, efficient products and processes that contribute to our quality of life.
In Germany, Wilhelm Barthlott, PhD, professor at University of Bonn’s Nees-Institute, studied the lotus leaf, noting how its microscopic peaks and valleys helped raindrops remove dirt from the leaf’s surface. His research led Germany-based paint manufacturer Sto to create Lotusan, a unique building coating that cleans itself when it rains, eliminating the need for gallons of toxic chemicals.
William McDonough, sustainable development guru and cofounder of McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry in Charlottesville, Va., applies nature’s principles to create fabrics safe enough to eat and factories that discharge effluent safe enough to drink.
The goal of biomimicry, he explains, is not to retrofit existing processes so that they do less environmental damage, but to create better progress-promoting processes that sync up with nature’s own way of doing things, so that the net environmental effects of development and industry are negligible, even positive.
“If coal plants release mercury — and mercury is a neurotoxin that damages children’s brains — then reducing the amount of mercury in emissions doesn’t stop
that. . . . Being less bad is not being good. Our idea is to make production so clean, there’s nothing bad left to regulate,” he told Newsweek’s Anne Underwood (May 16, 2005).
Growth can be good, he notes, “if you use nature as a model and mentor, if you use modern designs and chemicals that are safe . . . I want to crank the wheel of industry in a different direction to produce a world of abundance and good design — a delightful, safe world that our children can play in.”
To find out more about biomimicry, visit www.biomimicry.net. Ecoliteracy
The stories of biomimicry and the precautionary principle are being told in a lot of educational programs these days, part of a new movement to get kids to connect with nature and learn how they fit in to the big global picture of natural processes. Some schools have adopted ecoliteracy, as the movement is called, as the foundation for their academic curriculum.
“Children have a natural inclination to love the world, to love life,” says Michael Stone, senior editor at the Center for Ecoliteracy, Berkeley, Calif., and coeditor with cofounder and executive director Zenobia Barlow of Ecological Literacy: Educating Our Children for a Sustainable World (Sierra Club Books, 2005). “Given the notion that people will only work to save what they love, we create settings in which that love can emerge. We’re trying to remove barriers to kids’ natural sense of connectedness with their environment. We’ve also discovered that what kids learn is very much a product of their experience — of how they learn and in what settings,” Stone adds.
It’s all too easy, he notes, to wind up teaching kids just the opposite of what we’ve intended. It doesn’t work, for example, to try and teach children about good nutrition and anti-diabetes strategies while the PTA sells junk food to support the school band, or to discuss the ethics, economics and environmental impacts of meat consumption when children have never seen a cow.
At Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School in Berkeley, famed chef Alice Water’s Chez Panisse Foundation has created the Edible Schoolyard, a 1-acre garden and kitchen classroom where children plant, grow and harvest food, then prepare and eat it. The lessons they learn are part of their core academic curriculum. Out of this project grew the Berkeley Unified School District’s School Lunch Initiative, which the Center for Ecoliteracy launched in 2004 in partnership with the Children’s Hospital Oakland Research Institute and the Chez Panisse Foundation.
Nature works by creating sustainable communities, Stone points out. The Center’s mission works the same way: Focusing on districts and principals as well as students and teachers. When fourth-grade classmates sought to protect endangered freshwater shrimp in Marin and Sonoma counties, they actually met and spoke with the ranchers whose up-stream cattle were damaging the shrimp habitats. “It was an important experience for both,” Stone says. “They found out they weren’t enemies.”
Ecoliteracy is just beginning to gain ground in many educational communities. There’s nothing new about thinking ecologically, he notes, “but there is something new about making it more explicit in education.”
To find out more about ecoliteracy, visit www.ecoliteracy.org. Ecological Medicine
In the summer of 1999, the West Nile virus hit New York City, killing seven people and leaving most of the 62 survivors with chronic disabilities. That summer the city had also been hit with a severe drought and record-high temperatures.
Paul R. Epstein, MD, associate director of Harvard Medical School’s Center for Health and the Global Environment, believes the spread of West Nile was due in part to favorable conditions caused by rising carbon-dioxide levels and fossil-fuel emissions, a phenomenon called the greenhouse effect that has been linked to global climate change. “Today, atmospheric concentrations of CO2 are 379 parts per million,” Epstein and co-author Christine Rogers wrote in “Inside the Greenhouse,” a 2004 report on the impacts of climate change in the inner city. “The earth has not experienced levels of CO2 above 280 ppm for at least 420,000 years.”
With the U.S. spending an estimated $3.2 billion a year to treat asthma in children under 18, it’s no wonder that unhealthy air alarms people like Epstein. Since 1996, his center has worked to “help people understand that our health, and that of our children, depends on the health of the environment, and that we must do everything we can to protect it.”
Part of Epstein’s mission is to get people to think beyond the limits of their own field and to acknowledge that curing one health problem shouldn’t create another. This is a foundational idea in the field of ecological medicine, one that asserts the pesticides we use to keep disease-carrying pests at bay should not poison the air and water on which both animal and human life depend. The medicines given to cure one person’s disease should not endanger countless others downstream. And the waste produced by our healthcare industry should not put all of human health at risk.
In 1994, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) identified medical waste incinerators as the single largest source of dioxin, a human carcinogen produced by PVC (vinyl) plastic used in medical devices. In 2001, the EPA estimated that “the risks for the general population based on dioxin exposure may exceed 1 in 1,000 increased chance of experiencing cancer.” Other high-risk toxins associated with medical devices include mercury, a potent neurotoxin, and phthalates, a suspected endocrine-disruptor that can cause birth defects.
But there’s encouraging news, too. For the past several years, California-based Kaiser Permanente, the nation’s largest nonprofit healthcare company, has been putting an increased emphasis on the links between human and environmental health, says Lynn Garske, environmental stewardship manager at Kaiser. Today it focuses on sustainable operations (conserving resources, minimizing waste), green buildings (eliminating hazardous materials) and ecosmart purchasing.
Kaiser’s size (30 hospitals, 400-plus physical facilities) gives the company considerable marketplace clout, Garske says. To meet Kaiser’s stringent requirements, carpet vendors created a vinyl-free, nonpolluting carpet backing made from polyvinyl butyral (PVB), a chlorine-free laminate inside safety glass that is recycled and recyclable. Electronics vendors must pledge that discarded equipment will not be sent to landfills. Kaiser is looking to buy healthier food from healthier sources, as well as medical supplies made from more earth-friendly materials.
The healthcare giant is also testing a voluntary self-certifying system called the Green Guide for Health Care, sponsored in part by Health Care Without Harm (HCWH). Since 1996 this international coalition of 443 organizations in 52 countries has worked to make the healthcare industry safe and ecologically sustainable.
To find out more about ecological medicine, visit www.sehn.org/ecomedicine.html.
Cathy Madison, freelance writer and former editor of Utne Reader, contributed to this article.
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Learning From Nature
Four concepts about which every health-invested, biosphere-dependant human
should know.
By Experience Life Staff | Web Extra
April 2006 |
The Precautionary Principle
When young doctors recite the modern Hippocratic Oath — “I will prevent disease whenever I can, for prevention is preferable to cure” — they invoke the precautionary principle. The principle suggests that it is inherently better and more efficient to prevent harm from occurring than it is to attempt to remedy negative effects after the fact.
When applied to new-product testing, for example, the precautionary principle calls for a product to be proven beneficial and not harmful before it is released to the market — as opposed to taking a “wait and see” attitude about whom it might affect and attempting to correct these problems after the fact. The precautionary principle also applies to release and use of toxic substances, the exploitation of resources, and physical alterations to the environment — virtually anything that might have substantial unintended consequences affecting human and environmental health.
The precautionary principle tends to shift the burden of proof from the general public to the industry stakeholder that stands to most benefit economically from the proposed product or action. It would call for a manufacturer to prove a new chemical is safe before it is made available for use — as opposed to assuming it is safe, and then forcing those who claim to have been made sick by it to pay for research proving the chemical produced toxic residue in streams or breast milk, for example.
Finally, under the precautionary principle, creators of a new process or product must not only prove that it is safe, but must also show that they have examined a full range of proven alternatives in an effort to minimize potential damage and maximize effectiveness. The decision process must include all affected parties and it must be open, informed and democratic.
This sounds logical enough. But in the competitive worlds of industry and business, it all-too-rarely works this way. One challenge is that such extensive testing can be time consuming and expensive on the front end. The other problem is that because there are so many variables at play in our current environment and in our population, it’s virtually impossible to account for all the potential interactions — of drugs, chemical additives, environmental toxins and so forth — that might occur in all people. For these reasons, opponents of the principle (which has been rejected by the U.S. government but accepted by the European Union) object that it is impractical and a deterrent to progress and profit.
Supporters of the principle, meanwhile, assert that treating the human population — and the biosphere — as “lab rats” in order to speed new products to market is deeply dangerous and morally indefensible. For lack of a formal adoption of the precautionary principle, they note, many classes of known toxins (parabens, dioxins and phthalates, for example) are currently widely employed and released into the environment — despite the fact that they are known hazards to human health. Picking up the public health and environmental expenses of such experiments on the back end (think hazardous waste Superfund sites or global climate change) creates far more prohibitive risks and costs, they note. And the vast majority of these costs will ultimately be shouldered paid by taxpayers, not the industries who have already booked the profits.
In Europe, the precautionary principle has decadeslong history. The Germans developed the precautionary principle in the ’70s when acid rain was widely believed to be destroying its forests. While lacking absolute proof, the government cited the voluminous circumstantial evidence in its decision by restricting power-plant emissions to prevent further damage.
Other European nations followed Germany’s lead. The Swedish government banned DDT in 1975 and flame-retardants in 1998 because they were present in breast milk — without waiting for absolute proof that the chemicals caused harm. In November 2005, the European Union Parliament approved legislation that would force industries worldwide to test any chemicals produced in significant quantities for effects on human health and the environment. This new REACH (Registration, Evaluation and Authorization of Chemicals) legislation would set the world’s strictest standards, possibly leading to global bans.
Here in the United States, there’s evidence that the precautionary principle, while not yet widely embraced, is enjoying an increased measure of respect in both the public and private sectors. In 2002, the L.A. Unified School District adopted the Integrated Pesticide Management policy, based on the precautionary principle, to govern pesticide use in schools. In 2001, upon learning of potential cell phone danger to children, Verizon sent a brochure to parents suggesting that they adopt the principle and limit children’s calls.
Many corporations have adopted green-business, sustainability and other environmental-policy initiatives consistent with precautionary-principle logic — in part because it helps to minimize their legal exposure, and in part because they are beginning to realize that a reputation for responsible corporate citizenship is a worthwhile investment.
To find out more about the precautionary principle, visit www.sehn.org/precaution.html.
Biomimicry
One of the key lessons of the precautionary principle is that working against nature (trying to interrupt natural processes of decay with artificial preservatives or synthetic materials, for example) almost always results in unanticipated and undesirable consequences. Meanwhile, working with nature (say, using a balance of probiotic microorganisms or antioxidants to resist spoilage) generally works much better.
“What would nature do here?” is the guiding principle of biomimicry, which Janine M. Benyus, author of Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature (HarperCollins, 2002) calls the “conscious emulation of life’s genius.” The concept of biomimicry — seeking solutions and design inspiration from nature — is contributing to an astonishing array of industry advances and helping to create sustainable, efficient products and processes that contribute to our quality of life.
In Germany, Wilhelm Barthlott, PhD, professor at University of Bonn’s Nees-Institute, studied the lotus leaf, noting how its microscopic peaks and valleys helped raindrops remove dirt from the leaf’s surface. His research led Germany-based paint manufacturer Sto to create Lotusan, a unique building coating that cleans itself when it rains, eliminating the need for gallons of toxic chemicals.
William McDonough, sustainable development guru and cofounder of McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry in Charlottesville, Va., applies nature’s principles to create fabrics safe enough to eat and factories that discharge effluent safe enough to drink.
The goal of biomimicry, he explains, is not to retrofit existing processes so that they do less environmental damage, but to create better progress-promoting processes that sync up with nature’s own way of doing things, so that the net environmental effects of development and industry are negligible, even positive.
“If coal plants release mercury — and mercury is a neurotoxin that damages children’s brains — then reducing the amount of mercury in emissions doesn’t stop
that. . . . Being less bad is not being good. Our idea is to make production so clean, there’s nothing bad left to regulate,” he told Newsweek’s Anne Underwood (May 16, 2005).
Growth can be good, he notes, “if you use nature as a model and mentor, if you use modern designs and chemicals that are safe . . . I want to crank the wheel of industry in a different direction to produce a world of abundance and good design — a delightful, safe world that our children can play in.”
To find out more about biomimicry, visit www.biomimicry.net. Ecoliteracy
The stories of biomimicry and the precautionary principle are being told in a lot of educational programs these days, part of a new movement to get kids to connect with nature and learn how they fit in to the big global picture of natural processes. Some schools have adopted ecoliteracy, as the movement is called, as the foundation for their academic curriculum.
“Children have a natural inclination to love the world, to love life,” says Michael Stone, senior editor at the Center for Ecoliteracy, Berkeley, Calif., and coeditor with cofounder and executive director Zenobia Barlow of Ecological Literacy: Educating Our Children for a Sustainable World (Sierra Club Books, 2005). “Given the notion that people will only work to save what they love, we create settings in which that love can emerge. We’re trying to remove barriers to kids’ natural sense of connectedness with their environment. We’ve also discovered that what kids learn is very much a product of their experience — of how they learn and in what settings,” Stone adds.
It’s all too easy, he notes, to wind up teaching kids just the opposite of what we’ve intended. It doesn’t work, for example, to try and teach children about good nutrition and anti-diabetes strategies while the PTA sells junk food to support the school band, or to discuss the ethics, economics and environmental impacts of meat consumption when children have never seen a cow.
At Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School in Berkeley, famed chef Alice Water’s Chez Panisse Foundation has created the Edible Schoolyard, a 1-acre garden and kitchen classroom where children plant, grow and harvest food, then prepare and eat it. The lessons they learn are part of their core academic curriculum. Out of this project grew the Berkeley Unified School District’s School Lunch Initiative, which the Center for Ecoliteracy launched in 2004 in partnership with the Children’s Hospital Oakland Research Institute and the Chez Panisse Foundation.
Nature works by creating sustainable communities, Stone points out. The Center’s mission works the same way: Focusing on districts and principals as well as students and teachers. When fourth-grade classmates sought to protect endangered freshwater shrimp in Marin and Sonoma counties, they actually met and spoke with the ranchers whose up-stream cattle were damaging the shrimp habitats. “It was an important experience for both,” Stone says. “They found out they weren’t enemies.”
Ecoliteracy is just beginning to gain ground in many educational communities. There’s nothing new about thinking ecologically, he notes, “but there is something new about making it more explicit in education.”
To find out more about ecoliteracy, visit www.ecoliteracy.org. Ecological Medicine
In the summer of 1999, the West Nile virus hit New York City, killing seven people and leaving most of the 62 survivors with chronic disabilities. That summer the city had also been hit with a severe drought and record-high temperatures.
Paul R. Epstein, MD, associate director of Harvard Medical School’s Center for Health and the Global Environment, believes the spread of West Nile was due in part to favorable conditions caused by rising carbon-dioxide levels and fossil-fuel emissions, a phenomenon called the greenhouse effect that has been linked to global climate change. “Today, atmospheric concentrations of CO2 are 379 parts per million,” Epstein and co-author Christine Rogers wrote in “Inside the Greenhouse,” a 2004 report on the impacts of climate change in the inner city. “The earth has not experienced levels of CO2 above 280 ppm for at least 420,000 years.”
With the U.S. spending an estimated $3.2 billion a year to treat asthma in children under 18, it’s no wonder that unhealthy air alarms people like Epstein. Since 1996, his center has worked to “help people understand that our health, and that of our children, depends on the health of the environment, and that we must do everything we can to protect it.”
Part of Epstein’s mission is to get people to think beyond the limits of their own field and to acknowledge that curing one health problem shouldn’t create another. This is a foundational idea in the field of ecological medicine, one that asserts the pesticides we use to keep disease-carrying pests at bay should not poison the air and water on which both animal and human life depend. The medicines given to cure one person’s disease should not endanger countless others downstream. And the waste produced by our healthcare industry should not put all of human health at risk.
In 1994, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) identified medical waste incinerators as the single largest source of dioxin, a human carcinogen produced by PVC (vinyl) plastic used in medical devices. In 2001, the EPA estimated that “the risks for the general population based on dioxin exposure may exceed 1 in 1,000 increased chance of experiencing cancer.” Other high-risk toxins associated with medical devices include mercury, a potent neurotoxin, and phthalates, a suspected endocrine-disruptor that can cause birth defects.
But there’s encouraging news, too. For the past several years, California-based Kaiser Permanente, the nation’s largest nonprofit healthcare company, has been putting an increased emphasis on the links between human and environmental health, says Lynn Garske, environmental stewardship manager at Kaiser. Today it focuses on sustainable operations (conserving resources, minimizing waste), green buildings (eliminating hazardous materials) and ecosmart purchasing.
Kaiser’s size (30 hospitals, 400-plus physical facilities) gives the company considerable marketplace clout, Garske says. To meet Kaiser’s stringent requirements, carpet vendors created a vinyl-free, nonpolluting carpet backing made from polyvinyl butyral (PVB), a chlorine-free laminate inside safety glass that is recycled and recyclable. Electronics vendors must pledge that discarded equipment will not be sent to landfills. Kaiser is looking to buy healthier food from healthier sources, as well as medical supplies made from more earth-friendly materials.
The healthcare giant is also testing a voluntary self-certifying system called the Green Guide for Health Care, sponsored in part by Health Care Without Harm (HCWH). Since 1996 this international coalition of 443 organizations in 52 countries has worked to make the healthcare industry safe and ecologically sustainable.
To find out more about ecological medicine, visit www.sehn.org/ecomedicine.html.
Cathy Madison, freelance writer and former editor of Utne Reader, contributed to this article.
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