Dear All,

Before I introduce the distressing article below, permit me to share with you some personal background on an issue which concerns me greatly.

After leaving university with a science degree I  taught chemistry at the High School level in the UK for 4 years, and then in 1966, I went to the US to start a PhD in biochemistry at Cornell University. but in 1967 I got involved in the Vietnam Peace movement, and soon dropped out of Cornell. And then Biafra, and  then Bangladesh. Eventually, in the 1970s I found myself back in London teaching a subject called “General Studies” at Paddington Technical College. There, I taught anything and almost everything except science! I never thought I would teach science again. Then, I read the book that changed my life: “The Limits of Growth” by Donella Meadows et al. (Club of Rome, 1972). Their logic (backed up by computer models) was at the same time both simple and shattering: “You can’t have infinite growth against finite resources!” That simple principle now propels my current interest in pursuing zero waste.

E.F. Schumacher when he was asked about the thesis outlined in “The Limits to Growth” said that he had worked it out on the back of an envelope! One of Schumacher’s most memorable quotes in his classic text “Small is Beautiful” was “If we manage to win the war against nature, we will find ourselves on the losing side.”

I was reminded of these two quotes, a few weeks ago in a talk on Global Warming, given by Ralph Torrie, at a recycling conference in Edmonton, Alberta. He said words to the effect that “We are so used to negotiating our way out of crises, that we forget that nature does not negotiate.”

Who would argue that you can have infinite growth against finite resources and yet, if you listen to our political leaders from the US to China, the solution to all our ills is grow, grow and grow. There are some clever people around who can argue sweetly that man is so inventive that we will find alternatives to everything that runs out. For these sweet talkers I have a very simple question: what is the alternative to fish? Plastic fish?

No situation more grimly illustrates the massive and thoughtless human attack on our planet than what we have done to fish - fish in our rivers, fish in the Great Lakes and fish in the mighty oceans. We have poisoned them (with mercury, PCBs, dioxin and pesticides); we have plundered many species to the point of extinction and still others are being choked and poisoned on plastics (see the story below from today’s San Francisco Chronicle). This hasn’t been deliberate, just mindless.

The overall message. The human species is incredibly clever. Our educational sytems continue to churn out brilliant engineers, scientists, economists and very clever people in so many disciplines, but how many wise thinkers are we producing? Who teaches wisdom? Who rewards wisdom?

For wisdom we have to go back - we have to examine - as David Susuki so brilliantly describes in his book “The Wisdom of our Elders” - the wisdom of indigenous peoples. As primitive as we may see them, they had one thing that we do not have and that is a sustainable lifestyle. Without being told by univeristy experts, they knew that they had to live within nature’s constraints.

Fortunately, more and more people are beginning  - a little late perhaps - to recognize that if you want to solve a tricky problem, first look to see how nature does it. If we did this, we would realize that despite all our modern cleverness we haven’t developed a power station as sophisticated, or as elegant, as a leaf.  Its a humbling experience to see how brilliant nature is. Take chemistry for example, nature would never have been so brilliantly stupid as to pour vast quantities of materials into the environment which couldn’t be be rapidly broken down. Nature doesn’t make permanent things. We try and it is coming back to haunt us (again, see the story below from today’s San Francisco Chronicle).

And in all this, as many of you probably expected, I wanted to come back to that one place that concerns us a great deal: fluoridation. What breathtaking arrogance is it that allows the public health community to place fluoride into the drinking water of millions of our citizens at 250 times the level that fluoride appears in mothers’ milk (0.004 ppm, NRC, 2006, Table 2-6, page 23)? Did nature screw up on what baby’s first meal should be? No. Did we screw up - yes! And we do it again and again and again and we will continue to do so until we wise up and learn to read nature’s messages.

Paul Connett

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Monday, November 6, 2006

Plastic trash caught up in a swirling vortex in the North Pacific Ocean between California and Hawaii is killing sea life, choking birds and fish and entangling seals and sea lions, a new Greenpeace report says.

Soda six-pack rings, plastic bags, condoms, beach toys and stray nets — much of it washed off U.S. shores and some tossed directly into the ocean — float in a mix of plastic pollution that injures hungry animals as big as whales and as small as zooplankton, according to a report by the international environmental group.

Scientists traveling aboard the Greenpeace vessel Esperanza said Sunday they now are gathering firsthand data on threats to the world’s oceans from pollution, overfishing and whaling. As part of that investigation, they released the report, a compilation of studies published since 1990 on plastics in the marine environment.

The current research examines plastic as it weathers into particles the size of sand grains, so small they become part of the tissue of ocean organisms.

“These small fragments of plastics may pose more of a threat to marine life because they resemble the prey of lots of organisms — everything from zooplankton to whales,'’ said Adam Walters, a chemist speaking by telephone aboard the vessel and an author of the report.

These bits can fill the stomachs of birds and other sea creatures that mistake them for food, causing malnutrition and eventually starvation. The researchers are measuring the distribution of the particles as they that float or fall to the ocean floor.

This latest report on plastic accumulating in the North Pacific comes just three days after a study in the journal Science concluded that, if trends continue, the world’s fish stocks are headed for severe depletion by 2050 as a result of global warming, fishing and pollution.

The Esperanza, headed for San Diego, is conducting research in a Texas-sized patch of ocean called the North Pacific Gyre near the northwestern Hawaiian Islands. As winds and currents circulate clockwise in the oceans, this area stays calm in the summer and becomes a collection basin for plastics and other litter.

Over the past three decades, marine biologists have found plastic bags blocking the digestive tracts of sea lions, discarded fishing line strangling sea turtles and nets cutting off the flippers of manatees.

The research on micro-particles is new.

Since last March, scientists on the Esperanza have sampled plastic particles in the Mediterranean, North Atlantic, Red Sea, Indian Ocean and near the Philippines. Next come the Sea of Cortez and the South Pacific.

Thilo Maack, a marine biologist with Greenpeace in Hamburg, Germany, also speaking from the ship, said he has been diving for samples.

“Between the plankton, you see the red, yellow and all colored plastics floating. We find the plastic in the tissues of animals. For us, this is a very worrying signal,'’ because it could be accumulating in the food web, Maack sad.

They often find “ghost nets,'’ abandoned floating nets filled with fish.

“The marine mammals try to feed on these fishes, and get entangled in ropes and loose net parts. Eventually they drown because they can’t get to the surface,'’ Maack said.

The report, which doesn’t contain the results of the research on micro-plastic, offers solutions.

Floating plastic debris can be cut worldwide by cleaning beaches, reducing garbage in storm drains, improving the handling and transport of raw pellet and other plastic materials, and adopting an international treaty prohibiting vessels from dumping trash at sea, according to the report.

The ultimate solution lies in policies that allow the use of plastics and synthetics only in cases where they are absolutely necessary, it said.

Other findings in the report compiled by Greenpeace are as follows:

– At least 267 different species, including 111 species of seabirds, are known to have suffered from entanglement or ingestion of plastic rubbish.

– Plastics consistently make up 60 to 80 percent of all marine debris. The seabed, particularly near coasts, is littered with plastic bags.

– About 80 percent of the plastic in the ocean washes in from rivers, storm drains, beaches, sewage treatment plants and other sources; about 20 percent gets dumped in the ocean from vessels and fishing boats.

– Much of the plastic litter in oceans comes from derelict fishing debris, since plastic and other synthetic materials have replaced natural fibers over the past 35 years.