Comments on: Sacrifices and Community http://readingcirclebooks.com/bookofnature/science-technology/sacrifices-and-community/ Read. Write. Learn together. Thu, 23 Feb 2012 10:59:54 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.4-beta4-20825 By: kriss http://readingcirclebooks.com/bookofnature/science-technology/sacrifices-and-community/#comment-39 kriss Sun, 24 Feb 2008 22:18:30 +0000 http://readingcirclebooks.com/archives/86#comment-39 Good to have you back, Nicole! And I love the snow on the website - very fun. I'm still loving it outside, too, though I confess I don't do the driveway ploughing here on the farm, my husband does. And he's sick to death of it. This chapter told a lot of stories familiar to mine: our four kids all had high lead levels as toddlers, having been born in Chicago and allowed to play in the dirt outside our wood-frame home. I mistakenly believed it healthy for children to crawl, play, dig and even lick up a bit of dirt now and then. Tonkas were some of the first toys we invested in as new parents. But then our pediatrician informed us of the results of the blood tests required for every Chicago child: our kids were all at 6 or more ppm. At 10 the state could take our home from us. So we hired a private consulting company to find out where the problems were, and they were everywhere. The dirt next to the house was the highest concentration, since the homes had once been wood-sided and repeatedly scraped and re-painted with lead. We stopped growing vegetables entirely and converted the gardens to perennials. The interior trim, all lead. The consultants' advice was to cover it all in packing tape until the kids were less vulnerable. We didn't take that tape off for over a decade - by then we were re-painting everything in preparation for selling the house, and the kids were all pre-teens. Still, we sold the house to a family with toddlers, and they were duly informed, but the situation had been the same in every house they'd looked at. Well, I'm determined that my grandchildren will enjoy playing with Tonkas here on this Wisconsin homestead, and much of our work here involves healing the land, though more from compaction and pesticides than lead. But it's sobering to read the high rates of cancer and other ills Steingraber reports in farming-country families. One our closest farmer neighbors here has lost two members to cancer in the past three years. All of the farms adjacent to ours use conventional methods: herbicides, pesticides, GMO varieties that cross-pollinate with our heirlooms. This is the air we breath now. There is no longer any possibility of escaping the effects of environmental toxins anywhere in the world. And that's a sobering thought, but perhaps a hopeful one. We have no choice, really, but to pull together, city and country, first world and third, to make a change. And how will we do it? Good to have you back, Nicole! And I love the snow on the website – very fun. I’m still loving it outside, too, though I confess I don’t do the driveway ploughing here on the farm, my husband does. And he’s sick to death of it.

This chapter told a lot of stories familiar to mine: our four kids all had high lead levels as toddlers, having been born in Chicago and allowed to play in the dirt outside our wood-frame home. I mistakenly believed it healthy for children to crawl, play, dig and even lick up a bit of dirt now and then. Tonkas were some of the first toys we invested in as new parents. But then our pediatrician informed us of the results of the blood tests required for every Chicago child: our kids were all at 6 or more ppm. At 10 the state could take our home from us. So we hired a private consulting company to find out where the problems were, and they were everywhere. The dirt next to the house was the highest concentration, since the homes had once been wood-sided and repeatedly scraped and re-painted with lead. We stopped growing vegetables entirely and converted the gardens to perennials. The interior trim, all lead. The consultants’ advice was to cover it all in packing tape until the kids were less vulnerable. We didn’t take that tape off for over a decade – by then we were re-painting everything in preparation for selling the house, and the kids were all pre-teens. Still, we sold the house to a family with toddlers, and they were duly informed, but the situation had been the same in every house they’d looked at.

Well, I’m determined that my grandchildren will enjoy playing with Tonkas here on this Wisconsin homestead, and much of our work here involves healing the land, though more from compaction and pesticides than lead. But it’s sobering to read the high rates of cancer and other ills Steingraber reports in farming-country families. One our closest farmer neighbors here has lost two members to cancer in the past three years. All of the farms adjacent to ours use conventional methods: herbicides, pesticides, GMO varieties that cross-pollinate with our heirlooms. This is the air we breath now.

There is no longer any possibility of escaping the effects of environmental toxins anywhere in the world. And that’s a sobering thought, but perhaps a hopeful one. We have no choice, really, but to pull together, city and country, first world and third, to make a change. And how will we do it?

]]>