The West Virginia chemical spill brought to light the
failure of the government to assess either the dangers posed by industrial
chemicals or the factories that manufacture them.
“There’s a folksy
saying my grandma taught me: ‘If it smells like licorice and tastes like
licorice, it must be licorice.’ Now it has a corollary: ‘Or it could also be a
4-methylcyclohexane methanol spill into your water supply, so grab the children
and run for your lives.’ It’s not quite as folksy anymore.”
My friend Bill
Harnsberger was joking when he posted that on his Facebook page, but it hints
at a deeper truth. The world we live in isn’t as simple as the world of our
grandparents.
Back in Grandma’s day,
there were plenty of dangers around, but most of them were due to nature — or
your own stupidity. But now, a corporation you’ve never heard of can screw up
and contaminate the
water supply for 300,000 people in nine counties so badly that
they can’t use it for anything but flushing the toilet.
As for the big “clean
up” plan used in the disaster, it was simple: let the chemical dissipate. It’s
still out there — all of it — just really, really watered down. Hopefully so
much so that it won’t cause any health or environmental problems, but who
knows. Because as the The Washington
Post pointed out, the answer to many safety questions for the
licorice-scented substance is: “No data available.”
Yep, that’s right.
Does it cause cancer? “No data available.” Reproductive toxicity? “No data
available.” Thanks, environmental laws. Because, you know, the EPA is an
out-of-control government agency trying to kill business with over-regulation
by not even forcing
corporations to find out if the chemicals they create are toxic or not.
So the chemical will
just go down the river. And if you’re breathing a sigh of relief that you don’t
live near or drink from West Virginia’s Elk River, be warned that the water
where the spill occurs ultimately flows into the
much larger Ohio River. And that body of water flows into the
Mississippi.
This information turns
an attitude of “stinks to be you” into “no man is an island.”
Of course, the
chemical will be diluted to extremely small concentrations before it reaches
the Mississippi. And let’s hope the plants, fungi, and bacteria out in nature work
their magic to break it down, or at least immobilize the chemical.
But it reminds us why
we have laws to protect the environment. Really, they are laws to protect us.
Sometimes I wonder,
what’s more important, the economy or the American people? We talk about the
economy as this abstract entity that must be maintained above all else. Really,
it’s there to serve us.
Would it really kill
jobs if the plant that spilled the chemical was inspected more often? (It was last inspected
in 1991.) Or if the chemical manufacturer had to thoroughly test the
safety of its products? And even if it would, what’s more important — a few
people’s jobs, or the health and safety of the 300,000 people whose drinking
water was contaminated?
Besides, the chemical
spill was decidedly lousy for jobs. Freedom Industries is now bankrupt. Who
knows what will happen to its employees?
And how many
businesses had to close while they had no clean water? On the other hand,
requiring companies to test chemicals and inspecting them for safety would
create plenty of jobs.
A certain segment of
society loves to demonize environmental laws, but right now, the law has only
required safety testing
of about 200 chemicals out of 84,000 in use today. So how about
those other 83,800?
Let’s reform our toxic
chemical laws before the next spill happens.
OtherWords columnist
Jill Richardson is the author of Recipe
for America: Why Our Food System Is Broken and What We Can Do to Fix It.
OtherWords.org
