Are you healthy? How do you know?
In a few months, agriculture officials in California are planning to begin a series of regular pesticide spraying over various counties in the state, including San Francisco where I live. Their target: the light brown apple moth or LBAM. The whole article is in today's SF Chronicle.
Apparently, this charming little butterfly of the night is responsible for the destruction of millions of dollars of cash crops at various stages in its life cycle. It's a raider of the agribusiness coffers and therefore insecta non grata of the military-industrial complex. The USDA has handed over nearly 80 million to aid the war effort. And the chosen method of controlling the LBAM population is the use of a pheromone that will disorient the moths to prevent them from mating. A number of entomologists and ecologists have stated that there's no evidence this airborne biochemical cockblock will have any effect. At the same time, hundreds of people living in Santa Cruz, where the pheromone has already been deployed have filed health complaints citing headaches, muscle aches, coughing, and wheezing, among other symptoms. Thus, there seems to be at least some worry that the chemical intended to hurt only the moths might actually be only hurting humans.
To verify this, scientists are currently deliberating on six different research projects aimed at assessing the health impact to humans. To do this, they have chosen to monitor how the chemical affects animals. Let's check in: humans who have experienced this chemical say it hurts them. Their comments have been ignored. Instead, animal subjects are being overdosed with pesticide to see how much it will take to kill them, burn their eyes, skin, lungs, etc. This is the science you trust.
In addition, the spraying is meant to start before the tests are complete. That is to say, the question of whether or not the spraying is a safe idea is not going to be answered until months after it's already started. What does that say about the program? Does it even matter at that point how the rats fared? It gets more interesting.
All of the six tests focus on short-term toxicity. That is: are people going to die, start coughing up blood, or have skin lesions. Nobody is even asking whether we might start birthing children with flipper limbs, or trim 20 years off of our retirement years, or become peckish assholes with a sudden inexplicable interest in shuffleboard.
The questions of safety are endless. I'm most interested in this last one.
How could we use science to test the subtle effects of a substance on a person? That is to say, mood, personality, values. All of these are represented in our biology, and are therefore subject to chemical influence. But how could they be tested? The data is all based on subjective experience, something that is tough enough to characterize for oneself, let alone to explain to someone else, let alone to then quantify and tabulate.
The way that experience is represented is through activity, choices, interactions over time. People with alcoholics or other kinds of substance addicts in their circles have witnessed how a chemical can gradually change a person in a way that's hard to separate from the person themself. In these circumstances, our own basic chemical architecture starts to show through. We are a bag of metals and minerals and water, and when other metals and minerals flow through us, we are different, unavoidably and perhaps unwantedly.
You are what you eat. We get it. And what we've eaten/been exposed to has been there for a long time. This is an important point to consider when choosing to eat/be exposed to new things. The most important difference between artificial and natural is that nature is always the most senior chemical engineer. I defer to its seniority.
So back to my original questions: Are you healthy? How do you know?
If you have a cough, you know its a problem because it feels like a problem. Perhaps you were lucky enough to know what it felt like to breathe easy, and therefore you can see the deterioration by comparison. You had ease, and now you have pain. I'd call that one type of health loss.
What about vision loss. There's not necessarily physical pain. But there's a loss of a skill that was once useful to you. Maybe you can't read as well, or have trouble navigating in the dark. Medicine has approaches to assisting here. I'd call this another type of health loss.
But then there's that pesky other kind. The one that involves how we are, more subtley. I used to be a chill guy. Now I'm always grumpy. I take a pill, and I'm back to whistling while I knit. The process seems like one of restoration. I've decided being a certain way is better than another and therefore I associate health with the better one. The world of SSRIs, psychiatry, hypnosis, yoga, spirituality, religion, politics. They all live here. They are the tools of how we characterize our internal experiences and decide which ones are better, and how to have more of those and less of the others.
This is one place I see our current scientific approach lacking. The modern scientific tradition of peer-reviewed repeatedable double-blind controlled lab studies is heavily steeped in analysis and quantification. This makes sense for things that can be analyzed and quantified. But the health of people is not such a thing.
The health of people is what they say it is. Just as their lives are what they feel they are. All we have is our experience. And experience cannot be quantified.
So here I am in San Francisco, the most endearing place I've ever lived. A pinnacle of climate and community, and a haven for so many like myself that just couldn't be comfortable other places - or at least find it easier to be here. And we're about to be test subjects for chronic hormone exposure that may well change how we feel, and how we are. I hope sincerely that something makes this stop. Because I personally don't know what to do to make it so.
But at the very least, those who know me and others who live here, please take note. If we're different, if something changes, this might be the reason. And I might not realize. I'll be changed. Forced to incorporate substances into my body that weren't meant to be there, and that will muck up what was once working well. I might get sick in a way that nobody can measure - and thus nobody can prove. One of the purest truths I can think of about the value of quote-unquote natural living is the idea of time testing. Nature has evolved gradually over billions of years. It is by its nature - excuse the pun - a manifestation of how components of our reality can safely co-exist.
When new variables are introduced into systems whose equilibrium has been stabilizing for eons, then as LeChatelier would predict, a shift is inevitable. If the city were to burst into flames, people would surely notice. But alas, the destruction of the human experience is greatest health crime of our age, and yet because medicine has been taken out of the realm of experience, and into the world of business, symbols mean more than the things which they claim to represent.
I hope that we as people can take the time to devote more of our lives to considering our experience, realizing our shared needs, and appropriating our effort to secure the lot. I believe that love is what life feels like when its allowed to flow. Please join me in learning to love health as a top priority. There is no part of life that can produce more life than life itself.
