Chemical Fantasies

“The US agriculture giant Monsanto and the German chemical giant BASF were aware for years that their plan to introduce a new agricultural seed and chemical system would probably lead to damage on many US farms.”

– Carey Gillam in The Guardian

I make it a point to avoid thinking about Monsanto and the thirty-plus years of my life ruined by glyphosate and GMO corn and soy, but the sheer lethality of cash-driven “wars” on food were not blithe idiocy; the people in charge simply spent the living future on “high” living, and the public blithely assumed that products for sale were safe. We have all impelled our world toward extinction: We are moderns who are not quick to get off the horror-house ride we’re on and join a parade that might take us toward life. Isn’t someone else in our highly differentiated and dangerous economy going to do this for us?

No. Monsanto’s behavior—enforced by laws that protect shareholders like pension plans—is ingrained in modern ways of living. When their Roundup system failed, they turned to dicamba, and farmers locked into the system followed along.

Our heartland is too naive and too corrupt to value a living future. It’s time to change.

It’s time for employee-doctors to step out and step up to protect patients by exposing what many patients—myself included—have learned without their help, or in spite of their spite. In our modern befuddlement, we treat products as innocent until proven guilty, and patients as guilty until proven innocent. And modern methods of epidemiology, methods for risk assessment, inadvertently ensure that that we cannot “prove” that ubiquitous poisons are affecting sapiens along with our habitats.

According to a study by Maggi et al., glyphosate persistence in the environment is not widespread, which means that we may still have time. But do we have sense not to kill our own descendants along with evolved life? That remains to be seen.