THE GREAT LAKES
Like so many of our natural resources that we take for granted, The Great Lakes have always seemed too big to be damaged by anything mankind could dish out. Like the oceans themselves, their majesty may have been their undoing. Still there day after day, century after century, apparently undaunted by our industrial mischief. The proximity of The Lakes to so many major industrialized cities means that pollution is no surprise. Nor are the results of a recent study by Chris De Rosa which was compiled during his tenure as director of the division of toxicology and environmental medicine at the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) which is housed within the Centers For Disease Control in Atlanta. A position he held since 1991, he was recently relegated to the stock room due to the contents, shall we say the "inconvenient" contents, of his report centering around the Great Lakes.
The report raises the possibility of public health threats due to industrial contamination throughout the Great Lakes region, and the peer reviewers, as well as the author of the report, claim that the results are being suppressed because of the questions that are raised. Michael Gilbertson, an Ontario biologist who was one of many independent reviewers said that politics are behind the delay in releasing the report to the public. "This information, which really should have been distributed more than a year ago, is inconvenient to the administration." You see, the report was ready to be released when senior officials at the CDC put the brakes on.
Citing the use of county health data in the report, upper management decided to halt the public release of the report until further notice. Gilbertson went on to say that "all science has limitations, but to stress the limitations at the expense of getting this information out to the research community is not in the public interest at all." Don't ask me what makes him think that the "public interest" ever got in the way of any political agenda, but then again, he's from Ontario. If he plans to spend any significant time in the American arena of Global Warming or anything that even hints at being associated with "clean-planet" whackos, he better get used to stone walls. He'll be climbing over, or dismantling, many in the days to come.
Not surprisingly, the report found an increased rate of cancer and infant mortality in the regions surrounding the Great Lakes. It is probably too soon to draw a definitive connection, though pragmatism yields a ready answer. Given the convoluted and arduous arguments over Global Warming and the merits of science, it would likely be decades before a consensus could be built concerning the Lakes and the pollution and who is to blame, if anyone. Forget about trying to fix it or clean it up. That's for the next generation. Our job is to bicker and plod, parse and prune, and avoid anything resembling a decision for as long as possible.
As with all pollution, the chemical damage is done. The profiteers are long gone, their products long-since consumed. Also, as with similar cases, the silent victim is trust. These are the stories that fuel the conspiracy-theorists, the un-stable who believe that 9/11 was a hoax and the airplanes were holograms and the "evil American government" imploded the Twin Towers. The government isn't really evil, of course, they're just emotionally stunted. They still react like we all did as children the first time we wrote "poop" on the living room wall with crayons. We denied it to our parents, crayon under our fingernails notwithstanding, but most of us grew up knowing that adults own up. Still, some of us grow up still denying. Bigger versions of the same child, only now with PCB's and Dioxin under our fingernails.
How refreshing it would be if just once in a while, we could consider science, interpolate with common sense, and decide in a timely manner that, yes, those paint factories and chemical manufacturers who routinely poured carcinogens into waterways and lakes for decades...well, that seems to have created some problems. We were short-sighted and failed in our responsibility to be good stewards to our environment. We made a mistake. Let's fix it.