My search uncovered a standard array of petroleum spills from leaky underground storage tanks throughout the town, including a somewhat significant one at a gas station adjacent to my daughter’s school. Luckily, the flow of ground water appears to move away from the school’s building footprint; although the contamination appears to have migrated offsite through the utility corridor, and was bad enough at one point to have warranted concerns about vapor intrusion at neighboring properties. The state is still working on that.

I also learned about soil and ground water contamination beneath the former Standard Register facility, now occupied by Connor Homes, and how the Subway on Court Street used to be a dry cleaner. Yes, indeed a dry cleaner that had an historic release of chlorinated solvents. When the problem was discovered some 20 years ago, plumes of tetrachloroethylene (PCE) and its carcinogenic degradation products had already migrated offsite, spreading beneath the neighboring residential properties and heading toward the daycare center located immediately behind.

I remember feeling a jolt as I read through the site records, as one of the owners of the offending dry cleaner bore the same last name as mine, and perhaps even more jarring because I have friends whose young children are currently enrolled at that daycare.  But I also recall feeling grateful —as I often did when I worked in the regulatory field— for the foundation of regulations that enable problems such as these to be addressed. The investigation report I read indicated that contaminated soils had been removed, that indoor air monitoring had been conducted for the daycare and neighboring homes years ago, that exposure pathways for sensitive receptors had been evaluated — in short, that the problem hadn’t been ignored.

If you are a parent of school-aged children like I am, you have no doubt encountered the locked doors and sign-in sheets at the front office of your child’s school. You may have submitted to the required background check before serving as a classroom volunteer, and have most likely provided documentation for your child’s receipt of the required vaccinations to attend their public school. These are just a few of the many protective layers that have been put into place to guard the health and safety of our kids, and many of them —like the heightened security and locked entrances, for instance— probably a reactionary procedure born from some tragic, preventable event.

It’s easy to forget the origins of such protective measures, especially when the threat is no longer visible. Easy for parents to forgo vaccinations for their children without the shadow of an iron lung looming overhead, because the regulations that were put into place have successfully kept our exposures at bay. But the threat is still present, and cracks in the armor of those protective measures invite the risk to come back in, as reminded by the few cases of whooping cough that cropped up at our school this year.

Having worked in the public sector, I am fully aware of the inefficiencies that plague the regulatory sphere. Improvements can always be made, I agree, but regulations are often there for a reason, their very purpose a storied affair. What would have happened, I wonder, if there were no rules? If the dry cleaner hadn’t been required to investigate and remediate its mess, if nobody even knew? What would the kids of the Mary Johnson Child Center be breathing into their lungs while they napped on mats along the floor?

I guess that’s why I’m so disgusted by the efforts of Trump and his supporters to usher in Cabinet members who seem so committed to the unraveling of protective regulations — everything from economic and education policies to environmental protection. It’s as if they’ve conveniently forgotten the critical events that have shaped the policies of the agencies for which they’ve been tapped to represent. And though it’s been nearly 30 years since Love Canal and the resulting Superfund legislation, it’s been less than a year since the lead-contamination tragedy in Flint, Michigan, and only 5 months since the PFOA crisis for the citizens of Hoosick Falls, NY.

If providing safe drinking water to our children isn’t a fundamental American value, then I don’t know what is.

Or maybe that’s just it. Maybe this incoming administration is just a timeline marker for the seismic shift of American values from a commitment to the preservation of health and human rights to something a little more… green.

Look, American industries have been complaining about regulation since the first regulations were ever passed. Cut the red tape, they say now, so we can be competitive with China.

Like this?

Or this?

That used to be us. I thought we already decided that wasn’t acceptable for our future generations. And remember child labor?

 Even that had to be regulated away.

But now I’m beginning to wonder if it ever really went away. Because the truth is, the burden we’re currently placing on the backs of our future generations might be the most brazen form of child labor that there is.

Photo credits:

Flint boy: npr.org

China air pollution: journal-neo.org

China water pollution: demilked.com

Addie Card, anemic little spinner in North Pownal Cotton Mill: Lewis Hine

There is no Planet B: Inhabit.com

The post If There Were No Rules appeared first on Mary Heather Noble.

But no matter how savvy I think I am about the science, or how much people like me tend to believe that science is what’s going to save us, there is but one essential discipline whose role is really the driver of this bus.

Remember that phrase coined by political strategist James Carville in the 1990s? “It’s the economy, stupid.” Well, I can’t seem to get that phrase out of my head… again. And while Carville’s point back then may have been to emphasize the importance of the struggling economy in the 1992 presidential election, my point in resurrecting the phrase is this: It doesn’t matter how the science explains the cause-and-effect relationships involved in an environmental health crisis. What really matters is the why it happened — which, unsurprisingly, is almost always a matter of economics.

Take Flint, MI, for instance. Sure, I understand the science behind what’s happened:  Water drawn from the Flint River and delivered to Flint’s municipal water customers from spring of 2014 on was more corrosive than the City of Detroit water they had been using prior to then, so the new water literally ate through their aging infrastructure, causing lead and other particulates to pour from their taps. Chemistry 101, right?

But the science doesn’t explain how Flint River water got into the pipes in the first place, nor does it explain why months passed without any corrective action, despite complaints from residents about the visible contamination of their drinking water. Science also fails to provide an acceptable explanation for why Flint pediatrician Mona Hanna-Attisha was belittled and attacked when she released her findings that the percentage of Flint children with abnormally high blood lead levels had doubled since the City switched its water supply. Or why it wasn’t until late December and early January that authorities declared the continued lead poisoning of Flint’s children as the emergency that it was.

More than a year of daily, chronic exposure to lead-contaminated water has occurred in hundreds of Flint households — in a predominately African American community where over 40% of the population lives below the poverty level. Science? No, I think another discipline might be at play. You can almost see the words in the thought bubbles hanging above the City and State officials’ heads: It’s just for a few more months. Really, what difference does it make?

There’s an important term that is often tossed around in civil discourse about economics: “moral hazard.”  Moral hazard refers to the elevated risks one party might take in an economic transaction because another party will bear the negative consequences of those risks. We heard a lot about moral hazard around the Wall Street bank bailouts in 2008, and we often hear conservative grumbling about the moral hazards of the Affordable Care Act —or any social service program, for that matter— and how it isn’t fair for the taxpayers to pay for someone else’s (potentially irresponsible) personal choices.

But the concept of moral hazard is seldom discussed around matters of environmental or personal harm, when the asymmetry of risk involves something other than cold hard cash. Which seems misguided, since the underlying presence of unfairness is the same. Think about it: What if the moral hazard threatens one party’s ability to breathe? The ability to drink clean water? The ability to go to school or play in a city park without getting shot? Where are the conservatives then?

I don’t present this idea as a theoretical argument, because unabated moral hazards are yielding environmental and human health tragedies as we speak. Consider for a moment the economic equation controlling gun regulation in this country.

Consider the matter of DuPont in Parkersburg, WV, where, for decades, the company dumped thousands of tons of perfluorooctanioc acid waste (PFOA, formerly known as C8, the main ingredient in Teflon) into the Ohio River, unlined ponds and beyond, causing widespread contamination of surface and drinking water resources in Parkersburg and surrounding communities. DuPont not only exposed thousands of people to a toxic chemical, they actively concealed the known health effects of PFOA (identified in their own internal toxicology studies) for decades, so they could continue to bring in over $1 billion per year in profit from their highly successful Teflon products (read the recent New York Times article about the case here, a Huffington Post article about it here, and a slightly older one from The Intercept here).

DuPont had even developed a different chemical to replace PFOA in the early 1990s—one that was reportedly less persistent in the environment and stayed in the body for a shorter duration of time— but the company ultimately decided against replacement because the economic risk was too great.  Of course, when the exposure imposed upon workers of DuPont and the 70,000 people served by PFOA-tainted drinking water systems is factored into the equation, along with the link between PFOA and birth defects, kidney cancer, testicular cancer, thyroid disease, and other serious ailments, one wonders where the asymmetry of risk really falls.

—Which brings me back to my point: This is an economic equation, a deeply unbalanced one that is designed to limit the loss of profits, the loss of dollars and cents. Until we start attaching appropriate value to the lives at stake in these institutional transactions, I’m afraid the science is never going to be able to catch up to our inevitable loss.

Photo credits:

npr.org

dispatch.com, Chris Russell, Dispatch file photo

The post Moral Hazard: It’s More than Economics, Stupid appeared first on Mary Heather Noble.