Book Review: Silent Killers: Radon and Other Hazards by Kathlyn Gay

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Silent Killers: 

Radon and Other Hazards

by Kathlyn Gay

Anxiety is a normal part of life in the modern world. Politics, economics, global warming, internet brainwashing, psychotics with easy access to guns, narcissistic world leaders, a failed educational system, diseases...the legacy media just keeps feeding us high doses of potentially traumatic information in quantities too big to properly digest in short amounts of time. If you’re a germaphobe it’s even worse. Paranoia is an understandable response to it all. But for most of us, a lot of that stuff is happening far away and doesn’t directly threaten our safety on a daily basis. Now consider that your home is full of toxic chemicals that can either kill you in the short term, sometimes immediately, or can cause deadly diseases that slowly murder you over a long period of time like cancer. There’s just no escaping from all the hazards wherever you go. Kathlyn Gay’s Silent Killers: Radon and Other Hazards gives you the rundown on some of the things around you that can do you in. What better way to spend a sunny afternoon is there than reading about them?

The book opens with discussions on dioxins and asbestos. Cleaning products, industrial lubricants, herbicides, and plastics all have some of the most deadly chemicals known to humanity. Dioxins are largely a product, and sometimes a byproduct, of industrial manufacturing. The most well-known chemical in the class of dioxins is agent orange or napalm, the chemical used during the Vietnam War to kill vegetation, making the so-called enemies easier to see. It did a sufficient job of killing people too, especially children, and got into the DNA of returning soldiers who passed it on to their offspring. Vietnamese and Cambodian children born after the war often fared no better. If you’ve been to those countries you can recognize its effects when you see young people with malformed or missing limbs. And yet dioxins are used in factories and household products because corporate businessmen care more about profits than people.

Asbestos, on the other hand, has been banned. Due to its flame resistant qualities, it has been used in architecture, especially in low-cost housing and public buildings, going all the way back to the Roman Empire. Studies done by the American Environmental Protection Agency in the 1950s determined that asbestos causes diseases affecting the respiratory system. A decades long effort to remove asbestos and ban it has largely been successful.

The subject of radon doesn’t get taken up until the middle of the book. This nice little colorless and odorless radioactive gas gets stirred up while mining or digging into the ground. When left alone in its hidden underground chambers, it is completely harmless. But when humans go into terrestrial territories without proper safety precautions, this killer escapes into the atmosphere undetected and poisons people who breathe it in.

Other chapters address dangerous metals, lead paint, toxins in drinking water (and no, fluoride is not dangerous), pesticides and weed killers used on farms, and a couple others. One chapter is about my personal favorite poison which is nuclear waste. Nuclear power is cheap and doesn’t contribute to global warming, but the waste it produces can contaminate the land where they bury it over a long period of time. Storage containers and facilities degrade, leak, and poison the atmosphere around them. The Three Mile Island radioactivity leak outside Lancaster, Pennsylvania gets a brief mention along with the Love Canal toxic waste dump disaster in Niagara Falls, New York. I bet the Amish people living near Three Mile Island said, “See, we’re better off with our horse buggies and oil lamps. You people laugh at us, but you’re the ones suffering from radioactivity poisoning now.”

This book is written from a scientific standpoint so there are lots of studies cited along with small amounts of dry technical writing and some occasional counterpoints provided by critics of the studies. The counterpoints come entirely from researchers working for corporations that capitalize from spreading toxic chemicals and other poisons throughout the human genome so you have to keep things in perspective. When it’s cheaper to publish propaganda and bogus scientific studies than it is to follow OSHA, FDA, and EPA government regulations, then it’s obvious what greedy businessmen will do to please their shareholders.

Aside from being dull at times, the biggest problem with this book is that, being written in the 1980s, it is a bit outdated. Some of these problems have been taken care of, like the banning of some aerosol sprays containing chlorofluorocarbons and the near elimination of acid rain for example, while others, like nuclear waste and ozone emissions from cars that cause greenhouse gas buildup, continue to be a problem. The book’s age also shows because of its repetitive warnings about cigarette smoke, another problem that has thankfully been reduced because of government regulation. Now we have newer silent killers like microplastics in everything we eat and chemical additives in hyperprocessed foods that the average person can’t even identify. Even worse, our current president is paying for tax cuts for billionaires by gutting agencies like the EPA, the FDA, and our educational system that should be teaching people how to minimize risks by thinking about what kinds of products they buy. Our government is also deregulating industries to help corporate businesses make more money since safety regulations cut into profits.

Silent Killers isn’t going to make it onto anybody’s bucket list of books they have to read before they die. There are better, and more updated, sources on this subject matter. Still, these are things everybody should be aware of and aren’t. On the brighter side, Kathlyn Gay makes it clear that personal choice plays a role in how much exposure we get to these silent killers. Simple things like keeping windows and doors open while limiting your use of air conditioning makes you a lot safer. Just as well, spending more time outdoors in nature reduces exposure to toxicity. But really, anything can kill you and eventually something will. You can sedate yourself with television, the internet, or drugs. You can deny any of these dangers out of your perceptual existence. You can become a fanatic and take on the impossible task of eliminating all risks from your life. Or you can do what I do: embrace your fears, look at the things that scare you most, evaluate how much of a danger they really are, and do what is within your power to survive while maintaining your sanity. And make jokes about it all along the way. Anxiety and paranoia can make life more stimulating.. Just because existence is grim and hopeless, that doesn’t mean you can’t choose to make it tolerable. 

 

 

Book Review

Love Canal:

A Toxic History from Colonial Times To the Present

by Richard S. Newman

In the late 1970s, there were two places in America that evoked a sense of dread anytime they were mentioned. One was Three Mile Island, the nuclear power plant outside Lancaster, Pennsylvania that leaked radiation into the atmosphere and could potentially have caused a meltdown. The other was Love Canal, a toxic waste dump in Niagara Falls, New York where an entire neighborhood had been built. Richard S. Newman’s Love Canal tells the story of the latter, covering the business practices of the man who gave the site its name, the chemical company that dumped their waste there, and the grassroots protest movement that grew around the discovery of the deadly deposits under the soil.

Newman begins his account with the American Indians’ reverence for the famous Niagara Falls and the coming of colonialists who saw the potential for using Lake Ontario and the Niagara River for the transport of commercial goods. Later, when the Industrial Revolution kicked in and the falls became important for generating electricity, Niagara Falls became a boom town for manufacturers. Out of this economically expanding community came a man named William T. Love. He had a vision of building a canal running off the Niagara River that could be used for generating power in order to expand the growth of the small city southwards where more factories could be built. Love’s enthusiasm was infectious enough to raise investments and his employees went to work building the canal which they named after him, dubbing it the Love Canal. But William Love was more of a dreamer than a doer; he ran out of funds and he abandoned the canal project after its being only partially built.

Years later, Elon Hooker founded the Hooker Chemical company. It was a successful company, especially in the World War II era when they began manufacturing chemicals to be used in various ways for military equipment. Hooker Chemical also took off because they produced important chemicals used in making plastic. Like any other industrial companies, they produced tons of waste. The city of Niagara Falls allocated the Love Canal as a dumping ground, so Hooker Chemical poured all their toxic sludge into flimsy metal barrels and dropped them into the ground, covering them with a topping made of clay.

A couple decades later, the city government allowed housing developers to build a low-income subdivision with a school and a housing project tower block for African-American renters all on top of the Love Canal toxic waste dump. The houses were cheap and a lot of blue collar workers thought they had bought into the American Dream. But then things started to go wrong. Rates of cancer and other diseases became disproportionately prevalent in the area, the rate of miscarriages skyrocketed, birth defects were common, and everybody in the neighborhood smelled a sickening stench in the air. Strange things were happening too like when children threw rocks they found, the rocks would explode and dogs that played in the grass would lose their hair. As it turned out, the barrels underground that were meant to contain the industrial waste had corroded and toxic chemicals were leaking into the soil and air, depositing in people’s basements, and getting into their drinking water. The locals got together and started a protest movement that got national attention. They added more fuel to the fire of the exploding environmentalist movement of the time. The author goes into all the fine details of what they did, how successful they were, the government’s reaction, and the long range impact of the political movement.

Throughout the telling of the Love Canal story, the author writes in a subtext, giving details about the ecological and environmental attitudes in America going back to the founding of the nation. Really that part of the history is taken up with the Transcendentalism of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. After that there were various movements in favor of conservation and the preservation of nature. It wasn’t until the 1960s though that environmentalism intensified and a Return to Nature and Save the Planet ethic took over. People began seeing the natural world as not just a place to escape to for recreation or relaxation, but something we need to be part of in order to survive. All of this eventually merged with the activism of the Love Canal community and furthered the cause of environmental protection.

There is a lot to admire in this book. The chapters on the industrial and commercial history of Niagara Falls are fascinating, especially for those inclined towards an interest in modern history. The story of the Love Canal neighborhood and the activist movement that grew out of it are well-presented and sufficiently detailed too. The author also rightly make a point of explaining how toxic waste is a problem that can be effectively managed with technology when giving the proper funding and attention. The darker side of the story is the reminder that the Republican party and big corporations are working together to roll back all the progress that environmentalists have made, making future ecological disasters a probability. Sadly, people have short memories and living in a country where history is rarely ever taught, the future doesn’t look too bright.

Love Canal is a good book and especially the kind of thing the younger generations should be reading. Until recently, the environmental movement was growing and people of my generation were expecting to pass that torch onto the next generation. Unfortunately, when they picked uo the cell phone they dropped the torch and now pollution levels are rising exponentially, our water is filled with microplastics that kill wildlife and find their way into our food supply, more fossil fuels are burned then ever before, and global warming is accelerating rather than slowing down. Caring for the planet has become less important than staring at a screen all day watching reels of dogs on skateboards, people eating themselves to death in mukbang videos, and the latest, dumbest dance trends. People became so hypnotized by the internet that they forgot about everything that matters. Pay attention, kids...the next Love Canal disaster could be happening under your feet right now. If your phone is more important than the survival of the planet we depend on for life, then maybe we don’t even deserve to survive.

 

Book Review

The Monkey Wrench Gang

by Edward Abbey

     Who hasn’t felt like blowing things up from time to time? I know I have, not that I would actually do something like that. I don’t want to end up in jail and it probably wouldn’t do much to make the world a better place in the long run anyways. Besides, my weapon-making skills are non-existent, I’m clumsy, have shaky hands, and can’t tell the difference between saltpetre and cialis so you wouldn’t want to be near me while I’m carrying a box of high-powered explosives. But really, if you haven’t fantasized about blowing something up at some point in your life, you’re probably not paying much attention to what’s happening in the world. Edward Abbey was certainly paying attention to the destruction of nature and he felt like blowing things up. Instead of doing that, he wrote a counter-cultural novel called The Monkey Wrench Gang and it is all about people who blow things up. It is hard not to cheer them on along the way even though it is obvious from the beginning they are on a quixotic mission.

During a white water rafting trip in Utah, four trickster-type individuals start drinking by their campfire and talk about how great it would be to sabotage all the industrial development taking place across the American Southwest. One is the rafting guide, Seldom Seen Smith, a Mormon with questionable morals and marginal commitments to the Church of LSD, oops I mean LDS. He is basically a clever redneck who wants to preserve nature as it is without the intrusive exploitation of the capitalist system. Doc Sarvis is a surgeon who is fed up with having to treat patients suffering from diseases and injuries caused by the chemicals and pollutants of the modern world. His much younger lover, Bonnie Abzug, no relation to Bella Abzug, is a Jewish hippy feminist from New York who just wants to burn down civilization and start everything over from scratch. Then there is Hayduke, a crude and primitive-minded wildman who just returned from Vietnam. He wants revenge for the nightmare of living through the war and sees a parallel between the way the US military invaded Southeast Asia and the way big corporations are invading the American wilderness. He wants to free himself from society and live like an animal in the desert. His name is derived from “hajduk” which, in Slavic and other Eastern European languages means “outlaw”. Each one represents a different facet of the environmental movement as it was in the 1970s and one of this novel’s strengths is that these are the most memorable characters ever created by this author. While their conversations and personalities alternate between clashing and harmonizing with a lot of punning and humor along the way, they fit together like pieces of a multi-dimensional puzzle.

Another of the novel’s strengths is the descriptive language. Abbey was famous for his ability to describe the deserts of Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona, and he never fails to deliver in that regard in this book. He engages all your senses to make it feel as if you are there, experiencing what the characters experience, feeling the wind they feel, walking where they walk, hiding behind the trees and rocks they use for cover, feeling the vastness of the starry desert sky and being absorbed into that stillness and quietude that one can only feel in the depths of that part of North America. And he describes industrial machinery and the development it brings with just as much detail. Obviously he took great care to use language for the construction of ugly, intrusive human inventions for the sake of taking grim delight in their destruction at the hands of the four heroes.

The plot is minimal and basic. The gang make plans to sabotage whatever machinery they can find, albeit without killing anybody, and proceed to do so. They get pursued throughout the desert by a posse of law enforcement villains and vigilantes who are more concerned with exploiting the land for money than they actually are with justice. All the while, the quartet of eco-warriors know they don’t have a chance of succeeding in tearing down civilization, but they feel compelled to keep monkey wrenching until they get caught.

There are some downsides to the writing. The main characters are brutally racist towards Native American people and politically correct readers of today will definitely whine about the sexist portrayal of Bonnie Abzug. This is a very macho, hyper-masculine novel, although in some ways that is part of its appeal. There was a time when American Leftists actually did have the balls to go toe to toe with the system, unlike today’s useless army of woke wimps who think that “online activism” is actually going to do some good in the world. Yeah, if you actually care about the world you should get off your social media asses and figure out ways to cancel global warming instead of bickering with inconsequential MAGA maggots on Twitter. But then again, there are times when the Monkey Wrench Gang come across as naive and a bit stupid too; for four people who care about preserving nature, they should be smart enough to know that burning construction equipment in the high esert, pushing earth movers into a lake, and blowing up bridges will do a hell of a lot of damage to the environment they want to protect.

But The Monkey Wrench Gang is a big wish-fulfillment fantasy. I don’t think it is meant to be taken in any other way, except maybe as a call to (responsible) action. This is, after all, the book that inspired the Earth First activist group. It really is an action-adventure story that reads like an updated, 1970s version of the traditional Western genre, complete with rough and tumble, whisky drinking, cigar chomping, poker playing outlaws who learn how to stick it to the lawman. They bomb construction sites rather than robbing banks and the whole thing reads like Abbey hoped someday this would be made into a movie. Not a chance of that happening today since the colossally big corporations that run the world now would never stand for any kind of entertainment that might inspire people to fight the system. Is it any surprise that Hollywood seems to be making nothing but junk food for the 21^st century mind these days? Anything that dazzles the senses and prevents people from thinking benefits the big shots at the top of the human society shit pile. There is plenty of room for destructive fantasies in our culture, especially when they critique our way of living or provide a means of catharsis. You can cheer this gang on as they sabotage machinery the same way you cheer on Tyler Durden when he blows uo the bank at the end of Fight Club.

Maybe it’s time for somebody to write a good science-fiction novel about blowing up the internet. There are millions of times I’ve fantasized about doing that.  

 

Book Review

Fire On the Mountain

by Edward Abbey

     How far should one man go to preserve the land he holds sacred? John Vogelin, the protagonist of Edward Abbey’s second novel Fire On the Mountain, insists on fighting to the death to hold onto his ranch where he was born, where he spent all his life, and where he planned to die. If this sounds like a commentary on freedom and macho American individualism, you are right. If this sounds like the premise for a gripping story, don’t get your hopes up too high though.

Vogelin is an 87 year old man who owns a ranch and some land in southern New Mexico. The government’s plan is to expand the White Sands Missile Range and Vogelin’s property is the only obstacle holding them back. They insist on seizing the land under the law of eminent domain, but old man Vogelin won’t budge. The ranch is all he knows and removing him from it would make the end of his long life a miserable one.

The supporting characters are his grandson, Billy, who is also the narrator. The young boy is visiting his grandfather for the summer, taking a vacation from his home in Pennsylvania. Billy prefers life on the ranch to that in his school and he plans to take over the property when Vogelin dies. The other supporting character is Lee Mackie, Vogelin’s best friend. Lee is a businessman, a native to the region, and the one who tries to be a negotiator and voice of reason for Vogelin as he fights with the government. Vogelin is the most complete character of the three; he has a simple outlook on life but we learn his motivations, his feelings, and the reasoning behind his stubbornness. From the other two, we learn not so much. Grandfather Vogelin is Billy’s hero and the boy vows to fight by his side to the end, but you might wonder at times why he is even in the story to begin with. He is a shadow to the main character and little more. Even the narration, which reads as if Billy is recalling the story from the vantage point of adulthood, does not actually need the first person subjective style that Abbey employs. It would be fine if written in any other voice. Lee Mackie serves a more definite purpose, acting as the conscience and counterpoint to Vogelin’s struggles, but we never really learn who he is as a person. We never learn how he met Vogelin or why he is so attached to the old man, even though he thinks the old man should sell his property to the government and move on. Thankfully, Edward Abbey learned from the mistakes he made in his earlier writings and went on to write better developed characters in his later works.

So what is a reader to gain from reading this short story with a generic plot and weakly-drawn characters? The best part of it all is the beginning when Vogelin, Billy, and Lee Mackie ride on horseback out into the mountains in search of a pony that wandered away from the ranch. The author does here what he always does best: describe the desert with its scenery, its stillness, its vast landscapes, big sky, and unique ecosystems. Abbey never fails to capture the essence of the New Mexico desert and this book is no exception. If you have been to places he describes you will know exactly what I mean.

This long passage also introduces two themes, one of which is important to the plot and the other is something that never gets developed to completion. The latter of the two is Billy’s confrontation with the desert. When on top of a mountain, he comes face to face with a mountain lion. Paralyzed with fear, the two stare at each other and this event transforms Billy’s life. The problem here is that we never really learn how Billy changed after that. Abbey doesn’t describe the meaning of this encounter and he never develops this theme subsequently to its occurrence, although it does get mentioned from time to time. We also learn that Lee Mackie had a similar type of experience when he was younger, but no details are given as to what the event was and how it effected him.

The other theme that gets taken up during their trek into the wilderness is the trio’s encounter with the military. In one scene, they get confronted by some belligerent soldiers from the air force who almost start a gun fight with them. In another part they find their lost horse, only to see it had been tortured, murdered, and mutilated by the same soldiers when they were drunk and had nothing better to do. Abbey’s portrayal of the US military is in no way favorable. And why should it be? This book was written in the 1960s and the anarchist author needed some antagonists for the plot’s conflict anyways.

SPOILER ALERT HERE. The rest of the story is anti-climactic. Grandpa Vogelin gets into a gunfight with government officials, though no one gets killed. The burning of his body at the end seems both significant as closure to the novel and symbolic as well of temporal man’s relationship to the eternity of nature. The fact that starting a massive fire in the desert to cremate Vogelin is a colossal act of stupidity ruined the ending a little bit. Forest fires spread rapidly and in the dry heat of New Mexico, this is not something to be messed around with. It is surprising that an environmentalist like Edward Abbey couldn’t see the ignorance of making a funeral pyre in such a poorly situated located.

Fire On the Mountain is almost a Western. It reads like an interpretation of the Western genre as seen through the lens of the Cold War and post-World War II America with a touch of 1960s counter-cultural defiance of authority thrown in. By today’s standards it would be considered a right-wing anti-government screed, but in Abbey’s day, fighting the government was purely a left-wing undertaking. Keep that in mind when reading anything by this author. It isn’t quite a Western because there isn’t enough action in it to make it much more than a desert drama with a half-assed gunfight near the end. If Edward Abbey hadn’t gone on to write great books like Desert Solitaire and The Monkey Wrench Gang, this short novel would have been forgotten long ago. But if you can’t get enough of Abbey’s talent for descriptive writing, and I certainly can’t, this might be worth a quick read just once. 

 

Edward Abbey: A Voice In the Wilderness

biographical video