We’re not stopping campaigning until it’s banned - no more cancers from Roundup.
When it comes to important issues about community, country or planet, people are pretty slow on the uptake. Environmental issues are particularly fraught.
In 1960, Rachel Carson wrote her seminal book, Silent Spring, attacking the damaging effects on plants and animals of DDT. It still took years for it to be banned.
In New Zealand, Ivan Watkins Dow of New Plymouth produced weed killers 2,4,D and 2,4,5,T, in the 1950s. In my University holidays I drove a tanker full of those poisons to meet the helicopter that sprayed the gorse and willows on Northland farms. I filled the hopper of the chopper, with poison all over my hands, no protection at all, and drove off to meet the chopper at the next farm. 2,4,5,T was the ingredient in Agent Orange, sprayed on foliage in Vietnam, killing thousands. Once again banning of these carcinogens took years.
Now, we are in the same position with glyphosate, the cancer-causing ingredient of weed killer Roundup. Court cases around the world have all found glyphosate responsible for cancers, and maker Monsanto, and now Bayer Pharmaceuticals of Germany, who bought Monsanto for 63 billion dollars cash, have been fined millions of dollars. Still they deny its carcinogenic qualities, and to boost sales and counter criticism guess who they often hire to lie to the public? Former tobacco lobbyists, that’s who!
Why are these environmental issues so intractable? Individuals are selfish. If an issue doesn’t directly affect them they avoid it. Too costly, technology will save us, the biggest polluters must act first. I don’t know how long Auckland Council will hold out and continue poisoning Aucklanders before glyphosate is banned.
This cancer-causing chemical, like others including asbestos, stays in the system for years before cancers break out and kill people who may have first injested the chemical at their school gate, or through play with a pet dog who had just rolled in the glyphosate on the berm in front of their home.
Gus Speth, famous American environmentalist puts the problem succinctly. He says this, “I used to think the three greatest environmental threats were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse, and climate change. But I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed and apathy, and to deal with them we need a spiritual and cultural transformation, and we scientists don’t know how to do that.”
Memo to Council and Councillors: History is riddled with failures to act, and to make important decisions. Ban glyphosate and get on the right side of history. Some of the best scientists in the world are in despair. Jacinda Ardern talked about a ‘nuclear moment’. This is one, if ever there was one. (John Elliott)
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