Selected Readings on Human Health, Disease, and the Environment

The following are responses and summaries of various readings related to Human Health, Disease, and the Environment. 

Six Modern Plagues,  Chapter 5:  A Spring to Die For: Hantavirus

                Hantavirus pulmonary syndrome is a disease that has existed in the American Southwest since, at the very least, the time of Columbus’s exploration.  It invades the lungs of its victim and causes them to drown in their own fluid.  The disease is transmitted by the urine or saliva of mice.  When there is a great increase in the mouse population of the area there is a proportionate increase in the number of Hantavirus cases.  This was especially the case when in 1993 there was a great outbreak of the virus which has since been attributed to the recent heavy rains caused by El Nino.  Though the Navajo had knowledge of the disease for centuries before, what emerged for the rest of Americans was “a powerfully new, encompassing view of humans not as a stand-alone species but as just one species among many in a web of climate, ecology, and intertwined fates.”  The spring of 1993, just as the months before previous outbreaks, had seen a huge explosion of the mouse population in nearby rural areas.  The abundance of mice thereafter ventured into the cities and residential areas where the spread the disease to humans.

Selected Readings on Human Health, Disease, and the Environment

The following are responses and summaries of various readings related to Human Health, Disease, and the Environment. 

Six Modern Plagues: Introduction

Fifty years ago the people of the west believed that humanity was nearing a point where no longer would we need to worry about sickness.  Medicine had developed to a point where it seemed that it had an answer for every infectious disease in existence.  In reality, though, the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries were merely the calm before the storm.  Today new diseases are being discovered at a rate faster than any previous time in history.  Many of these are diseases which have long existed in other species but due to humanity’s changing of its environment they are now jumping ship from their previous bodies to us.  This change is occurring because people are now invading land which they have never before occupied; forcing bacteria and viruses to evolve and adapt to their newfound hosts.  Evolution usually occurs naturally over long periods of time but in today’s age the great ecological change being caused by humans is speeding up this process.  Not only are these new diseases on the rise, but old diseases which have been lying dormant are beginning to re-emerge.  Diseases such as small pox and leprosy were not long ago thought to have been completely eradicated but they are beginning to return and in strains which the old cures and vaccines have no affect on.  The problem is that the speed with which our microbial enemies evolve and adapt is increasing and humanity is directly responsible.  Our ever increasing destruction of natural habitat, invasion of areas where we have not previously inhabited, and shift from a sedentary lifestyle to daily transcontinental travel is merely speeding up this process.  A change in dominators has already begun.  We will lose the ability to regain upper hand if we do not soon change our ways.

Selected Readings on Food, Agriculture and the Environment

The following are responses and summaries of various readings related to Food, Agriculture and the Environment. 

The Eco-Foods Guide: Foreword/Introduction

According to the experiences of Lappe, the better food you choose for yourself, the more pleasurable eating becomes. The greatest downfall of people’s eating habits today is making the quick and easy choice of fast-food restaurants or processed foods from the supermarket.  These kind of simplicities are the root cause of our nation’s greatest epidemic, obesity.  The key factor in the explosive rate of obesity is the processed, sugared, salty, fatty, meat-centered diet of the majority of Americans.  It is a diet unlike anything our species has encountered before.  We are the only species that knowingly consumes food that will eventually result in its own destruction.  Humans are able to eat a lot of sugar and fat in a single sitting; this trait served people well before agriculture, when food was needed to be stored internally after a big kill or find, but is now our bane.  What we eat has a great effect on the environment as well, though most academics would have dismissed such ideas until recently.  The best food for us is the food that is best for Mother Earth and people generally want to purchase the foods which are good for them as well as good for the Earth: it is only a matter of the availability and knowledge of product. 

Selected Readings on Food, Agriculture and the Environment

The following are responses and summaries of various readings related to Food, Agriculture and the Environment. 

Diet for a Dead Planet: Killing Fields

Farming, while once thought of as one of the kinder industries to the environment, is now finding itself more destructive than many of the more feared industrious wasters.  Farmers have failed to follow pollution controls long established in other industries.  Pesticides, fertilizers, and animal waste combine in the farming industry’s toll on the environment.  No longer do most farmers practice crop rotation which keeps the topsoil fertile and prevents any one species of insect from gaining any advantage.  Instead, due to government subsidies for individual crops, farmers practice monocroping which drains the soil of its nutrients and allows particular pest species to become dominant.   This requires the farmers to apply fertilizers to the soil in order for the crops to have sufficient nutrients and pesticides to the plants and area to rid of the pests.  The pests who survive the chemical invasion reproduce and become all that much more virulent as the new population finds itself immune to the previous pesticides.  Thereafter the farmer must implore alternative, sometimes stronger pesticides.  All of these chemicals seep into the ground, sometimes spoiling water aquifers, wash down into nearby streams and creeks, become lodged inside the crop itself, and evaporate into the atmosphere.  Probably the biggest criminal of agribusiness though are the animal factories.  Here, thousands of hogs, chickens, or cows stand day after day in a pen just large enough for their frames eating protein-laden foods and ingesting antibiotics, while the urine and feces rains down through slats in the floor.  All this waste flows like a river into a large tub sitting nearby where it gets taken into nearby waterways and absorbed into the sky.  Research by the EPA has shown that this animal waste is the largest contributor to pollution in American waterways. 

Selected Readings on Food, Agriculture and the Environment

The following are responses and summaries of various readings related to Food, Agriculture and the Environment. 

Against the Grain: Hog Heaven

Human beings have a need for agriculture, or at least for its byproduct food, however agriculture hasn’t a need for human beings in the sense that it evolves regardless of the needs of humanity.  For thousands of years people had a deep connection with the food that they consumed, but with the appearance of the industrialism on the scene food became seen less as a link to nature and more as a detriment to human advancement.  This change in thinking required for our food to become more processed in order for it to no longer appear natural.  The beginning of this process was with the fad diets of the mid 1800s which had the goal of bettered bowel movements through the consumption of the necessary processed foods, many coming solely from grain.  Grain made the perfect crop for this process, for in its natural state it is not able to be consumed.  Wheat requires, at a minimum, hulling, grinding, and cooking.  This is distinctly more complex than the simple consumption of most vegetables and fruits, of which man had been accustomed to for millennia.  Grains have as a primary ingredient starch, which is a complex carbohydrate.  Starch can be processed into sugar, and from this idea was born the entire industry of processed foods and the conversion of crop foods into commodities.  From this eventually came corn syrup and in the 60s high fructose corn syrup, which is a key ingredient in nearly every packaged food to this day.  These foods gave people a convenience and appearance of status never before afforded to the lower classes of society.  These ideals still permeate our culture to this day in the wealth of fast food available throughout every town and city of America.  The mass marketing and processing of grains as commodities has provided people with “cheap” and “easy” calories, though at the great cost of our own health.

Selected Readings on Food, Agriculture and the Environment

The following are responses and summaries of various readings related to Food, Agriculture and the Environment. 

Against the Grain: Hard Times

The movement of Europeans to the lands of the New World extended the average life span by decades.  One of the chief reasons for this drastic change was that those new to the western world were actually eating healthier.  The Americas had greater food, both in quantity and quality.  The first recorded famines occurred some six thousand years ago, a phenomenon Manning directly attributes to agriculture.  Most of the great nations of the colonial age were able to alleviate many of their famine problems with the expansion and movement of the population outside of their borders.  China, however, did not become imperialistic – at least in the colonial sense of the word – and so many of the same famine problems persist today. Famine is the one of nature’s solutions to the population explosion inherent with agriculture: the other being expansion.  The argument that Manning and many others would make, of why famine still persists to this day, is that the problem rests with the hierarchical structure of agriculture; while we have reached a point where our technology and tactics are sufficient to feed the world, the poverty of the hungry is the greatest cause.  Famine in Europe finally began to see a downturn with the introduction of New World crops into the agricultural system there.  While most of the poor throughout Europe were feeding daily on wheat, the potato took hold in Ireland, a land where virtually no edible staple crops could be grown.  The potato took root on the island and by the eighteenth century was the sole food of most Irish, most eating up to six pounds a day.  This surplus of food saw the usual trend of population explosion with it doubling by the mid nineteenth century. In 1845 a catastrophe took place on the island – the same that any monocrop society will eventually face.  The potato began fighting a great plague, without success.  Over the next sixty years almost half of population, that gained from the potato boom, would succumb to starvation or emigrate out of the nation.  The potato forever left its mark on Ireland and the Irish people.

Selected Readings on Food, Agriculture and the Environment

The following are responses and summaries of various readings related to Food, Agriculture and the Environment. 

The Fatal Harvest – Industrial Agriculture Will Feed the World

Around 800 million people go hungry daily, and even in the United States where we export more food than we consume 33 million people go without food.  The industrial agriculture corporations want the public believe that this hunger is due to the fact that there is not enough food produced in the world to supply all its populace.  They purport the lies that increased chemical agriculture will provide for an adequate increase in food surpluses so that there will no longer be any starving people.  However, in reality, the rate of food production has actually been adequate for the population and in the last 35 years has actually outpaced the growth of the worlds population by 16 percent per capita.   There is enough food produced throughout the world to provide for 4.3 pounds of food per person daily: many times more than necessary.  The true cause of starvation and world hunger is poverty.  After large conglomerates began buying up farm land the people who once depended on this land for their sustenance no longer had a source of preservation.  Many of these people then moved towards the industrialized cities to fight amongst the masses for low paying wages in dangerous factories.  “If you don’t have land on which to grow food or the money to buy it, you go hungry no matter how dramatically technology pushes up food production.”  Those who are still able to farm the land must pay greater costs for the technologically infused seeds and machinery and end up getting less for their crop than they once would.  This price is not however reflected in the base cost of the consumer due to the large mark-up from the middle man.  The large corporations could help the situation in their local communities by growing staple crops but choose instead to grow luxury high-profit crops which will fetch a greater amount of money when exported to the rich.