Environmental Issues and Essays
A Brief History of Soap and its Impact on the Environment
Beginning around 1960, it was noted that there was more foam on rivers and that sewage treatment facilities were encountering serious problems, including that water foamed when it came out of the tap, this due to the fact that propylene-based alkyl benzene sulphonates are not completely degraded by the bacteria naturally present in effluents. It is not for me to try to explain the chemistry of all that started to go wrong, but merely to note that the correction being sought was to increase use of proteolytic enzymes to aid the breakdown of materials that were not readily "bio-degradable." The ramifications of this are almost too far-reaching to imagine.
State Farm Insurance has denied countless claims for wind damage in areas of the Bayou devastated by hurricanes. It has accomplished this inhumanity against legitimately insured customers by falsifying engineering reports, forging signatures, and systematic corporate abuse of power. Show your support for your dislocated brothers and sisters by boycotting State Farm.
Although Monsanto denies the chemical's toxicity, 80-85% of consumer complaints to the FDA about food pertain to Aspartame. Symptoms vary enormously: muscle and joint pain, menstrual cramps, ringing in ears, vertigo, nausea, insomnia, severe headaches, blurred vision and slurred speech, memory loss, blindness, mild to seriously suicidal depression, and seizures.
Exxon-Mobil and Chevron-Texaco
For more than half a century, the world has understood the problems related to air pollution and diminishing resources. During at least the last 20-30 years, alternatives to fossil fuels have been developed, but multinational corporations and their cohorts in government have failed to implement policies allowing for a smooth transition from obsolete technologies to modern methods for producing the energy that sustains the modern world . . . and now we at war for oil.
In 1997, Monsanto lost a lawsuit and agreed to stop using the terms "bio-degradable" and "environmentally friendly" in its advertising. The primary byproduct of herbicide manufacture is dioxin, a chemical described by some as the most toxic on the Planet. It has been implicated in any number of issues from Agent Orange to the Love Canal.
Poulsbo, Washington
Copyright by Ingrid Naiman 2002, 2006