We All Have To Do the Heavy Lifting

The TCE Blog kindly linked to yesterday’s post, and as you can see for yourself in the comments, quite rightly challenged me to clarify what I meant when I said we all have to do the heavy lifting with regard to controlling TCE exposures.

Environmental management has been a drama with the players being government and regulated entities (industries and federal agencies such as the DOD) and workers and communities serving as the audience. Go over to Confined Space, and you will find examples of how workers do not compete on a level playing field with employers when it comes to health and safety, while government agencies are less and less serving their role of equalizer. The process for investigating and cleanup of a groundwater contaminant plume under a community is sufficiently complex that it’s difficult for communities to contribute to the problem-solving. Most people just don’t have the time (or make the time – see below) and the resources to engage and become part of the decision-making.

At the same time, leaving the management of these issues to government officials and industry representatives could lead to you being disappointed in the outcome (say, if you’re the one with TCE vapor in your basement). For example, EPA withdrew in 1989 the toxicology information for TCE used in risk assessments and risk-based decision making. The agency jump-started the process for reassessing TCE risks in 2000. We may see some resolution of that reassessment within the next two years, but more time will be needed before those results are translated into regulatory policy. Faster action is happening in some places, but it is very much on a site-by-site basis, dependent on the initiative of individuals – members of the affected communities who are motivated to engage, and governmental officials and industry representatives who are willing to be proactive.

That last point seems to be the key. Jared Diamond says, "[i]t is easy and cheap for the rest of us to blame a business for helping itself by hurting other people.” However, he also says that we, the public, have the responsibility and power to compel industries to achieve higher environmental, health and safety standards, either directly or through our politicians.

In the recent past, I’ve been less than optimistic about the willingness of our politicians to step up and address environmental issues. However, this might be something to consider: there are possibly 400,000 workers who might be exposed to TCE. This is based on a 20 year old survey, and current statistics aren’t known, but may be similar. Hundreds and perhaps thousands of communities may be affected by TCE contamination in soil and groundwater. How many voters and consumers are represented by these communities and workplaces? Many of these people are members of unions, churches or other organizations. They have friends and relatives. Altogether, are these individuals enough to form a viable political and economic bloc, based on the common thread of above-ambient TCE exposure?

From Collapse:

For instance, after the public became concerned about the spread of mad cow disease, and after the U.S. government’s Food and Drug Administration introduced rules demanding that the meat industry abandon practices associated with the risk of spread, meat packers resisted for five years, claiming that the rules would be too expensive to obey. But when McDonald’s Corporation then made the same demands after customer purchases of its hamburgers plummeted, the meat industry complied within weeks. . . . The public’s task is to identify which links in the supply chain are sensitive to public pressure: for example, McDonald’s, Home Depot and Tiffany’s, but not meat packers, loggers, or gold miners.

The trick now is to find the parallels within the supply chain for TCE. Some more work needs to be done to create this political and economic critical mass, though. James Howard Kunstler, speaking in regard to peak oil, observes:

It has been very hard for Americans - lost in dark raptures of nonstop infotainment, recreational shopping and compulsive motoring - to make sense of the gathering forces that will fundamentally alter the terms of everyday life in our technological society.

This state of affairs applies just as well to environmental health problems as resource issues. Perhaps the TCE Blog could serve as a focal point, or rallying point, for linking together the diverse elements of public society, who have above-ambient TCE exposure in common, into a special interest group with real influence.