The COVID plague is raging around us. The Republican Party and the Trump administration are working furiously to overthrow our democracy by delegitimizing our electoral process. Many Americans are experiencing severe economic hardship and are traumatized about the future. Over a quarter of a million American families are plunged into grief over the loss of loved ones to COVID-19. And while President-elect Biden is moving steadily to assume his constitutional powers as president, he’s being obstructed at every turn by the Republican Party’s manic efforts to thwart the peaceful transition of power. How do we get through a time such as this?
Perhaps for most of us it’s as simple as focusing our attention somewhere else, like social problems, that we think we can actually help to do something about. I’m trying to stay sane by concentrating on pursuing a serious environmental agenda for our state during what could be an ecologically-sympathetic Biden administration.
The first priority of that agenda would be to get dead serious about finally starting to clean up our polluted groundwater, soil and air.
Despite the national chaos, New Mexico finds itself in a near ideal position to try to do that. Pollution deniers of the GOP here are out of power. Democrats hold the legislature and the governor’s office. And the governor herself is an environmental champion with a public health background and the political courage in the face of the surging COVID pandemic to do what’s right for the health and safety of New Mexico’s people. If there was ever a time to do something real about pollution, and the underlying health threats that come with it, now is that moment.
While the control of infectious diseases, through vaccines and antibiotics, is a triumph of modern medicine, the world’s children are suffering from an epidemic of non-communicable diseases caused by pollution. Children are “exquisitely vulnerable to toxic chemicals,” according to pediatrician and professor of environmental medicine Philip J. Landrigan, MD. In his book, Children and Environmental Toxins, Landrigan says, “toxic chemical exposure causes disease in children at exposure levels far lower than adults.”
The kinds of non-communicable diseases associated with pollution include childhood asthma, which has tripled in frequency since the 1970s; learning disabilities, which affect 1 out of 6 children around the world; leukemia and brain cancers, which have increased by nearly 40% since the l970s; “certain birth defects,” which have become the leading cause of death in infancy and childhood obesity, which has more than tripled since the l970s. Type 2 diabetes, “previously an adult disease, has become epidemic among children and is diagnosed at ever earlier ages,” Landrigan writes.
Most of the tens of thousands of invented chemicals created in the last century were not initially tested for their potential toxicity. And they have joined the socially toxic brew of structural racism, and the chronic poverty it causes, to become what the American Heart Association says is “a fundamental cause of health disparities” in our country and state. One can see clearly why children everywhere, and especially in New Mexico, are becoming a sacrificial population.
The first step in creating a forceful comprehensive environmental agenda for New Mexico is for state government to do something it has never tried before — to undertake the monumental task of creating an aggressively publicized list of all toxic chemicals in New Mexico’s environment, where they are, who is responsible for their release, the technologies available to clean them up, the potential costs of doing so and who should be held accountable.
Such a universal pollution list would include all the many thousands of potential chemical and radioactive pollutants and where they are found — from chemical spills at virtually every military base in the state, including Kirtland Air Force Base, to radioactive and hazardous storage and releases at both Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories, as well as all nuclear treatment and storage facilities in southern New Mexico. It would also include all the proprietary chemicals used in fracking and all the fracking and drilling sites in the state, as well as mine refuse and tailings, especially from uranium mining, along with the contaminated water and sludge accumulated at every old mine, including gold mines. It would list all underground pipelines, septic systems and gasoline storage tanks and all railroad yards, landfills, dry cleaners, manufacturing and energy-generating sites that cause air and water pollution of whatever kinds. Nothing toxic would be excluded.
The existence of an exhaustive and universal pollution accountability chart for New Mexico would stagger public consciousness with its enormity and ubiquity. It would become glaringly apparent how dangerous and despoiled we’ve allowed the Land of Enchantment to become.
Building a public database like that could be the first step in motivating generations of lawmakers and leaders to get serious about finding the funds and the brain power to rid our state of its horrific legacy of toxic waste and give our children a chance at living healthier lives free from the insidious burdens of unidentified environmental pollutants in their vulnerable bodies.
Hiding the existence of pollution, denying its public health impact and prevaricating over its clean up belongs to the same species of lethal stupidity and recklessness as climate change denial and considering COVID-19 a conspiratorial falsehood.
The early stages of an anti-pollution agenda in New Mexico could start next year with an association of environmental and public health activists lobbying for funds to begin the kind of thorough, open-minded research necessary to create an archive of reliable pollution data.
This would not be a pie-in-the-sky project. It’s about as necessary and down to earth, and water, as you can get.
*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it
Yes! Focusing on issues we can actually do something about! While we mustn’t take our eyes from the big picture (especially when those out to destroy every bit of sane governance remaining are so hell bent on doing as much damage as possible before January 20th), putting energy into work where we can actually make a difference makes a lot of sense. As always, V.B., you are a great guide.
Unfortunately, a lot of environmentalists’ efforts and energy are being siphoned off to fight the expansion of WIPP and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission/Department of Energy plan to bring all the nation’s nuclear reactor spent fuel to for supposed “interim storage” in southern New Mexico at the Holtec site and another site just across the border in Texas If that should occur, the high level nuclear waste will probably never leave NM. More nuclear and chemical contamination will also come from resumption of nuclear weapon plutonium pit production at Los Alamos if not halted by the new administration.
Well done.
you might consider sending this article off to Biden and the Democrat’s.