Munich American Peace Committee (MAPC)
Radio Lora, 10. Juli 2006
Alternative Radio
Helen Caldicott
Nicht verzweifeln, sondern handeln!
Rede an der Universität von Colorado, im Mai 2001
Die in Australien geborene
Kinderärztin, Helen Caldicott, war Mitbegründerin und
Präsidentin von Physicians for Social Responsibility, der
Vereinigung „Ärztinnen und Ärzte in sozialer
Verantwortung“, der auch „Ärzte ohne Grenzen“
angehören und die 1995 mit dem Friedensnobelpreis ausgezeichnet
wurde. Helen Caldicott schrieb u.a. „Atomgefahr USA“,
„Missile Envy“ und „If You Love This Planet“.
Ihre Autobiographie nannte sie „A Desperate Passion“ .
Herzlichen Dank für Ihre Einladung. In meinem neuen Buch „The Coming of Nuclear War: The Lockheed Martin Presidency und The Star Wars Administration“ (auf deutsch etwa: Der drohende Atomkrieg: die Lockheed Martin Präsidentschaft und die Star Wars Regierung)
beschreibe ich, wie diese Regierung den Weltraum skrupellos mit
Wasserstoffbomben und Atomreaktoren aufrüstet und eine
Engergiepolitik betreibt, von der George W. Bush keine Ahnung hat,
wohin sie führt, denn er, der kaum ein Buch gelesen hat und dem
die Welt außerhalb der USA fremd blieb, ist nur eine
Galionsfigur, der eigentliche Präsident ist Cheney, ein
gefährlicher Mann: kalt, hart, rechts gerichtet und der Wirtschaft
durch und durch hörig. Die Welt befindet sich in aller
höchster Gefahr. Nur eine unblutige, friedliche Revolution des
Denkens und Handelns kann uns und unseren Planeten noch retten.
Dazu brauchen wir mehr weibliche Abgeordnete und am besten auch
eine Präsidentin, denn Männerspielzeuge wie Sprit fressende
Geländelimousinen und 1 900 neue Kraftwerke und Atomreaktoren
bringen unsere Erde um. Wichtige Posten in der Naturschutzbehörde
dürfen nicht weiter mit Lobbyisten der Viehzüchter, der Gen-,
Atom- und Kohleindustrie besetzt werden. Schon kleine
Änderungen in unserer Ernährungsweise können unsere Welt
ein bißchen retten. Warum stoppen wir also nicht das Bestrahlen
unserer Lebensmittel, mit dem die Atomindustrie tonnenweise ihre
radioaktiven Nebenprodukte entsorgt? Mit krebserregendem
Cäsium-137 werden nicht nur unsere Nahrungsmittel besprüht,
sondern auch unser Trinkwasser verseucht. Muß es erst zu einer
großen Kernschmelze kommen, damit Atomkraftwerke und radioaktiv
bestrahlte Lebensmittel verschwinden? Die Kernschmelze von Three Mile
Island wurde mit Rücksicht auf die Atomindustrie schamlos
vertuscht. Keine 20 km von dort entfernt liegt die Schokoladenfabrik
Hershey’s , die ihre Milch von den verstrahlten Weiden bezieht.
Schützen Sie ihre Kinder, kaufen Sie keine Hershey’s
Schokolade!
Rinder, Schafe, Schweine und Geflügel werden mit Antibiotika
vollgestopft, damit sie größer und fetter werden und keine
Infektionen bekommen. Diese Tierkrankheiten sind für den Menschen
völlig ungefährlich, aber wenn wir durch den Genuß von
Fleisch ständig Antibiotika zu uns nehmen, kann eine Infektion mit
einem gegen Antibiotika resistenten Bakterium zum Tode führen. Als
Ärztin fordere ich, dass diese Tiere keine Antibiotika
bekommen dürfen.
Unsere Kühe werden gnadenlos mit Wachstumshormonen gefüttert,
die aus ihnen Milchfabriken machen und bei uns Menschen
möglicherweise Krebs erregen. Auch wenn diese Nachricht schlecht
für McDonald‘s ist, aber auch in den USA wird der
Rinderwahnsinn zunehmen, wenn man die Rinder mit Kuhmist und den
Kadavern von Scrapie kranken Schafen füttert.
Düngemitteln werden Schwermetalle und andere Chemikalien
beigemischt, darunter auch Plutonium, von dem ein halbes Kilo über
die Welt verteilt, die ganze Menschheit an Lungenkrebs erkranken
ließe. Hier in Ihrer Nachbarschaft, in der Atomwaffenfabrik von
Rocky Flats, lagern Hunderte Pfund Plutonium! Düngemittel
enthalten aber auch Blei, Nickel, Kadmium, Quecksilber, Arsen, Dioxin,
Xylen, Chrom und Formaldehyd. Ist es nicht genial, seine giftigen
Abfallprodukte zu entsorgen, indem man sie einfach unter den
Dünger mischt und auf die Felder und unsere Nahrungsmittel
verteilt? Und die Umweltbehörde sieht bei all dem seelenruhig zu!
- 2 -
Als Kinderärztin liegt mir natürlich besonders der Schutz der
Kinder vor Chemikalien am Herzen. Krebserregende Chemikalien und
Radioaktivität in der Luft und im Wasser verpesten Algen,
Garnelen, Krustentieren und Fische. Je länger wir leben und diese
Tiere essen, um so länger sind wir Chemikalien und Strahlungen
ausgesetzt und um so häufiger erkranken wir an Krebs. Aber auch
immer mehr Kinder leiden schon an Krebs. Der kindliche Organismus kann
sich gegen Chemikalien und radioaktive Strahlung schlechter wehren,
weil Niere und Leber noch nicht voll ausgebildet sind und die
entarteten Zellen ebenso schnell wachsen wie die Kinder. Die Wirkung
von Schädlingsbekämpfungsmitteln wurde bisher immer nur an
Männern, nie an Frauen, Kindern oder Ungeborenen getestet. Dabei
werden jährlich 1 bis 3 Millionen Menschen damit vergiftet, die
meisten in den Entwicklungsländern.
Bereits 1984 gab es 8,627 Lebensmittelzusätze und 1.600 Pestizide.
Wie viele mögen es erst heute sein? Und vergessen wir auch nicht
die genetisch veränderten Lebensmittel. Wir sind so stolz auf
unseren Goldenen Reis, der aber hat leider einen ganz gravierenden
Nachteil hat, er enthält viel zu wenig an besonders für
Kinder wichtigem Vitamin A.
Mir gefällt es gar nicht, dass das menschliche Genom entdeckt und
patentiert wurde. Das ist so, als hätte man Gott patentiert. Ich
glaube an keinen Gott, aber ich glaube, dass die Natur und die
Evolution heilig sind.
Genetisch veränderte Lebensmittel sind höchst beunruhigend,
besonders dann, wenn sie Pestizide enthalten, die für Bienen
tödlich sind. Wenn die Bienen sterben, sterben auch die Pflanzen,
die Blumen, die Bäume und das Getreide weil sie nicht mehr
bestäubt werden. Aber die Leute von GATT und der
Welthandelsorganisation WTO - die keine Ahnung haben von
Biologie, Physiologie, Genetik, Umweltfragen oder Soziologie -
entscheiden, dass Länder, wie Australien pestizidhaltige
Düngemittel einführen müssen. Wenn eine Regierung ein
Gesetz beschließt, das die wirtschaftliche Entwicklung eines
anderen Staates behindert, dann wird dieses Gesetz von der WTO für
ungültig erklärt. Bisher konnte noch kein einziges Land eine
WTO-Entscheidung rückgängig zu machen. Heute privatisiert die
WTO das Wasser und morgen die Luft, und bald laufen wir alle mit
Sauerstoffkanistern auf dem Rücken herum.
Wie konnte es nur dazu kommen, dass die internationalen Konzerne so
mächtig und die Regierungen so schwach geworden sind, dass
kostenloses Gesundheitswesen Sozialismus genannt wird und das, was
Jesus predigte, Kommunismus? Unser Credo lautet, die Reichen
müssen reicher werden und arme Kranke darf man nicht kostenlos
behandeln. Die Hälfte aller Steuergelder geht an das Pentagon,
für Marschmusik und nutzlose Waffen. Dabei hat Amerika gar keine
Feinde und wenn es welche hätte, dann sollte es alles daran
setzen, sie zu Freunden zu machen. Auch die New York Times
meint, dass Verteidigungsminister Rumsfeld ein Psychopath ist, der
eigentlich kein öffentliches Amt bekleiden dürfte.
- 3 -
Keinem von Ihnen muss ich erzählen, wie gefährlich Pestizide
und chemische Düngemittel sind, die unsere Äpfel und die
Ananas von Dole so wunderschön aussehen lassen und Bienen,
Vögel, Ameisen und Kakerlaken töten und beim Menschen
Hodenkrebs verursachen. Wir bilden uns ein, dass Gott uns die Macht
gab, diesen Planeten zur beherrschen und in diesem Wahn töten wir
uns sogar selbst. Waschen Sie Baumwollkleidung und Windeln bevor Sie
sie ihren Kindern anziehen! Trocknen Sie Ihre Wäsche an der Sonne,
ohne Wäschetrockner brauchen wir keine Atomenergie! Sparen Sie
Wasser und Strom, spülen Sie Ihr Geschirr von Hand! Lassen Sie
Ihre Kinder ruhig gelegentlich ein Paar Läuse und Ihre Katzen und
Hunde Flöhe haben – aber bewahren Sie sie vor Krebs und
Leukämie erzeugenden Unkrautvernichtungsmitteln! Wir Ärzte
sollten nicht länger zusehen und endlich die Schließung von
Chemiefirmen wie Monsanto und Dow Chemical fordern! Es ist uns
gelungen, Kinderlähmung, Cholera, Typhus und Pocken zu besiegen,
warum sollten wir nicht auch Atomkriege, Rumsfeld und Atomkraftwerke
besiegen können?
Wie also können wir diese unsere Welt retten? Retten vor kleinen
Jungen, die im Pentagon mit Waffen spielen? Diese Frage
beschäftige mich schon als Kind, aber erst die Ermordung von
Robert Kennedy und Martin Luther King und der Wahl Richard Nixons zum
Präsidenten machten aus mir eine Bürgerrechtlerin und ein
radikales Antivietnamkrieg Blumenkind. Nach dem Tod meiner Mutter ging
ich zurück nach Australien und las Germaine Greer und Bertrand
Russel. Sie veränderten mein Leben. Ich wurde mutiger und es war
mir egal, was die Leute von mir dachten. Nachdem ich im Fernsehen noch
unbeholfen aber lautstark gegen die französischen Atomtests
protestiert hatte, unterstützten mich 75 % der australischen
Wähler, und wir zogen erfolgreich gegen Frankreich vor den
Internationalen Gerichtshof. Verändern auch Sie ihr Leben!
Informieren Sie Ihre Kongressabgeordneten und Senatoren! Gewinnen Sie
sie durch Dinnerparties oder appellieren Sie an ihr religiöses
Gewissen! Nutzen Sie die Macht des Fernsehens! Fallen Sie auf, tragen
Sie Gasmasken, wenn es sein muss, protestieren Sie auch
splitternackt! Kaum ein Politiker versteht etwas von Physik oder
Physiologie, aber sie alle haben Gefühle, an denen wir sie packen
können.
Bevor in Harvard „Physicians for Social Responsibility“
gegründet wurde, ging ich so lange als „Atomkraft Nein
Danke“ Aktivistin hausieren, bis 23.000 Ärzte
öffentlich erklärten, dass ein Atomkrieg der Gesundheit
schadet und schlecht ist für Patriotismus und Nationalismus. Das
führte sogar im Land des „Lieber tot als rot“ zu einer
Revolution. 80% der Amerikaner lehnten einen Atomkrieg und Atomwaffen
ab. Das war der Anfang vom Ende des Kalten Krieges, aber noch lange
nicht das Ende der Atomwaffen. Es gibt also noch viel zu tun. Es ist
uns gelungen, durch Aufklärung eine Revolution in Gang zu bringen,
aber wir dürfen nicht aufhören, unser Leben zu
verändern, zu informieren, zu kämpfen und unsere Botschaft
auch den einfachen Menschen verständlich zu machen.
Radio Lora, 10. Juli 2006
HELEN CALDICOTT
Desperate Passions & Direct Actions
University of Colorado, Boulder, May 18, 2001
Helen Caldicott is an Australian-born pediatrician. She was the founding President of Physicians for Social Responsibility; an
organization that was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995. She is the author of Nuclear Madness, Missile Envy and If You Love
This Planet. Her latest book is her autobiography, A Desperate Passion.
Thank you very much for inviting me to be. I've just written a book
called The Coming Nuclear War: The Lockheed Martin Presidency and the
Star Wars Administration. They're going to militarize space and have
orbiting hydrogen bombs and orbiting nuclear reactors. Rumsfeld is
truly evil. Kissinger called him the most ruthless man he's ever known,
so that's high praise from someone who knows ruthlessness.
Then we've just entered the energy policy of the Bush Administration.
Of course, George Bush doesn't really know what he's doing. He's
virtually never read a book, I would venture to say. He's virtually
never been out of the U.S. He has no curiosity. He just a frontispiece,
like the figurehead on the ship. The one who really is the President is
Cheney, who is a most dangerous man. If you want to read a profile of
him, there's a good one in the New Yorker. He's a cold, hard, totally
right-wing man who totally represents the corporations.
We're in the most serious trouble the world has ever been. This is the
most dangerous presidency you have ever had. What you have to have is a
revolution. As Jefferson said, America needs a revolution every twenty
years, and you need one now. I don't mean blood and guts and guns. I
mean a peaceful revolution in thinking and action, and particularly in
action and in passion. It's time that 53% of the Congress was composed
of women, and maybe a woman President. France has just passed a parity
law so that 50% of all elected representatives are women. It's beyond
time. I think we may hold the magic key to the future of the survival
of the planet.
The planet is in the intensive care unit. It's terminally ill. If we
continue with these wicked SUVs and this wicked energy policy and
building 1900 new energy plants and nuclear power plants and the like,
the earth will die.
To start off my talk, I want to go through the problems with our food
and then I'll talk about what I've done in this country and how easy it
is, because this is a democratic vacuum, to actually lead a revolution.
It's not difficult at all. First I want to read some parts of an
article in the New York Times written by Catherine Sealey. The headline
reads: Bush Picks Industry Insiders to Fill Environmental Posts.
"Bush has announced his intent to nominate a mining industry lobbyist
as the number two person at the Interior Department. He's chosen a
lobbyist for the National Cattlemen's Beef Association to be the
department's chief lawyer. His choice for number two at the EPA is a
lobbyist for Monsanto. He wants as chairman for the Council on
Environmental Quality a lawyer who represented General Electric, which
makes nuclear power plants and nuclear weapons and plutonium 238 for
the satellites.
Turner Bush, a Clinton appointee, Bush has nominated J. Steven Griles,
a mining industry lobbyist who once worked in the Interior Department
under James Watt, Reagan's first Interior Secretary. The collective
orientation of these people is clearly pro-development and
pro-exploitation of public resources for the personal profit of various
industries. John D. Graham is going to be administrator of the Office
of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the OMB. Remember that name,
because you'll be seeing it in the future. He's a Harvard professor who
has argued that the costs of most environmental regulations exceed
their benefits. He'll be in charge of reviewing all regulations
proposed by federal agencies. In a speech in 1996 at the Heritage
Foundation, he said, Environmental regulation should be depicted as an
incredible intervention in the operation of society. These people are
evil.
Bush said he'd nominate Linda J. Fisher to be the Deputy Administrator
of the EPA. Most recently, she headed the Government Affairs Office at
Monsanto. Mr. Griles, a mining lobbyist picked as Deputy Interior
Secretary, worked for the Reagan Interior Department in a series of
jobs. Then he became an executive, it's a revolving door, in
government, out of government, at the United Company, a coal, gas and
oil company. Until recently he was a lobbyist for national
environmental strategies, with clients including the National Mining
Association, Occidental Petroleum, Edison Electric and Coalbed Methane
Ad Hoc Committee.
William Geary Meyers III is Bush's choice to be Solicitor for the
Interior Department. As lobbyist for the National Cattlemen's Beef
Association and the Public Lands Council, Meyers advocated pro-rancher
positions. For Chairman of the White House Council on Environmental
Quality Bush has picked James Connorton, a partner at Sidley Austin, a
law firm that advises corporate clients and trade groups on
environmental law. He's represented GE and Atlantic Richfield in fights
against the EPA about cleanup of Superfund sites.
Bush's choice for Assistant Attorney General at Justice for the
Environment and Natural Resources is Thomas Sansanetti, a lawyer from
Wyoming who specializes in minerals and energy and is a member of the
Libertarian Federalist Society. As the Solicitor Interior in the first
Bush Administration, he helped negotiate the Exxon Valdez oil
settlement. Other Interior nominees include Bennett William Railey, a
lawyer who's represented farm interests, as Assistant Secretary for
Water and Science, and Lynne Scarlett, President of the Reason
Foundation, a Libertarian group, as Assistant Secretary for Policy,
Management and Budget.
When I was a little girl my nickname was Henny, because I'm Helen. One
of the first stories my father ever told me was about Henny Penny going
to tell the king the sky was falling. You call her Chicken Little. I'm
Henny Penny. All my life I've been running around telling the king the
sky was falling. It's really falling now.
Let's get into our food first, and then I'll tell you a little bit about how to save the world. [laughter] I kid you not.
Food irradiation. The nuclear industry is using their radioactive
byproducts from nuclear power to irradiate our food with huge, huge
doses of radiation. They use cesium 137, which is soluble, which has a
half-life of thirty years, which is a beta and gamma emitter. You can
read about cesium in Nuclear Madness. It is a potent carcinogen. It
concentrates in muscle. It's a potassium analog. Muscle is rich in
potassium. It's very soluble. They have it in a canister, metal, but
because of the 2 intense radiation it tends to get little pinholes in
the canister.
The cesium is kept underwater to prevent the gamma radiation, like
x-rays, from getting out and irradiating workers. When they want to
irradiate food, they put it on a conveyor belt and lift the cesium
canister out of the water. Unfortunately, sometimes the water is
contaminated with cesium because it's soluble and because of the
pinholes, so there have been occasions where the food has been sprayed
with cesium 137, not necessarily medically indicated to be eating food
with cesium 137 in it. They also use cobalt 60, which isn't quite so
soluble.
When you irradiate food with such huge doses of radiation you produce
radiolytic byproducts, hardly any of which have been tested for
carcinogenicity. There is one German study that has studied one of the
byproducts of radiation, a chemical product that has increased the
incidence of mutation in the colons of rats and I think increased the
incidence of colonic cancer in rats. Food irradiation should never
happen. The workers can be exposed to radiation as they're handling and
transporting it. The nuclear industry should be closed down tomorrow. I
think the only way the nuclear industry will be closed down and these
nuclear scientists get a dose of what they really deserve is if there's
a major meltdown. I don't want that to happen, but I think that may be
the only way.
Three Mile Island did melt down. It was a major meltdown. There's a
major cover-up on the results of that. General Admiral Rickover, who
was Jimmy Carter's major science advisor, who filled the oceans up with
nuclear submarines, squashed the report on Three Mile Island and said
if people had found out about it, it would have meant the end of
nuclear power in America. When he was dying, he told his
daughter-in-law Jane Rickover that he rued the day he squashed the
report. Hershey's is thirteen miles from Three Mile Island as the crow
flies. It's a very rich dairy area. Obviously that's where you put a
chocolate factory. We still don't have the ground measurements of
radiation on the surface soil, but these materials bioconcentrate by
orders of magnitude in the food chain at each stage, soil, grass, cows,
then human breast milk.
Babies are ten to twenty times more sensitive to radiation than adults,
so our children are at risks. Don't eat Hershey's chocolates. I've been
saying that for twenty years. They haven't sued me yet. If I were
wrong, they would have sued me.
To cattle, sheep, pigs they add antibiotics. I suppose the antibiotics
help them to grow into bigger, fatter animals, because the minor
infections they get are being prevented. However, the problem is that
the more antibiotics the animals get, the more likely it is that
bacteria will mutate to become insensitive to antibiotics. Number one.
We don't tend to get infected with bacteria that infect animals. So
that's not a major problem for us. But number two, we are imbibing
antibiotics continuously in our meat. If you eat antibiotics, and
normal bacteria that live in us, like strep in our throat and the
colonic flora, we're totally inhabited by bacteria, that's normal. It's
good for us, and it stimulates our immune mechanism. But taking
antibiotics we encourage the growth and development of resistant
bacteria within our own systems. Hence if we get sick and a staph
infects us that has been exposed to antibiotics, you've got an
antibiotic-resistant staph and it can kill you. So we're seeing more
and more antibiotic-resistant organisms, which is serious because we're
left with no armamentarium to treat our patients. All antibiotics for
cattle, sheep, pigs and chickens should be banned. I'm speaking as a
physician now.
They treat cattle with bovine growth hormone. There's some evidence to
suggest that that could be carcinogenic when we eat the cattle. The
poor old cattle, it stimulates their lactation and they pour out milk.
It knocks them out and they die early.
They're just milk-producers. We're so cruel, and it's all for money.
I want to talk about what I call "mad foot disease." Mad cow disease
I'm sure will develop in your country, and that will close down
McDonald's, which won't be a bad thing. It has a long latency period.
You feed your cows God knows what, including manure, like the British
have. I'm sure you feed them cut-up sheep. Sheep have a disease called
scrapie, which is the same organism, a prion, which gets transferred to
the cattle as they eat parts of the sheep and then the cattle manifest
it, the sheep manifest it, too, they get ataxia, they can't walk
straight and they die. We only get it from eating cattle. I'm sure it's
going to arise sooner or later in this country. I don't eat beef in
America. I eat it in Australia because we feed our cattle on grass. But
I'm finding that the fertilizer that farmers use, the chemical
factories and the steel factories that have filters in the stacks and
filter out chromium and mercury and lead and zinc, they send it off and
mix it with the fertilizer. The fertilizers contain a lot of heavy
metals and other chemicals, including, you've got a place called the
Lowry landfill here and it's contaminated with plutonium, that's so
toxic that one pound, if evenly distributed, hypothetically could give
everyone on earth lung cancer. You've also got Rocky Flats here, and
stuck in those pipes are literally hundreds of pounds of plutonium. Ten
pounds is critical mass. One day you could easily have a nuclear
explosion at Rocky Flats that would contaminate Denver forever. I
wouldn't live here for all the tea in China. You live in an extremely
dangerous place.
Broomfield Reservoir contains plutonium. There's a higher than normal
incidence of testicular cancer among the Broomfield population. But
these fertilizers are incredibly toxic. They contain lead. You know
what lead does. In very minute amounts it damages children's IQ,
particularly babies. I worked with Herb Needleman at Harvard when he
did that pioneering work on lead in children and IQ. The fertilizers
contain nickel, cadmium, mercury and arsenic, which George Bush is
particularly fond of, dioxins, xylene, and all sorts of organic
solvents, chromium and formaldehyde. Many of these materials are
carcinogenic. So, look, it's a great way to get rid of your toxic
waste, by mixing it with fertilizer and putting it on the crops of food
that we eat! What do these people think they're up to? How dare the EPA
allow that to happen? [applause]
There are 80,000 chemicals in common use, very few of which have been
tested adequately in animal studies to find out if they're
carcinogenic. Four or five get tested adequately per year. They're hard
studies to do. You have to feed them to baby rats or older rats, watch
them till they die and then do autopsies.
You have to do very careful epidemiological studies. The studies get
fouled up along the way, and they don't really like doing them. The
toxic chemical companies don't like doing them anyway. So the money is
pulled to do them. Many of the chemicals that we are exposed to on an
everyday basis are not tested to see if they cause cancer.
Being a pediatrician, I'm particularly concerned about the sensitivity
of children to chemicals. Chemicals are synergistic, one chemical
potentiates the effect of others. One and one doesn't equal two in
cancer induction. One and one might equal 3 twenty times the potency in
cancer induction. Then you add radioactive isotopes, which are being
produced all over the country in nuclear power plants, which
consistently pump out every second of every day radioactive materials
into the air and water. They use a million gallons a minute of cooling
water.
That cooling water is mildly radioactive. Then because of the
bioconcentration, the isotopes reconcentrate back in the algae, the
prawns, the crustaceans, the little fish, and the big fish. The big
fish are the most dangerous to eat because they bioconcentrate
radioactive elements and also organic chemicals in a much more highly
concentrated way because they eat the little fish. And they live
longer. That's why all the people get cancer, because we're exposed to
radiation and chemicals for longer periods of time, although the
incidence of childhood cancer is rising in an alarming fashion.
Children don't have a lot of fat, they're mostly water. When they
imbibe toxic chemicals, they're exposed to the chemicals at high
concentrations. Many of the chemicals we're exposed to are fat-soluble
and tend to go immediately to fat deposits, like the breast, which is
almost totally fat. We know that breast cancer is increasing. Gradually
these chemicals leach out over time from the fat. Children have no fat,
so the concentrations are higher in their bodies. Children's mitosis,
cell division, is very rapid, and it's in actively dividing cells and
the genes are being reproduced actively that the genes can be mutated.
They're more sensitive to toxic chemicals and to radiation. You can
literally see a baby growing before your very eyes. The human brain is
almost normal in size at the age of two. Just look at a baby's brain.
Children metabolize a lot of the chemicals faster. Often the
metabolites, most of this stuff is metabolized in the liver, that's
what the liver does, break down toxic chemicals, that's what it's for,
and often the metabolites are more dangerous than the actual chemical
itself. Often the excretion by the kidneys and liver is decreased. They
have immature kidneys and livers so that these materials hang around
longer in the body before they're excreted. They have a huge intake of
water and liquids and food per volume. Their surface area is much
larger than ours. That's why they dehydrate very rapidly when it's hot.
They take in a lot per unit volume, much more than we do, of food. If
the food's contaminated, they're taking in more contaminants.
The pesticides that they do test are usually tested in sexually mature
animals, not sexually immature animals and fetuses. Until very
recently, they tested chemicals on adult males. It's only until very
recently that women said, Hey, what about us? Our metabolism and
physiology are different from men. They didn't test these chemicals in
children, whose metabolism is very different from adults. Nor did they
test them in fetuses.
If you saw the Bill Moyers program on toxic chemicals, which I think
was a masterpiece, Bill Moyers had his blood tested. He's got 84
different chemicals in his body, organochlorines, dioxins and the like.
We all do, too. No wonder the incidence of cancer is going up. Poor old
Bill didn't look too happy when he was told it, either.
One to three million people a year are poisoned by pesticides, most in
developing countries because they don't tell them how toxic they are.
In 1973, cancer incidence was 17.7% of the population. In 1991 it had
risen to 23.7%. That's an increase of 6%. I'm sure it's much higher
now. They postulate that diet causes 30% of all cancers. Smoking causes
30% of all cancers. And infections like hepatitis B and C produce 30%
of all cancers. And there's a genetic predisposition. Some people get
colonic cancer at the age of 20 because they have a dominate gene for
colonic cancer. So many of the cancers that are induced are caused by
environmental problems. I read that in 1984 there were 8,627 food
additives. You just have to look at any food and you see all the
additives, including flavorings and colorings. There were 1,600
pesticides in the food supply in 1984. There must be many more now.
Then there are genetically modified foods. I gave the commencement at
Douglas College. A man came up who runs a genetic lab at Rutgers, a
really nice man, who left England because Margaret Thatcher privatized
his lab. He does genetic engineering and modification. He said, We've
conquered a mold that destroys the papaya in certain parts of the
world. We've conquered another fungus that destroyed sweet potatoes.
What about golden rice? I said, Golden rice doesn't provide enough
Vitamin A for children who are Vitamin A deficient. It could almost
aggravate their situation. These people are absolutely convinced that
what they're doing is right. It scares the hell out of me. I don't like
the fact that they've discovered and patented the human genome. It's
like patenting God. I don't believe in God anyway. I'm a pantheist. I
think that nature and evolution are sacred. I guess you could call that
God. And we think that we can own it? We are the most aberrant, deviant
species on the planet, without a doubt. I think that our neocortex
evolved so fast we couldn't keep up with it.
Genetically modified foods are very worrying, especially when they put
pesticides in them, which can kill the bees. When the bees die, the
birds die. GATT and WTO make this situation by orders of magnitude
worse because they decide that countries have to import fertilizers
that are polluted, they have to import all these pesticides. It's
happening in Australia. We have no law that would override the ruling
of the WTO. If you haven't read about the WTO, you need to investigate
it. It's composed of three men who are the world government. They are
trade representatives. They don't know any biology, physiology,
genetics, environmental science, sociology or anything. If a country
passes an environmental law which inhibits the growth of some
transnational, then the WTO rules that it's out of order. The only way
that country can overcome that ruling is to have total consensus of all
the countries in the world, about 130 have signed the WTO, including
the country that is complaining. And no country has overruled any WTO
ruling. GATT was written by the transnational lawyers. It's all
legalese. It's terribly hard for me as a physician to understand, like
it's hard for you to understand our medical language. We can talk over
your sickbed in language you wouldn't have a clue about. Then you die
the next day totally ignorant. Lawyers do the same thing.
They wrote 22,000 pages of tiny legalese language to run the whole
world. They are now privatizing the water supplies of the world. I
suppose they'll privatize the air and we'll all be walking around with
oxygen cylinders on our back.
Who set this whole thing up, the idea of transnational corporations
having all this power and big government's bad for you? You mustn't
have free medical care. That's socialism. But that's what Jesus
preached. Maybe it's communism. We believe in the rich getting richer
and no one having free health care. But by the way, half the tax
dollars you pay go to the Pentagon, which spends a third of a trillion
dollars a year on weapons that no one needs and marching bands when
America doesn't even have an enemy. If you have an enemy, you should
work with conflict resolution so that your enemy becomes your friend.
But you don't have any enemies. Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense, is
a sociopath. There's an article about him on the front page of the New York Times.
Read it. They said to him, What about the fact that we don't have any
enemies and you're trying to militarize space and put orbiting nuclear
reactors in space and laser beam technologies? He said, We've got to be
prepared. The guy needs therapy. Most of these people need therapy.
They need to be removed from office by you. I don't know if there's any
hope for them. Maybe they got so screwed up as kids that things are so
set in concrete that nothing will change them. They should not be in
public office.
Pesticides, I'm preaching to the converted. I wrote about it in If You Love This Planet.
But what's a pest? Is an ant a pest? There are so many thousands of
species of ants. They're magical things, and our lives depend upon
them. Is a cockroach a pest? They've been here for millions of years
longer than we have, and they're the only things that are going to
survive a nuclear war, so they're good things. They don't transmit
disease. But as you drive along the highway you see huge billboards
with a huge cockroach on it. You have to spray everything unto death,
including yourselves, to kill the roaches. They have as much right to
live as do we. Is a worm a pest? They've got a third the number of
genes that we do. They've got as much right to live as we have. They
aerate the soil and produce fertilizer and humus.
In Hawaii they plant pineapples and cover the row with plastic and
inject nematocides into the soil that cause testicular atrophy,
azospermia and testicular cancers. When the pineapple is harvested,
they chop it up and color it up with yellow. Dole pineapple has yellow
coloring in it and nematocides that cause testicular atrophy. Don't eat
pineapples.
Are bees pest? They fertilize the crops. If you put pesticides in the
crops with genetically modified food and kill the bees, the birds eat
the bees and then the birds die, à la Rachel Carson. I have a
friend in Australia who grew up on a sheep property. She said when she
was a little girl the skies were black with birds. Now you see one or
two. Putting pesticides in crops is wicked. We need to say what's the
definition of a pest.
There are no pests. We are part of the life cycle of creation. All of
those insects are part and create the ecology upon which we depend. But
we think that God gave us dominion over the planet. Does it mean God
gave us dominion to kill everything else and just have it for
ourselves? When we do that we'll die.
We're so stupid.
Herbicides. To kill weeds. What is a weed? I hear there's some nice
land here that the government has appropriated and there's spraying
herbicides all over it to make it poisonous. That leaches into the
underground water, so people are drinking herbicide water. That's a
great idea. The way you get rid of weeds is you all go out in the
community on Saturday morning and you pull the weeds out, by hand.
Actually using muscles. I love weeding my garden. I've got two and a
half acres. I do it by myself. My daughter married a French count, and
he just surveys the peasants doing the weeding, and that's me.
[laughter] It's meditative. My greatest intuitive leaps come when I'm
weeding. Fancy spraying crops with herbicides, with poisons. What the
hell do they think they're up to? Then it gets into our water and
probably the crops.
All these pesticides, they spray them on everything, apples, grapes,
broccoli. Then there are fungicides. You can't have fungus. You have to
have perfect apples that taste like cardboard and whose skins are so
thick I can hardly bite through them. I hate them. I like nice little
tender, juicy apples with worms in them. I add to my protein intake.
[laughter] When I was a kid we had worms in our apples. What's this
about vegetables and fruit looking perfect? Nothing's perfect. We've
all got pimples and moles and excrescences and cysts. Some are bald. We
can eat an apple that's got a worm in it. What are they doing spraying
all our food with these poisons?
I had to give a talk to the Australian cotton growers once. I didn't
really know what they sprayed on cotton. They spray everything but the
kitchen sink. You really should wash cotton clothes before you put them
on a baby. We use cotton diapers. I washed them and hung them out in
the sun to dry, which is a great bacteriocidal agent. None of you
should use clothes dryers. If you do, never use them again. Hang your
clothes outside in the sun in the summer and beside the furnace in the
winter. About the amount of electricity you use in the clothes dryers
equals the amount that nuclear power generates. Don't use dishwashers.
Wash them by hand. Put some hot water in the sink. Don't have the tap
running all the time so you waste water.
Wash them and drain them. There are lots of ways to save energy to prevent global warming and to save the earth.
I found out that cotton oil is used to make margarine. The cotton is
drenched in pesticides and then we eat it. They spray pesticides and
weedicides on lawns. My lawn is all weeds and if I mow it, it looks
green. I shouldn't be mowing it because I'm pumping out more CO2. I
should be using a hand mower. That's where I have to admit guilt. The
lawns are navy blue. They're full of this awful fertilizer. A lawn
should be sort of green.
There should be ants and spiders and maybe some snakes. Little beetles,
ladybugs eat the aphids that damage the roses. Read Edward Wilson from
Harvard to learn about this, a zoologist and sociobiologist. Children
and dogs that play on suburban lawns in America have a higher than
normal incidence of soft tissue sarcomas, which are extremely malignant
muscle tumors which usually kill the kid and the dog very fast. Lawns
are medically contraindicated. No one should ever use fertilizer,
pesticides, weedicides ever again. You go into the hardware shops and
there are these huge plastic sacks of everything you can possibly
imagine, all pumped out by the chemical companies. The pesticide and
chemical industry is a byproduct of petrol that we use to drive our
cars.
Schools. They spray pesticides in schools. Why? What are they trying to
get rid of? When I was a kid at school, we had a few flies. My
grandchildren have had lice recently. You can get them out with a fine
comb. But my daughter washed their hair with some awful organochlorine
that can increase brain cancers and leukemia. So you have a few lice?
What's wrong with that? It's not going to kill you. We put this stuff
on our cats and dogs that's carcinogenic. We get a few fleas in the
house and we fumigate the house with carcinogens. Then we can all get
cancer later, but at least the fleas are dead. Doctors don't do
anything. We stay in our consulting rooms and wait to see who comes in
with cancer. If a kid comes in all bruised and we do a blood picture
and there are huge numbers of white blood cells and no platelets and we
say, I'm sorry, your child has leukemia. We're going to have to nearly
kill the child to survive. Over a two-year period we poison that child
like you can't believe. We irradiate that child. Later on they may get
a second primary cancer secondary to the treatment. Instead of getting
up, the doctors, and closing down Monsanto and Dow Chemical and the
like, we wait till the cancers appear. We are very stupid. The medical
dictum says, that if you have a disease you can't cure, the only
recourse is prevention. That's how we stopped polio, cholera, typhoid,
smallpox. We prevent it. So maybe we've got to start a whole new
doctors' organization, as well as trying to stop nuclear war, Rumsfeld
and nuclear power plants.
They fumigate offices. They put pesticides and fungicides in paint. I
remember painting a wall not long ago. The next day I had eruptions,
like hives, but not itchy, they were elevated areas in the skin. I had
a tremendous headache. I realized I had painted a wall and there were
toxic chemicals in the paint. I'll tell you an apocryphal story. A
woman developed epistecsis, nosebleeds. She had just moved into a new
house. You have to have tight-fitting seals in new houses so you can
heat the house and the heat doesn't escape. That's energy efficient and
you cause less global warming. The doctor said, You're sick, you can't
go to work. She stayed at home for two years until she developed an
invasive nasopharyngeal carcinoma into her brain and she died. What had
happened was, formaldehyde is used in carpets, in drapes, to stick
fiberboard together. She was breathing in formaldehyde, which killed
her. We live with these chemicals every day.
You get in a car, put the car in the sun, the temperature goes up very
high. You put the windows up and you can measure 140 volatile organic
substances in that car. Formaldehyde, polyvinyl chloride, all sorts of
things. You've seen vinyl chloride in the Bill Moyers thing. It's so
toxic, I remember going to grand rounds at Harvard at Beth Israel once.
There was a man with an angiogenic sarcoma of the liver. He was dying.
He had cleaned out a vat of vinyl chloride gas once in his life. The
supposed etiology was the vinyl chloride. It's polymerized into plastic
wrap. Everything's wrapped in it, including my cup of tea in the motel.
You go to a Holiday Inn and the whole lavatory seat is covered with it.
It's an unstable polymer. It leaches vinyl chloride gas into the food,
particularly cheese and meat. It's very fat-soluble, so it leaches into
the food, into the fat of the meat and the cheese. Never use it in a
microwave. The activation of the molecules can leach much more vinyl
chloride into the food. Do we wonder that cancer is going up?
You see this PVC wrap everywhere. Then you read C.R. Caldman's work
about the fact that cans, we call them tins of food, you know how they
used to get rusty? You'd open it and after a few days the food would
taste of rust? They line the cans now with plastic that contains
estrogen mimickers in quite high concentrations. So if you've got a
nodule of breast cancer cells, you could stimulate your breast cancer
and die more quickly.
You know those polycarbonate bottles, I'll bet someone's got one. Do
you know where this water comes from? Do you know that the Mafia tip
toxic chemicals at night into aquifers and lakes and rivers? You don't
know where the water's coming from. The water out of your tap is almost
certainly clean and fairly potable. But this polycarbonate bottle
contains estrogen mimickers, particularly when you drink Coke, which is
a corrosive substance, quite acidic. It's medically contraindicated
ever to drink anything out of these stupid bottles.
Babies' pacifiers, children's toys have estrogen-mimicking substances
in them to make them more flexible and malleable. These chemicals and
PCBs are damaging the wildlife, particularly in the Arctic. Somehow
with the vortexes of the air, these materials get up there. The polar
bears and seals, there's a very high concentration in the breast milk
of Eskimo women. And PCBs and the like hang around forever.
There are 325 food pesticides and metabolites in over 5,000 food
products. I don't even like eating in America. I don't know what I'm
eating. I just had a nice salad. It's probably got alar on it,
fungicides. I like it at home, where I grow heirloom vegetables in my
own garden plot. We've got our own chickens, our own eggs every day.
I'm scared to eat.
How to save the world. This is my book called A Desperate Passion.
I couldn't call it that in Australia because Australians don't like
anything that's too emotional. We're all Irish convicts. You understate
things but you drink a lot of beer. I suppose I'll give you a brief
summary of what I did. I grew up in Melbourne, Australia. I was always
different. I had no friends as a kid, I don't know why I was different.
Someone called me "precocious" once. I knew it was bad, but I didn't
know what it meant. When I was 15 I read On the Beach. It changed my
life and branded my soul. I lived in Melbourne, where the only people
left alive after the nuclear war were people in Melbourne, and then
gradually the radiation came down and killed everybody. At the end of
the book the beautiful wide streets of Melbourne are still there and
George slaying the dragon on the steps of the public library and a
blind is gently flapping in the breeze, and that's the end of life on
earth.
In 1956 they couldn't do it, but soon after they could destroy life on
earth. I never thereafter trusted any adult. I started medicine when I
was 17. I learned about Muller and the drosophila fruit fly and the
radiation and how radiation causes genetic abnormalities. I couldn't
understand why Russia and America and China were testing bombs in the
atmosphere. When I was 24 I had a baby and said, I'm an adult now. I've
seen a lot of couples, a little boy and a little girl, come in and the
little girl gets pregnant and overnight when she delivers she becomes
an adult. The little boy may never become an adult. If you go to the
Pentagon, it's full of little boys who compare the missiles to the
family jewels. That's what they do.
Then I came to America in 1966 for three years. I wasn't active. I was
a doctor. I had three babies under three. I used to weep into my
ironing as I listened to George Wold speak at the moratorium at MIT
against the Vietnam War. I got up one hot, humid Boston morning and
there, lying bleeding to death from the head, was Bobby Kennedy. I
turned the radio on one night and there was Louie Lions on NPR, weeping
into the microphone. Martin Luther King had just been shot. I was here
when Nixon was elected, a grey day. My ex-husband was so depressed he
didn't get up the whole next day. I was here for the flower child
anti-Vietnam thing and civil rights, and I was radicalized.
I went home. My mother had just died. I became depressed. During the
angry phase I read Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch. I thought, Can I
do that? Can I say that? And I did. And I didn't give one goddamn what
anyone thought of me. For the first time in my life I knew for certain
what I knew to be the truth. It was a white-hot certainty. There were
some people outside my house trimming the trees and chopping them. I
screamed at them. I said, What are you chopping those down for? This
was 1970. I said, These trees suck up carbon dioxide and prevent
pollution and make oxygen. I rang the Lord Mayor and they've never
touched those trees again. I saved a hotel they wanted to knock down
next door which became a heritage hotel. I did all sorts of crazy
things. I really upset people terribly, and I didn't care. I didn't
like upsetting them. I just had to speak my truth. I had a sort of a,
not a change of heart, not an evolution, a turning point in my life.
Then I read the three volumes of Bertrand Russell. He was such a
wonderful man. He spoke the truth loudly and clearly. If he was proven
to be wrong, he'd say, OK, that was wrong. This is the truth. He gave
me a lot of courage to do what had to be done. I found out France was
testing bombs in the Pacific and we were getting high fallout in our
water. So I wrote a letter to the paper saying children could get
leukemia from strontium 90 concentrating in milk. They didn't publish
it. I called the editor and said, Where's my letter? He said,
condescendingly, Madam, we get hundreds of letters a day. I said, Yeah,
but mine's important. I talked him through it and he published it. That
night I was on television. Pinned to the wall like a pin through a
butterfly's belly because I didn't know everything. I made mistakes.
You know how you learn? You stand up and make mistakes. There was an
old lady dying. I said, What would you have done differently? She said,
I would have made more mistakes.
Don't worry what other people think of you. You don't need approval.
That was Clinton's Achilles heel. He needed approval. He had no guts.
He didn't eradicate nuclear weapons. That's another lecture. I just
went ahead. In medicine we make mistakes. We sometimes, I hate to tell
you, kill people. We take out the wrong kidney or give the wrong dose
of a drug. I've never killed anyone, but I nearly have. If I had I
would have given up medicine. But you never do that again. You read the
whole literature and become a good doctor by making mistakes. You
become a good public speaker by standing up and watching the sleepiest
person in the audience and waking them up. You learn as you go.
I was on the TV talking about the French tests. I found out the
Australians didn't like the French because they thought they were
arrogant. I liked their food, their wine, their clothes. The
Australians hated them. In nine months, 75% of the people spontaneously
rose up and marched in the streets. No organization. Don't like
organizations because egos climb on egos, particularly male egos. There
was spontaneous uprising of the people of Australia. We took France to
the International Court, and she tested underground after that. So I
saw what Jefferson said, an informed democracy will behave in a
responsible fashion. What you people have to do is teach. There's Theo
Colvin at the moment in Congress, trying to teach 49% of Congress who
are desperately concerned about Bush about all these chemicals. Go and
help her. She desperately needs help. Those of you who understand the
science, the physiology, the pathogenesis and the chemistry, go and
help Theo. Teach your local Congresspeople. Get them in a room, nice
dinner, lots of wine, lock the door and then go for it. Teach them. Get
your Senators. I'm a true conservative, a deep conservative. I believe
in conserving the creation. Most of these people go to church on
Sunday. Get at them through Jesus, or whatever their religion is. Go
for their souls and their morality. They've all got it, even if it's
hidden quite deeply with layers of psychic numbing.
Teach your Sunday Schools. Teach your churches. Go into the schools and
teach. Broadcast far and wide. Go onto the television. Here's someone
with a gas mask. You'd be great on television. All wear gas masks and
go and take over the State House just up the Lowry Superfund site to
clean up the Rocky Mountain Arsenal. I don't know what you do with
Rocky Flats. Close down Cheyenne Mountain, which is prepared any second
of any day to blow up the world. You've got to get active, not be
passive. It's no good sitting around saying, What can I do? I'm so
depressed. In fact, a year ago I thought, I'm 62. Maybe I've done
enough. Maybe I should just garden and be with my grandbabies. I got so
depressed I had to take some medication. I went to see a counselor. You
know what I realized? If I don't do this work I get profoundly
depressed. If I do it and I'm really active, I have the illusion, and
maybe the reality, that I'm changing something and I can save the
world. Not many people are smarter than I am, and that's true for you,
too. Politicians are usually pretty dumb. The truth is, less than 3% of
politicians are scientifically literate, including the President,
Cheney. They don't have a background in science. They're businessmen.
They're lawyers who grease the wheels for the business people who are
poisoning and killing the earth.
Education is key. Using TV in a clever way. Gandhi was clever at it. He
used asymmetry. He didn't go back to take on the British Raj with a
uniform and a gun. He went almost stark naked, in a loincloth. He led a
salt march with absolute dignity and integrity, and guess what, he won.
Recently Patch Adams and I took our clothes off and walked stark naked
down Van Ness Avenue with fifty other people who were stark naked to
draw attention about the possible risk of nuclear war with Y2K. The
Pentagon lost all their early warning systems for eight months, but
they didn't tell us. The press were terribly bored.
Like a group of Jewish people in Denmark. A young man went to warn them
about Hitler. They were bored. They yawned and said, We've heard that
before. As if hearing it before negates the reality. He told them again
about the gas ovens. They yawned again. He burst into tears of
frustration. They got it and fled and saved their lives. Emotion is
appropriate. So we walked stark naked. We rang the press and said,
We're going to take our clothes off and walk down San Francisco. The
press were there in a flash. They didn't show any of the naughty bits
on television because it's very puritanical here. In Australia they
would have. We looked pretty nice stark naked. And you know what? We're
all stark naked in the face of the danger, the threat from nuclear
power, from nuclear war and Star Wars. They're going to fight wars from
space, vaporize cities from space, that's the plan. We're stark naked
in the face of these chemicals in our food. We're all beautiful. One's
fat, one's skinny. The human body is beautiful. It's when you put
clothes on it that you become artificial. Maybe we should all take our
clothes off just to show how we feel. There's not a simpler or more
courageous act to do. And people were so excited, because they'd really
done something courageous.
I won't go through everything else I've done. I suppose I'll finish by
saying that when I was at Harvard I started the group Physicians for
Social Responsibility and staggered round like an anti-nuclear bag lady
recruiting about 23,000 physicians. We started saying nuclear war is
bad for your health. It's not good for patriotism, for nationalism. You
get vaporized. Your eyes melt. People say, Really? For most people,
supporting better dead that red, we had a revolution in this country to
80% opposing nuclear war and nuclear weapons. That led to the end of
the Cold War, but not to the end of the weapons. They're still in
place. I was asked to speak to the national annual meeting of the
Morticians Association. They were worried about 7 embalming radioactive
bodies. We said, Don't worry, because you'll be one yourself. What we
achieved was a revolution through education. It means changing your
lives, getting out there, teaching, being clever with television,
asymmetrical action. You can all think of things to do that will grab
the imagination of ordinary people. [applause]
Other Alternative Radio Programs:
Helen Caldicott: "Ecology & the Human Spirit"
Helen Caldicott: "Technology, Spirituality & the Future of the Planet"
For information about obtaining cassette copies or transcripts of this or other programs, please contact:
David Barsamian
Alternative Radio
P.O. Box 551
Boulder, CO 80306
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