Staying Connected

On the days I actually make it to a desk, this is my begin-the-day-ritual: I scan the headlines at Environmental Health News.

It's my homepage. My home base. My life line--one essential way I stay plugged into what's happening around the world. How I stay plugged into the hurry-up-and-wait-world of environmental health science and policy. Scanning the top stories at EHN helps me transition from launching littles into their days with full bellies. And appropriate attire.

There, I can scan the top news and editorials on issues related to health, justice and the environment. And remember why I've plunked myself into the middle of this maelstrom. Why being in the midst of all these issues is among the most important places a mother could be.

Here, too, one can read up on the latest science that trained EHN fellows translate for those of us who still break a sweat when too many numbers follow decimal points, or when acronyms and chemical names--like 2,2',3,3',4,4',5,5',6,6'-Decabromodiphenyl ether (BDE-209) (see what I mean?)-- outnumber familiar words. The EHN fellows take the latest research and parse it into: what you need to know; what the researchers did; what they found; and what it means. And they use standard language to do so. Language that this beleaguered mother only three sips into a blessed cup of coffee can read.

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Today, the headline that reached across the screen and rattled me was this one. About Japan issuing radiation detectors to pregnant women and children who live near the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant.

About 300,000 children and pregnant women in Fukushima Prefecture will get dosimeters to monitor their exposure to radiation spewed from the hobbled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant.

For some time, I've been drawn to the science of monitoring bodies in an era when we, as a society, are growing more attuned to the fluid relationship between what's around us and what's in us. How, as Sandra Steingraber has written so eloquently, our bodies are living scrolls, telling the history of where and how we've lived.

Photo:  Rebecca Gasior Altman (2007)
Body casts of pregnant women symbolizing implications of exposures for future generations. 

I'd root myself among the camp that believe people have the right-to-know about what's in their bodies, despite all the attendant uncertainties about what it means to know.

Or, for that matter, what's in their food. My friend, Carolyn Raffensperger at the Science and Environmental Health Network, once told me about the radiation detectors issued to women who foraged for food near Chernobyl.

But I often wonder about what it feels like to know. Or to submit to knowing.

I recently came across these striking photos and personal account posted last March by National Geographic photographer, Karen Kasmauski. As she came to find out, Kasmauski was contaminated with the legacy of Chernobyl fallout while sharing traditional foods on assignment, she thinks, in Sweden. Herein, she describes the click--click-clicking of geiger counters, the experience of undergoing whole body scans, the handing down of an unknown destiny:

“Because you are contaminated,” he replied. “You’re registering cesium-137 in your whole body count. The signature of the isotope is from Chernobyl.”

And then the waiting. And not knowing. "Watchful waiting," I've heard it called.  Of "Living with Radiation."All-the-while realizing the possibility of never knowing what the numbers might mean. Of perhaps society never knowing, as Kasmauski wrote, the "long-term consequences and hidden costs of nuclear power."

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So, this morning, I'm thinking about those parents who, like me, packed bags for their kids to go off to school or to camp or to a friend or relative's. And like me, they might have packed extra socks and a snack. But unlike me, they also slipped in their child's radiation detector.

What must this feel like?

Is there relief in being able to check, to have access to a number? Does that relief, at some point, give way to an uneasy mix of questions that have only partial answers: for what do these numbers mean, and how, as a parent, to respond?

Epigraph

"Civilization's values remain rooted in philosophies, religious traditions, and ethical frameworks devised many centuries ago. Even our economic system, capitalism, is a half millennium old. So our daily dealings are still heavily influenced by ideas that were firmly set before anyone knew the world was round. In many ways, they reflect how we understood the world when we didn't understand the world at all. Our economic, religious and ethical institutions ride antique notions too narrow to freight what we've learned about how life works on our sparkle dot of diamond dust in the space. These institutions resist change; to last this long, they had to. But they lack mechanisms for incorporating discoveries about how life operates. So they haven't assimilated the last century's breakthroughs: that all life is related by lineage, by flows of energy, by cycles of water, carbon, nitrogen and such; that resources are finite, and creatures fragile... In important ways, they poorly correspond or respond to a changing world... [And] though we are fearless about revolutionizing technologies, we cling to concepts that no longer reflect realities."

Carl Safina (2010 The View from Lazy Point, pp. 15-16) 

I find this true on many levels, from the institutional to the individual. At least for me, as I bumble my way through parenting young children or putting food on the table, and stumble across the same themes in the study of health, society and the environment. To the Scratch is one space to explore the interface between old and emerging patterns of being in the world, whether personal or political. Or both.

To the Scratch

A scratch. A mark or line drawn to signify a starting place. A place to start. To start from the scratch is to start from a beginning. I imagine many possible beginnings. 

To reverse course, and begin again despite the outcomes of previous attempts. 

A starting place where one might draw advantage from previous experience or wisdom. Or, one might not. 

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“There was once a village along a river. The people who lived there were very kind. These residents, according to parable, began noticing increasing numbers of drowning people caught in the river’s swift current. And so they went to work devising ever more elaborate technologies to resuscitate them. So preoccupied were these heroic villagers with rescue and treatment that they never thought to look upstream to see who was pushing the victims in.”

 Sandra Steingraber from Living Downstream (2010 De Capo Press)  

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"Food is never just food. It's also a way at getting at something else: who we are, who we have been, and who we want to be." 

Molly Wizenberg (2009 A Homemade Life, p. 2)