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WAR IN HEAVEN For the past 24 years, my family has vacationed on Manitoulin Island, one of the world’s great magical places. One of its grand sandy beaches at Providence Bay is several miles long. Part of that beach has an undulating boardwalk, almost a mile long, which dreamily dances over the dunes along the shores of Lake Huron. There the chatter and cries of Canada Geese, ducks, and seagulls fill the air, deer come to drink at night and raccoons fish for crayfish by the light of the moon. During the day children build elaborate sandcastles and one time sculpted an enormous mermaid. People of all ages wander through the soft sand barefoot, and barefoot lovers wander along the boardwalk watching the sun set into the lake in front and taking in the scent of the wind-sculpted pines that line the boardwalk behind it. These Manitoulin dunes are home to several hundred species of flowering plants usually found at sea shores, attracting many botanists for study every year. This Spring the owner of the Providence Bay Home Hardware store suggested to the town council that the boardwalk needed to be protected. He offered to sell them several hundred gallons of “Copper II”, a wood preservative made from petroleum distillates containing copper, cadmium and arsenic - neurotoxins and carcinogens all. It is used to make pressure-treated wood and to treat raw wood. In combination, these chemicals have the additional horrific property of changing over time to become increasingly toxic, as University of Florida researchers recently published. The timing was peculiar, too. All Canadian and American producers of such wood preservatives and pressure-treated wood, announced in January, in response to overwhelming scientific evidence and public demand, that these products would be phased out completely by 2004 - something already the case in Europe since the late 1980’s. Oddly, the Home Hardware owner is one of that company’s directors and must have known about his company’s voluntary phase-out decision and the reasons for it. Could it be that the prospect of taking thousand of gallons of Copper II to the hazardous waste disposal in Sudbury, instead of selling it, had something to do with this? We’ll never know. Anyone interested in knowing what this set of chemicals can do need only watch “Erin Brokovich” played by Julia Roberts for which she won an Oscar. The research done by that feisty lawyer, which resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of compensation payments, paved the way for this universal voluntary phase-out before governments have even put legislation in place. Copper is toxic to aquatic life. As it leaches out of the treated wood, it causes cycles of destruction followed by regeneration every few months, but it is unknown for how long this cycling goes on, and if some other chemical attacks the spawning eggs as well, recovery is not possible at all. To humans copper is neurotoxic and enters our systems through contaminated drinking water. Cadmium is a carcinogen and one of the main causes of Parkinson’s, now a well-established fact in mainstream medical research. Medical journals have published data since the early 1980’s showing how cancer is caused in men working with pressure-treated wood. Arsenic is deadly in every conceivable fashion and one of the causes of ADHD in children, if their mothers were exposed to it while pregnant. Its mode of action appears to be by damaging the pathways which allow the body to maintain the proper essential fatty acid status. Arsenic’s preferred mode of entry is via the skin and breathing. Thus, pregnant women walking through the sand at providence Bay, children on the swings sets treated with Copper II, immune-deficient people on cortisone, old people with lowered immunity, and people with respiratory problems seeking the clean air of Manitoulin Island were going to be hit by an invisible toxic wave designed to kill termites and winding up killing them. Only slowly. The dose ingested by a termite is proportionately mammoth for it. The amount breathed in by us allows us to recover, only to unleash its effects in a heart-attack weeks later or maybe in a kid from hell 9 months from now. On May 8, I got a call from Greg Niven, the creator of that marvelous New Year’s Eve dinner and owner of the quaint School House Restaurant in Providence Bay. Chef Greg and his wife Heather had recently become parents of a little girl who joined their preschool-aged son. Greg was clearly in a state of high alarm. “The local hardware store wants to selling hundreds of gallons of wood preservative to the town,” he told me. “That stuff is deadly! Tomorrow the town council is meeting to vote on this, I must get some first class information to them at once! The last time the town sprayed the boardwalk some 5 years ago every breath hurt for about a week after! We need help - fast!” Greg and Heather happen to read my Vitality articles regularly and figured I might be able to suggest some tried and true activist tactics. That proved a correct hunch. Within an hour they were in touch with super-effective activist Debra Barrie in Smith Falls, an expert on the health effects of preservatives. Debra spearheaded the movement that has resulted in the Canadian building industry’s voluntary phase-out of these products. Debra’s health is severely compromised by years of exposure to the arsenic fumes of burning pressure-treated wood, but she uses every ounce of energy to stop this terrible health hazard. Go to her website and be amazed! By the time another hour had passed, Greg had informed the island’s newspaper, The Manitoulin Expositor, whose reporter Neil Zacharjewcz interviewed Debra and me and began calling the town councilors – the single most effective way to get any politician’s attention. Greg also called the local doctor, Dr. Maurianne Reade. She and her husband had sat at the table next to ours and we had spent part of that New Year’s Eve night chatting about the Reade’s native Yukon and our shared love for Manitoulin Island. Greg and Heather had joined us to show off their lovely new baby girl. What we didn’t know, until we all read the excellent May 15th article in the Expositor, was that my physician husband and Dr. Reade are both members of CAPE (Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment). Thus Providence Bay most providentially was blessed with an on-the-spot physician knowledgeable about environmental toxins and motivated to do something about them. Greg’s political conscience proved to be as zesty as his marvelous dishes: off he went in person to as many councilors as he could reach before the sun turned the sands of Providence Bay turned pink and the sun sank into Lake Huron. The next day the chef and the doctor attended the council meeting to learn about the fate of Providence Bay’s boardwalk. The message had got through: although public comment is not part of the protocol of such committee meetings, Dr. Reade was asked to comment, which she did most ably. The councilors quite correctly replied that 15 years ago, when the boardwalk was built, nobody knew about these toxic horrors, and not much was known even 5 years ago. Now that thew knew they weren’t about to persist in such harmful actions. When the Expositor’s editor read reporter Neil Zacharjewicz’s article and came to the description of wood preservative being absorbed through the skin, she said, she felt “her arms tingling”. That prompted her to put the story on the front page with an inch high headline. One week later, my husband and I walked along the boardwalk after a wonderful dinner at Greg’s and – for now at least – once more the spirit of Manitou spreads its peace over the island. This summer children will frolic on the swings, women will walk on the sand, lovers will wander along the boardwalk, and the magic will be complete. |
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www.thestar.com/conwatch for Consumer Watch information The book on pesticide alternatives by S. Tvedten, The Bug Stops Here (2002) is available for downloading totally free of charge, in HTML or PDF formats, on www.thebestcontrol.com. For house and garden environmental information e-mail HealthBuildingNetwork@yahoogroups.com |
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