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Earth Day is upon us again.

Most previous Earth Days have attempted – often quite successfully – to raise awareness of our individual responsibility to protect the environment, to protect the planet from global warming and other climate change issues, reducing the carbon in our lives – our air and water and atmosphere.

We’ve seen efforts at encouraging energy audits of our homes and businesses toward conserving energy and work us away from fossil fuel consumption and on to use of solar and wind alternatives on massive and neighborhood scales.

We’ve seen local community groups zero in on urban and community gardening as another way of achieving organic dominance over processed farming and foods.

What we have likely not spent enough time on is advocating for, nay, demanding, polluting corporations and governments to stop fouling the air and water in the most poverty-stricken of our neighborhoods and communities, invariably dominated by families and businesses of color. That’s the American Way – and it has ever been thus. It has and always be a matter of environmental justice.

Dating to the beginnings of the industrial revolution – the mid-19^th Century – our cities’ and rural manufacturing might and energy production have been placed where they knew you’d find the least political power and organized resistance to the foul air and water created by their operations. This, of course, resulted in wide disparity in the health of families raised and reproduced in the shadow of those facilities pouring hundreds of killing chemicals into the essential elements of life: the air our children breathe and the water they need to survive and lead healthy lives.

Any wonder why there’s been a 600-700% increase in asthma rates among children over the last 30 years and an exacerbating rate of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) among older people, who, for several generations were already on their way by smoking those oversold cigarettes. (Check out the maps - the industrial northeast has the highest rates of asthma.)

But these were often, nevertheless, the job-producers in many towns and cities. So, just as the mining initiatives and waste-burning facilities of today and yesterday hold the promise of employment, so did they more assuredly promise the highest of risks to the health of their workers and those community members and politicians who believed themselves tied to their success. They still do.

This year for Earth Day, we take on the subject of environmental justice and the manner in which official state, county and municipal government continue to ignore the effects of their environmentally dangerous decisions on their less-powerful constituents’ health and wellbeing and the will they lack to curtail the pollution destroying all of living matter in all of our rural and urban areas – in Minneapolis, currently, the Hennepin County garbage burner (HERC) and Northern Metals Recycling. We look, too, at the complicity of the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) and Minnesota Department of Health (MDH) in either ignoring or actually aiding the permitting of such facilities to continue their deposits of dangerous chemicals into the air and/or waters of our urban and rural living venues.

Still, organizations concerned with our sustainability and safety are making some strides toward resolution at the community level as well as policy advocacy in lawmaking and rulemaking circles locally and statewide. An event celebrating the day and those efforts will be held on Earth Day itself, April 21^st(22nd in some places), at the Urban League in North Minneapolis, Its organizers and speakers join us Monday morning.

TTT’s ANDY DRISCOLL and MICHELLE ALIMORADI talk with several advocates taking our elected representatives and their corporate collaborators to task for the damage that never seems to end for those living in and around the worst of them.

GUESTS:

KAREN MONAHAN – Environmental Justice Community Organizer, Sierra Club North Star Chapter

LOUIS ALEMAYEHU – Environmental Justice Advocates of Minnesota (EJAM) officer; Board member, North American Water Office; Writer, educator, activist, poet, father, grandfather of African and Native American heritage

SAM GRANT – Principal, Ujima Consulting and Movement Center for Deep Democracy; Founder and consultant with Full Circle Community Institute and Afro Eco

Remember – call and join the conversation – 612-341-0980 – or Tweet us @TTTAndyDriscoll or post onTruthToTell’s Facebook page.

Watch us from Studio 5! TruthToTell is now seen live on Livestream and later on Blip.tv or in iTunes

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Time was when we sauntered through the days and years not only not worried about the mercury we lived with, but rather fascinated by all of its apparent properties…dangerous properties, it turns out, for many – fatal. Our mouths could be full of it, our thermometers have always relied on it for taking temperatures, we’re injected with it, we swim in pools where it’s part of the purification system (chlorine), and we light our spaces with it – in both bulbs and switches.

A lot of the descriptions of the terrible things mercury can do to us can be found on a variety of websites, including the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA), and some of it is enlightening, if not as cautionary as it might be. Here’s part of what the MPCA’s description says:

Mercury is a silvery, liquid metal at room temperature - the only metal known to exist in liquid form naturally. It is sometimes referred to as one of the "heavy metals." Like water, mercury can evaporate and become airborne. Because it is an element, mercury does not break down into less toxic substances. Once mercury escapes to the environment, it circulates in and out of the atmosphere until it ends up in the bottoms of lakes and oceans. Depending on its chemical form, mercury may travel long distances before it falls to earth with precipitation or dust.. 

Bacteria and chemical reactions in lakes and wetlands change the mercury into a much more toxic form known as methylmercury. Fish become contaminated with methylmercury by eating food (plankton and smaller fish), which has absorbed methylmercury.

As long as the fish continue to be exposed to mercury, mercury continually builds up in their flesh. Fish that eat other fish become even more highly contaminated. Thus, the fish most desirable for many anglers -- bass, walleye and northern pike -- become the most affected, and larger fish tend to be the most contaminated.

When people eat contaminated fish, methylmercury remains in their bodies for a long time. If they eat fish containing methylmercury faster than their bodies can get rid of it, the methylmercury accumulates in their bodies and can be toxic. Many states, including Minnesota, have fish consumption advisories to inform people about how many meals of fish they can safely eat over a period of time.

That should be frightening enough, but we also take the deadly mercury into our bodies and blood streams by several other common means – our dental fillings (amalgams), flu shots and, although less so these days, other vaccines. Mercury amalgam fillings alone are believed to give off more mercury – which we breathe and swallow – than all the fish we eat and foul air we breathe combined, say researchers.

Many groups and agencies have been fighting to rid us of mercury absorption. Most of them are focused on reducing the mercury emissions from coal plants or getting rid of medical thermometers and keeping schools, where it’s already banned, free of the stuff.

As the world’s biggest exporter of mercury, the US is nevertheless banned from exporting “elemental” mercury – the kind you can see in beads rolling around a tray or in your hand, as we used to do. We can’t do much about “atmospheric” mercury, except stop burning coal and other minerals that contain the stuff.

The effort to put tough controls on the use and production of mercury in our lives is global, but powerful forces with vested billions in its use are at work to minimize those controls. Money controls the controls.

TTT’s ANDY DRISCOLL and MICHELLE ALIMORADI discuss the serious toxic health threats we face from the various sources and uses of mercury with a variety of mercury watchdogs.

GUESTS:

KAREN MONAHAN – Environmental Justice Organizer, Sierra Club Central Region

LEA FOUSHEE – Director of Environmental Justice, North American Water Office; Author, Sacred Water: Water for Life

LEO CASHMAN – Executive Director, Dental Amalgam Mercury Solutions (DAMS)

BRUCE MONSON – Research Scientist, Environmental Analysis & Outcome Division, Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA)

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TruthToTell Nov 28: HPV AND VACCINATIONS: Dangerous Liaisons?-AUDIO BELOW

HELP US BRING YOU THESE IMPORTANT DISCUSSIONS OF COMMUNITY INTEREST – PLEASE DONATE HERE!

HELP US BRING YOU THESE IMPORTANT DISCUSSIONS OF COMMUNITY INTEREST – PLEASE DONATE HERE

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Time was when we sauntered through the days and years not only not worried about the mercury we lived with, but rather fascinated by all of its apparent properties…dangerous properties, it turns out, for many – fatal. Our mouths could be full of it, our thermometers have always relied on it for taking temperatures, we’re injected with it, we swim in pools where it’s part of the purification system (chlorine), and we light our spaces with it – in both bulbs and switches.

A lot of the descriptions of the terrible things mercury can do to us can be found on a variety of websites, including the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA), and some of it is enlightening, if not as cautionary as it might be. Here’s part of what the MPCA’s description says:

Mercury is a silvery, liquid metal at room temperature - the only metal known to exist in liquid form naturally. It is sometimes referred to as one of the "heavy metals." Like water, mercury can evaporate and become airborne. Because it is an element, mercury does not break down into less toxic substances. Once mercury escapes to the environment, it circulates in and out of the atmosphere until it ends up in the bottoms of lakes and oceans. Depending on its chemical form, mercury may travel long distances before it falls to earth with precipitation or dust.. 

Bacteria and chemical reactions in lakes and wetlands change the mercury into a much more toxic form known as methylmercury. Fish become contaminated with methylmercury by eating food (plankton and smaller fish), which has absorbed methylmercury.

As long as the fish continue to be exposed to mercury, mercury continually builds up in their flesh. Fish that eat other fish become even more highly contaminated. Thus, the fish most desirable for many anglers -- bass, walleye and northern pike -- become the most affected, and larger fish tend to be the most contaminated.

When people eat contaminated fish, methylmercury remains in their bodies for a long time. If they eat fish containing methylmercury faster than their bodies can get rid of it, the methylmercury accumulates in their bodies and can be toxic. Many states, including Minnesota, have fish consumption advisories to inform people about how many meals of fish they can safely eat over a period of time.

That should be frightening enough, but we also take the deadly mercury into our bodies and blood streams by several other common means – our dental fillings (amalgams), flu shots and, although less so these days, other vaccines. Mercury amalgam fillings alone are believed to give off more mercury – which we breathe and swallow – than all the fish we eat and foul air we breathe combined, say researchers.

Many groups and agencies have been fighting to rid us of mercury absorption. Most of them are focused on reducing the mercury emissions from coal plants or getting rid of medical thermometers and keeping schools, where it’s already banned, free of the stuff.

As the world’s biggest exporter of mercury, the US is nevertheless banned (EPA) from exporting “elemental” mercury – the kind you can see in beads rolling around a tray or in your hand, as we used to do. We can’t do much about “atmospheric” mercury, except stop burning coal and other minerals that contain the stuff.

The effort to put tough controls on the use and production of mercury in our lives is global, but powerful forces with vested billions in its use are at work to minimize those controls. Money controls the controls.

TTT’s ANDY DRISCOLL and MICHELLE ALIMORADI discuss the serious toxic health threats we face from the various sources and uses of mercury with a variety of mercury watchdogs.

GUESTS:

KAREN MONAHAN – Environmental Justice Organizer, Sierra Club Northstar Chapter

LEA FOUSHEE – Indigenous Womens Mercury Investigation; Director of Environmental Justice, North American Water Office; Author, Sacred Water: Water for Life

LEO CASHMAN – Executive Director, Dental Amalgam Mercury Solutions (DAMS)

BRUCE MONSON – Research Scientist, Environmental Analysis & Outcome Division, Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA); author, Minnesota State Fish Contaminant Database

OTHER IMPORTANT SITES (CLICK on links):

MPCA SITES:

Frequently Asked Questions about Mercury

Mercury in Minnesota - Research and Reduction Initiative

Mercury Element Facts

Mercury in Schools

EPA:

Laws and Regulations | Mercury | US EPA

03/16/2011: EPA Proposes First National Standard for Mercury Pollution from Power Plants / Mercury and air toxics standards represent one of strongest health protections from air pollution since passage of Clean Air Act

12/02/2011: EPA Proposes Changes to Clean Air Act Standards for Boilers and Incinerators/Reconsidered standards would set emission limits for less than one percent of boilers, achieve public health benefits while increasing flexibility and responding to

EJAir | US EPA - Environmental Justice Site

Meet the Staff - Mercury Policy Project - Promoting policies to eliminate mercury use and reduce mercury exposure