There was one great article by Dr. Brian Moench President of Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment that focused on the autism epidemic and disappearing bees being real public health emergencies created by allowing our world to be overwhelmed by environmental toxins. In that article Dr. Moench says, "But as participants in modern society we are all now exposed to over 83,000 chemicals from the food we eat, the water we drink, the air we breathe and the consumer products we use. Pregnant women and their children have 100 times more chemical exposures today than 50 years ago. The average newborn has over 200 different chemicals and heavy metals contaminating its blood when it takes its first breath. 158 of them are toxic to the brain. Little wonder that rates of autism, attention deficit and behavioral disorders are all on the rise."
Dr. Moench's fusion of autism, colony collapse disorder and the widespread death of pollinators in general lead me to Jeff Pettis of the Department of Agriculture's bee research lab in Beltsville, Md. and his study of Neurotoxic Pesticides Helping to Decimate Bee Populations where he says, "There's a general phenomenon of pollinator decline — bats, bird, butterflies, all kinds of things,"
Another thing Dr. Moench mentions is a recent study showed that every human tested had the world’s best selling pesticide, Roundup, detectable in their urine at concentrations between five and twenty times the level considered safe for drinking water.
All of this makes me ill in body and spirit. As a kid in the 50's we watched countless commercials from Dow Chemicals preaching "Better Living Through Chemistry". Never did they offer the disclaimer that i'd be peeing roundup in poisonous concentrations in a few decades, nor did they say anything about how the pollinators of 90% of our food would be dying off about now or how 1 in 32 kids in UItah would be autistic before i reached retirement age. We who blissfully grew up as guinea pigs during the living 'better' though chemistry era are now reaping what was sown in our name. We weren't meek in our blissful consumption of that better life and now we, and descendants, 'will inherit the wind'. And an ill wind it is.
