Why Is Soil Health Important

Why Is Soil Health Important

🖨️ Print post BUILDING VITALITY: IT STARTS WITH THE SOIL In the twenty-first-century news feed,…

The Weston A. Price Foundation

By  Merinda Teller, MPH, PhD

BUILDING VITALITY: IT STARTS WITH THE SOIL

In the twenty-first-century news feed, toxic chemicals apparently make for “sexy” head­lines. These days, one sees countless stories about so-called “forever chemicals,” food dyes and other chemical industry handiwork, not to mention the spate of human-interest stories that surface whenever there is a toxic disaster. The train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio that prompted officials to intentionally set vinyl chlo­ride on fire,¹ the Lahaina fires that left Maui with “5 football fields 5 stories deep” of toxic debris² and the anomalous flooding that sent toxic mud oozing all over Western North Carolina and East Tennessee³ are but three recent examples.

There is certainly cause for concern, especially given that the vast majority of the eighty-six thousand chemicals listed on the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) Inven­tory⁴—at least 47 percent of which are actively in commerce⁵—have never been tested for safety or toxicity.^6,7 (Under the circumstances, and considering EPA’s well-documented capture by industry,⁸ the agency’s name should probably be read as somewhat ironic.) This situation will not change any time soon; current approaches for characterizing a chemical’s toxicity cost mil­lions, involve extensive testing on animals and take two to three years per chemical.⁹

How did we get here? In an interesting 2018 article, a medical historian posits that since the early nineteenth century, the Western world has gone through four phases of “human-toxic interactions”—whether in the industrial, agri­cultural or medical arenas—characterized by “complex trade-offs between public anxieties, economic interests, and scientific knowledge.”¹⁰ First came a period (“normalization”) in which “planners, industrialists, and experts” normal­ized toxic exposure to polluting industries and compounds containing arsenic, lead and mercu­ry. During the second phase (“fixing toxicity”) that started around the late nineteenth century, constituencies that included “politicians, con­sumers, unionists, and progressive industri­alists” as well as the omnipresent “experts” began differentiating between “acceptable” and “unacceptable” exposure levels, claiming it was possible to establish “safe boundaries” for toxic practices. This was the period in which the top causes of mortality began shifting to cancer and chronic illness…

READ FULL ARTICLE HERE… (westonaprice.org)

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