Aren’t you glad you live in Clover country? This TV jingle is one SF Bay Area residents will immediately recognize from childhood, along with the marketed picture we were sold of happy Clo the Cow, enthroned in endless green pastures, endlessly producing milk for human children rather than her own calves. Clo the Cow appeared at pumpkin patches and county fairs, giving away free ice cream to kids, and no local child could fail to recognize the benevolent face of Clo smiling down at them from the sides of milk trucks and billboards across the region. Having your slogan, containing words like Clo or Moo, used by Clover Stornetta Inc. has been seen as a mark of cleverness and decades of these catchy phrases have featured everything from Clo as historic figure to nursery rhyme character. But the latest billboard on view in the North Bay, billing Clo as Eclo-friendly, has gone too far.

In implying that dairy farming is eco-friendly, Clover Stornetta is depending upon public ignorance to smile on this completely misleading depiction, much the same way that the California Milk Advisory Board attempted to foist the unfounded claim that the state’s milk comes from Happy Cows. The CMAB probably did not expect such a fact-filled backlash to their Happy Cow campaign and I have to assume that Clover Stornetta Inc. is similarly insulated in its hopes and wishes that Northern Californian residents drink milk while being totally unobservant of the environmental damage from dairy farming that is so obvious in this part of the country and across the nation.

Rather than simply accept the insult to my intelligence inherent in a marketing campaign that equates the dairy industry with environmental health, I’d like to let Clover Stornetta Inc. know 6 facts I’ve learned about dairy farming.

Fact 1
We’d better hope that Clo doesn’t feel the call of nature while crossing the stream in the billboard image. California officials cite cows as a major source of nitrate pollution in more than 100,000 square miles of polluted groundwater. Drink from a stream anywhere in the Bay Area and you’re likely to wind up in the hospital or dead.

Fact 2
Humans can catch more than 40 different diseases from manure. Cow’s manure includes toxic and fatal pathogens including Salmonella, E. coli, Cryptosporidium, and fecal coliform.

Fact 3
Manure from dairy cows is cited as the cause of the Cryptosporidium contamination of Milwaukee’s drinking water in 1993, which sickened 400,000 people and killed more than 100 of them.

Fact 4
Manure causes algal blooms, depleting the oxygen in water. This phenomenon contributes to the Dead Zone in the Gulf of Mexico where the water is completely devoid of life in an area that has expanded to as much as 7,700 square miles in some years.

Fact 5
Ranching destroys the Earth’s top soil, is one of the major causes of global deforestation and is repeatedly cited as a major threat to endangered species due to the habitat destruction inherent in turning formerly wild lands into cattle pasture.

Fact 6
Farm animals, particularly cattle, produce more than 100 million tons of methane a year. Methane is responsible for nearly as much global warming as all other non-CO2 greenhouse gases put together.

Not So Glad To Live In Clover Country
Clover Stornetta Inc. does business in a part of the country known for its highly educated and generally aware populace. Anyone who encounters this company’s current claims of ‘Eclo’ friendliness has a right to feel insulted by such a baldly misleading ad campaign. Far from being friendly to the environment, the practices of dairy farmers are repeatedly cited by independent journals and books as being key causes of environmental destruction and global warming.

In the San Francisco Bay Area, just ask the Salmon Protection and Watershed Network about the absolute lows they are recording in endangered coho salmon hatching due to water pollution and global warming. Call your local water commissioner and ask him why California scientists are saying that 65% of California’s population is threatened by pollution in drinking water just from dairy cow manure. Or, just take your eyes and nose on a drive through dairy farming country in the region. Apart from the unbelievable stench, you are likely to see what I have:

• Dairy cows with uterine prolapse (the womb of the animal hanging outside of its body) while the cow stands ankle deep in her own manure and urine.
• Large numbers of dairy cows confined to small, grassless enclosures, staring through metal bars at passing traffic.
• Dairy cows with some type of skin condition that results in all of their hair rubbing off parts of their hides, revealing raw skin caked with manure.
• The calves of dairy cows taken from their mothers and confined to rows and rows of tiny plastic igloos set atop bleak fields of mud and manure.

The observable facts about the lives of dairy cows are not what Clover Stornetta Inc. will promote, preferring to sell an eerily sanitized picture of a spotlessly clean, grinning Clo, taking a nature hike through pristine wilderness. In recent times, Clover Stornetta Inc. has begun contracting with several organic dairies in order to deliver organic milk to consumers who feel they are making a more environmentally-friendly choice with such purchases. While organic milk production may do something to reduce the growing threat of antibiotic resistance approaching all of mankind with untold scourges of disease, thanks to the massive use of these drugs by conventional meat and dairy operations, organic dairy farming does nothing to reduce the pollution of water and soil, habitat destruction or global warming rooted in the raising of cattle.

It’s time to take off the rosy glasses and face the realities of life in the place Clover Stornetta Inc. has dubbed ‘Clover Country’. Local clean water, land and air was once the life support system of the Ohlone, Pomo and Miwok Peoples who called what we now term the SF Bay Area ‘home’ for thousands of years. But now, the combination of milk and alcohol production has turned ‘home’ into a place where you can’t drink the water, can’t breathe healthy air and are facing a planet that can become a dead zone if it heats up but a few more degrees.

This year, Yale Universtiy researchers released a study demonstrating the harms of marketing products to children via the use of cartoon characters. Studies like this have reached the same conclusions for decades, and I have to believe that the marketers employed by Clover Stornetta Inc. are well aware of such findings. If you see something wrong with an industry that persuades kids to cuddle up to Clo while polluting the children’s most basic need – clean drinking water – then I hope you will tell your youngsters why this depiction of an eco-friendly dairy cow is not telling the truth. Teaching young people to tell the truth and to discern when they may be being exploited are vital duties for any parent who wants to raise thinking human beings rather than compliant consumers.

In the spirit of telling the truth, I’d like to offer my own suggested ‘Clo’ slogan for Clover Stornetta Inc. and while I very much doubt they’ll be plastering it over a billboard near you, that’s what independent blogs are for. I say boo to the fantasy of dairy cows being eco-friendly, and yes to telling the truth:

“Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!” That’s what the simplest, most life-loving element inside me wants to shout when I see our vital SF Bay Area water sources being blasted with a toxic herbicide in the name of ‘controlling’ a weed. But I need to do more than shout. I need to give you the basic facts about the Spartina Project and the ground and aerial spraying that is contaminating some of our largest and most critical bodies of water with an herbicide that has been linked to massive health harms in mammals. If you reside anywhere in the Bay Area, the Spartina Project is being conducted where you live and you have a right to know that you and your family is being exposed to Imazapyr through contamination of the air, ground and water as a result of this terribly misguided project.

I find it especially diabolical that Marin County, with one of the highest breast cancer rates in the nation, is being saturated with Imazapyr, further exposing local women to totally unnecessary toxins that can only derail their ongoing struggle for health and life. None of us should be eating, drinking or breathing this toxic herbicide, but as usual, it is the babies, women, elders and already-ill portions of Bay Area populations that can least afford to be exposed to further toxins. Just last year, Marin Ag Officials had to admit that they had violated their own pesticide laws by allowing thousands of gallons of carcinogenic pesticides to be sprayed over public places for years and years. No need to look much further for an answer to all that Marin County cancer! And now the government is funding the further contamination of this already-compromised area with yet more unnecessary chemicals. I am convinced that this needs to be stopped, but I want you to have the chance to review the hushed-up facts about the Spartina Project and make up your own mind.

What Is The Spartina Project?
Spartina is a grass that, if left unmanaged, can alter ecosystems by filling waterways with weeds and mud instead of water. Spartina grass is found growing in much of the SF Bay Area. A government-funded group has been created to manage the growth of spartina grass, but rather than doing in this in an ecologically-sound manner, the group has decided to partner with an herbicide company to aerially spray and ground spray massive amounts of toxins into our rivers, marshes and other water bodies to poison the grass to death.

It is disgraceful that here in 2010, government agencies are still using these moronic approaches to wild land management – meeting the presence of a few weeds or bugs with an insane barrage of chemicals that assaults all life. In my 2008 article on the Spartina Project, I suggested that these government agencies stop making fat deals with herbicide manufacturers and start using that money to employ our growing population of jobless Californians to manually remove spartina grass where there is too much of it, on an ongoing basis. The harvested grass could then be used in some green business such as basket making. Here in 2010, our unemployment rate is even more drastic, but the Spartina Project continues to funnel funding to bureaucrats and chemical barons while exposing citizens to totally unnecessary toxins because these agencies refuse to embrace green management practices.

What Are The Toxins In the Spartina Project?
Here is the Herbicide Fact Sheet for Imazapyr. Please, read it in full, but to summarize, this herbicide has been linked to the following drastic health harms in mammal studies:

• Increased brain, adrenal gland and thyroid cancers
• Kidney cysts
• Stomach ulcers and lesions
• Fluid accumulation in the lungs
• Abnormal blood formation in the spleen
• Irreversible damage to and corrosion of the eyes and skin

As a woman with Crohn’s Disease, I don’t want to be exposed to anything that causes stomach lesions, and I don’t want anyone I love to be exposed to increased incidence of cancer, tumors or any of the other devastating effects linked to Imazapyr. I’m sure you don’t either. From what I have read in the Herbicide Fact Sheet, Imazapyr cannot be filtered out of drinking water, and in the few studies that were conducted, it was found to be a ‘persistent’ herbicide which contaminated both water and soil and was still there until the farthest out date from spraying for which it was tested. In other words, as long as researchers kept looking, Imazapyr was still there. No one knows if it ever ‘goes away’.

In addition to this, this herbicide, which is being ground and aerially sprayed directly in some fo the Bay Area’s most vital waterways, has never been tested for its chronic toxicity to fish and other aquatic life! As hard as that is to believe, it’s true. The Spartina Project is spraying an herbicide on aquatic animals without having any idea what it will do to them. The only known facts from testing are that the related herbicide, imazamethabenz-methyl, has high chronic toxicity to fish with effects occurring at less than 1 part per million. So much for the Coho Salmon everyone is trying to save in Marin’s waterways.

Imazapyr, which is manufactured by the American Cyanimid Company and is sold under the brand names, Arsenal, Chopper and Assault (don’t those names give you some idea of the danger of this product?), contains 47% ‘inert’ ingredients which U.S. law enables the manufacturer to keep secret from the public. So, we don’t know what these secret ingredients do, but what we do know is that the disclosed ingredients break down into two products when exposed to light. One of these, quinolinic acid, is a neurotoxin that causes nerve lesions and symptoms similar to Huntington’s Disease. This, of course, is only what we know about the disclosed ingredients in Imazapyr. No tests have ever been done on the secret ingredients.

Finally, Imazapyr is deadly to other plants, destroying their synthesis of DNA. Endangered plants and food crops are damaged by this herbicide.

In sum, Imazapyr is extremely dangerous to mammals, may well be deadly to aquatic life, contaminates drinking water for a prolonged, unknown time period, contaminates soil and kills non-targeted plants. This is not something any informed Bay Area resident would knowingly allow to be introduced into our environment.

Where And When Is The Spartina Project Happening?

As of writing this, the Spartina Project is going on near water bodies right now all over the SF Bay Area, including the Bolinas Lagoon, the Petaluma River, Limantour and Drakes Esteros, San Pablo Bay, all over San Francisco and elsewhere. The spraying is being done both via airplane and via ground spraying.

Please look at the 2010 Spraying Schedule to see the locations and dates, but please do not rely on the dates as readers have reported to me that the Spartina Project has not stuck to their own schedule and has sprayed on days they said they wouldn’t. But whether you happen to be walking along a marsh, creek, river or bay trail the day of a spraying or not, it almost doesn’t matter. Once these Spartina Project people spray, the herbicide will be in your air, water, ground and body for a long, long time.

What Can You Do About The Spartina Project?
Here is the contact page for the board members of the Spartina Project:

http://spartina.org/about.htm#staff.

Step one is to let them know that you have taken the time to educate yourself about the toxicity of Imazapyr and do not want it in your water, air, soil or body. Tell them you want this project stopped in the SF Bay Area.

Step two is more open to you, depending on what you think you can do to put a stop to such an unnecessary and dangerous plan. Perhaps you will organize a neighborhood protest group, write to local government officials or to local newspapers telling what you’ve learned about the toxic environment the Spartina Project is creating in the SF Bay Area. I think the main thing is not to be silent.

Government agencies have always relied on quiet and secrecy in order to conduct projects that would cause public outrage and opposition if they were widely understood. Right now, there are people going for their evening run around the local creek or marsh. They’ve got the baby in the stroller, the dog on the leash. And they have absolutely no idea that they are jogging through an invisible fog of carcinogenic chemicals because these chemical projects seldom make the news.

People proudly publicize accomplishments like the founding of a recycling center or the creation of a new green business. Spraying the San Francisco Bay Area with herbicides is hardly whispered about at all and its continuance depends of that weird, unnatural quiet. I started this article shouting, because I’m getting sickened to death by an ‘environmental/autoimmune disease’ while my neighbors are continuing to contaminate the world I’d like to keep living in. I spent last weekend in the hospital with my strange illness, called Crohn’s Disease, becoming epidemic in the U.S., cause unknown, cure nowhere in sight. As I lay in that hospital bed, hooked up to IVs and monitors, surrounded by fellow sufferers with cancers, disorders and disease, I thought about those Spartina Project people, spraying away. We should all be shouting.

Some 50 years have passed since Rachel Carson published Silent Spring – a book heralded by her contemporary society as the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of its era. I have just finished reading Linda Lear’s very thorough biography of Rachel Carson’s life and wonder if anyone could contemplate the story of this remarkable woman without feelings of strong admiration. While fighting the final two years of her battle with cancer, Carson released her landmark book on the ecological devastation being wrought by the pesticide DDT and began speaking publicly on the subject; and the more ill she became, the stronger grew her voice in opposition to man’s mistaken efforts to control nature rather than learning to live gracefully within it.

Like the words of any legitimate prophet, Carson’s continue to ring true in our own day, but during my entire perusal of Lear’s biography, I found myself inwardly railing at the things that haven’t changed, despite the life and work of a human being of Carson’s merit. 10 years after the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, slavery came to its end in the United States. 50 years after the publication of Silent Spring, we continue to befog our nation with billions of pounds of pesticides annually. It would seem that our society is even more dependent upon toxic chemicals than we once were upon slavery. Though DDT was eventually banned in the United States, the ‘peculiar institution’ of self-poisoning with carcinogens, mutagens and endocrine disruptors has only grown since Carson’s lifetime.

What Hasn’t Changed

Essential mindsets
Man as the controller of nature, blind trust in industry and government, and lack of personal accountability for the health of the environment continue to make up the thoughts and mental stances of so many Americans, despite decades of warnings, scandals, failures and disasters. All you have to do is look at the comments section on any news article about any environmental tragedy or disaster to see overwhelming evidence of this. I know I will never forget reading the comments of people during the aerial pesticide spraying of California’s Central Coast in 2007. Someone would write about dead sea birds, children in the hospital or some other tragic outcome of this spraying and there would always be comments insisting that pesticides were safe and the government – the same government that lauded the safety of DDT – would never harm us. These fear-based abdications of reason in the face of abundant evidence to the contrary are as rife as in Rachel’s day when industry and citizenry attacked her as being a communist and hysterical woman.

The Tactics
Having had first-hand experience of industry/government standard operations during the LBAM spray disaster of the past decade, it was almost re-affirming to watch Rachel Carson and her contemporaries face the identical lies, evasions, fact juggling and disregard for human rights that my peers continue to encounter around the issue of pesticides. Proponents of human rights and environmental health continue to be attacked and dismissed as alarmist, anti-government and delusional. In addition to being called a communist, Carson was accused of being – of all things – a ‘peace-nut’. Such a term may sound laughably quaint to us today, but anyone who has worked for peace or justice will easily relate to the ill spirit and underlying threat of slurs like these.

Carson was, in fact, sneered at for what appeared to some people as a ridiculous insistence that there was a careful balance in nature. If you watch this short video documentary about Carson’s work you will see a white-coated scientist explaining that man’s task is to control all nature. This was the very ideology Carson wanted to see abolished and exchanged for a more evolved conception of man’s small place in the grand scheme of the Universe.

Today, when we battle for human rights and environmental protection, we face the same stone-faced government agents who turn deaf ears to our sufferings and pleas to be governed as we wish by the people who are suppose to serve us. We face the same accusations by industry or fellow citizens of being unpatriotic or insane. We sense the same current of danger and threat when we tell the truth. And, we face an industrial-governmental complex even more deeply linked than that of Carson’s day. Industry controls nearly all important areas of our so-called Republic, and when we work for change, we are sharing the experience that Rachel Carson, her editors, publisher, friends and colleagues went through and refused to be discouraged by.

The Players
I groaned inwardly in reading Lear’s biography when the names of Velsicol, DuPont and Monsanto began appearing in the text on the pages of this lengthy book. I was struck with a sudden sense of injustice that Carson is long at rest, but the very corporations who foisted their leftover wartime chemicals on the American people are still very much in business. Monsanto’s absurd parody of Silent Spring – in which bugs are portrayed as the true danger to the earth, rather than DDT – shows up their ethics for what they truly are. Nearly everyone in the chemical industry championed DDT, just as they champion today’s carcinogenic scourges, and though the heads of most of those corporations in Carson’s times are likely in the grave now, company policy remains the same. In a letter to Carson, a colleague wrote:

“There are such powerful adversaries: the U.S Department of Agriculture and the business empires and the ever-increasing practice of monoculture.”

If that sounds familiar, it’s because we continue to whistle the exact same sad tune today.

This summer, Monsanto has elected itself Trojan Horse by attempting to ‘donate’ hundreds of tons of GMO corn seed to the disaster area of Haiti. This corn, which has been cited as a health hazard by numerous independent scientists, will not only contaminate Haiti’s regional heritage corn but would make serfs of Haitian farmers forever, as the non-reproducing corn could not be saved from year to year, but would force the people to re-purchase their seed corn annually from Monsanto. Visions of vultures are dancing in the heads of Americans and Haitians alike over this latest effort of the very same Monstano Corporation that mocked Rachel Carson when she cited DDT as a hazard. It can be painfully disheartening to contemplate the continuing story of corporations like this and the ever-growing, never-ending list of human and environmental tragedies that continues to be written.

What Has Changed
None of what I’ve written above is intended to diminish the very real accomplishments of Rachel Carson’s inspiring life. On a personal level, as a woman with an environmentally-caused chronic illness, I can’t be anything but moved and incredibly grateful to this one special woman who used her days on Earth, despite sickness and pain, to wake up a sector of the public to the dangers of pesticide use. I feel a strong kinship for Carson in that her motivation to protect the environment stemmed from her deep love of the beautiful Earth – a mindset identical to my own.

On a public level, Carson has done something of inestimable value for every human being who fights for environmental health. Today, at least where I live, I am able to find plenty of company when working on ecological issues. The people of my generation grew up in a world in which parents were at least concerned about pesticides, pollution, recycling, water quality and similar inter-related issues. This is because the parents grew up hearing about Rachel Carson and her contemporaries. These matters became part of the furniture of the human mind, thanks to the work of pioneering naturalists and environmentalists who started the struggle to bring American society back towards the Native ideals once dominant in this land: ideals of stewardship and appreciation of the Earth. We remain so far from the living practices of this country’s true Native forefathers, but at least, in 2010, not everyone I meet will think I am totally crazy if I suggest that there is a balance in nature. There are signs everywhere that we, as a whole people, are becoming less enchanted with our former obsession with ‘progress’.

Again, on a public level, we have Carson to thank as one of the instigators of modern thought regarding farming. Carson is certainly not responsible for the existence of organic farming practices, but she took inspiration from the testimony being given by an organic gardener whose food supply had been contaminated with DDT in the 1950s. All farms and gardens had been organic until the introduction of chemical pesticides and herbicides, but we had gotten so far away from this tradition in the post-WWII era that to be intentionally running an organic farm was something out of the ordinary in the 1950s. In 2010, where I live, it is not longer queer to farm organically. It is, in fact, seen as positive and modern. Certainly, much of the rest of the country has a lot of catching up to do when it comes to this, but when I look at California, I see evidence everywhere that Rachel Carson’s message ‘took’, at least on a small scale. On a large scale, commercial conventional agriculture still dominates, burdening our people and our land with a never-before-seen mixture of utterly toxic chemicals; but, at least I have the option to go to a local farmer, a farm market, a local grocery store and purchase safe, organic food. Rachel Carson’s work is inherent in this blessing, for certain.

Most importantly, perhaps, Rachel Carson’s gift to us is that of independent thought. Nearly all mid-20th-century Americans were shocked to learn that U.S. drug companies had been allowed to market Thalidomide (a sedative which caused horrendous birth defects) in the United States after the drug companies were fully aware of the effects the drug had caused abroad. People were outraged and stunned. Today, I think that less of us are stunned when our so-called regulating agencies, out of greed, fear or stupidity, fail to protect us from danger.

I think that, thanks to Carson and her peers, more 21st century American have learned to think for themselves, rather than placing unthinking trust in government and industry. We investigate. We weigh evidence. We work to make healthy choices despite the breaking of human rights laws by our politicians and the marketing ploys of big business. We may look one another in the eye for a moment and shake our heads about the rampant abuse we suffer at the hands of a government that has chosen profit over humaneness again and again, we may even try a dry chuckle over the fact that our politicians are supposed to be our servants, but while we make these somewhat jaded and socially acceptable gestures, many of us work to develop a private world in which we think for ourselves, build our own organic gardens, and strive to pass on to the next generation the values of environmental respect.

In geological time, 50 years is the blink of an eye, despite the vast human experience it represents. Who can say, over time, whether Rachel Carson’s clarion call, the voice crying in the wilderness, will eventually result in the environmentalists outnumbering the greedy? We’ve added genetic modification and global warming to our plate since Carson’s time. The odds are likely against us. But this is why I would encourage anyone to read Silent Spring and to look for a biography of this admirable woman’s life.

Time and again, the smallest, gentlest, humblest of people have had the most lasting effect on human society as a whole. If Rachel Carson, hampered with sickness and surrounded by a sleeping public, could put her skills to such good purpose, what can I do, what can you do? Simple folk have always and will always greatly outnumber the mighty and powerful. Take courage in the thought that we are now several generations deep in a society that has heard of the dangers of pesticide – a society that is learning to recognize the disease we have created in our loved ones and ecology – and we can do the work that is ahead of us. I am thinking about this today, looking out the window at my family’s organic farm, wondering what else I can do to carry on the work and move it forward, for love of the Earth.

This racist action is being leveled at the Mexican Indian people who are a vital part of life in this country, illegal or not. It is my personal belief that no human being should ever be labeled as illegal on their own home planet, but concepts of legal citizenship aside, this is a law which makes the state of Arizona a place of hatred and fear for all peoples. This law must be flatly condemned and held up as a prime example of those political elements in our nation which seek to destroy American ideals of liberty and equality.

I am feeling tremendous concern for Mexican Indian men, women and children right now who must be feeling extreme anxiety and terror because of this wicked law and I am also deeply worried about the more than 250,000 members of the 21 Native American Tribes who call Arizona home. Unfortunately, the word in Indian Country about life in Arizona has never been good. I have read too many accounts of police and citizen brutality against and even murder of Native peoples in Arizona that have gone uninvestigated and unpunished to feel that the state is a just or enlightened one. I can hardly stand to think that this new law will give police and private citizens further excuse to commit hate crimes against the local Indian peoples whom, with their wonderful dark skin and hair, may conveniently be suspected of being illegal aliens. Can you see this playing out like I can?

My father’s wry suggestion is that Mexican-American police begin arresting white people on suspicion of being illegal Canadian aliens. Others are advocating that all Americans boycott the state for this act of bigotry, refusing to vacation in Arizona or purchase the state’s products until this law is revoked. President Obama is starting an investigation of the legality of the law and national news sources give evidence of the outrage so many people are feeling over this hateful action.

My words – hatred, racism, bigotry, evil – are strong ones in this brief article, but this is a moment that calls for our most strenuous opposition. My family does not want to live in Nazi Germany or the Arkansas of the 1950s. The disgusting mentality of Arizona’s state government and the citizens who supported SB 1070 does not represent our ideals or morals as people who live in America. We do not want anyone to carry papers or live in fear of law enforcement officers or bigoted citizenry. Ugly minds conceive of laws like these and have no place in a land whose people are continuing to struggle to form a society where all human persons are respected. We are still so far from the day when people of every color and creed are equally valued. The immigration law shoves us backward into the territory of rounds-ups, pogroms, concentration camps, lynchings and ethnic cleansing. Let no one stand for this regression into our dark and violent past. Let us love our brother. Let us stand united against this immoral law.

About Me and Why I Was Considering A Raw Food Diet
I am an organic farmer and I have been a vegan for about 20 years. I did not make this decision because of the many promises of perfect health that are often touted as the benefits of a vegan diet – rather, I created a new way of eating for myself for solely ethical reasons. It’s a good thing I didn’t get into this way of eating for the health of it; despite spending two decades eating only organic, home cooked, whole foods vegan meals, I am one of the least healthy people I know.

Environmental pollution and mystery aggressors have left me with a legacy of inflammatory diseases, the most devastating of which has been Crohn’s Disease. Doctors consider my diet exemplary and my poor health a baffling mystery. My own conclusion is that a combination of genetics and environmental factors tend to dictate a person’s health profile. We all know elders who eat bacon and eggs for breakfast every morning and are doing fantastically at the age of 85. And, as so-called ‘alternative’ diets have been practiced for many generations now, we are all also likely starting to realize that some of our most good-food-conscious friends may also be our sickest. I have communicated with countless people (predominantly women) who have tried every elimination diet, tried being vegan, gluten-free, raw…you name it, and they continue to suffer from a host of serious environmental illnesses. I also know vegetarians who are incredibly healthy, fit and thriving. My conclusion is that any diet, however exemplary it may seem, is no guarantee of good health.

As I’ve said, I decided to adopt a vegan diet for ethical reasons and have never regretted it, but when I was diagnosed with Crohn’s Disease 2 years ago (after suffering years of unexplained abdominal pain) I began to question my diet. Was there something more I could be doing? Somehow, I came upon the mention of the raw foods diet in connection with Crohn’s Disease and the related condition, Ulcerative Colitis, and this led me buy a book called Self Healing Crohn’s and Colitis by David Klein. When you’re desperately ill, you are desperate, but as I read this book and supplemented this with hours of Internet research, my healthy powers of critical thought seemed to kick in for me, and while I’d love there to be a diet that would cure Crohn’s Disease or other conditions, I had to conclude that this isn’t it. It’s time to share my reasoning about this.

The Absence Of Data
Within reading the first few chapters of Self Healing Crohn’s and Colitis by David Klein, I began to feel a growing concern over the fact that opinions appeared to be being presented as facts, with no scientific or other research data to back them up. I found this same concerning situation on many of the raw foods websites I visited during my research.

Some books are presented from an opinion standpoint. For example, an author might write, “I believe I feel healthier when I spend at least half an hour in the sunshine every day.” That’s an expression of opinion and belief. This is very different than saying, “The Earth is a sphere and here are the photos taken from space to prove this.” That’s a statement of fact, backed up with fact.

My take on the majority of information presented in David Klein’s book and on the majority of the raw foodism sites I visited was that opinion was being presented as fact without any type of concrete proof. While I consider science to be highly fallible at times, I do depend on research and sound reasoning to verify statements and absence of this in an arena where claims of healing and health are being made is something which concerns me deeply.

I encountered repeat claims that human beings were designed to live on fruit, that fruit contains the same proportions of nutrients as human milk, that cooking foods makes them deadly…many claims, but scant citations or research or proof. Several of the arguments in favor or raw foods deserve, I believe, especially critical assessment.

Man’s Natural Diet
I was puzzled to discover what I considered to be a truly faulty premise upon which the whole raw foods belief system appears to be based. There appears to be a romanticized, vague and golden image of a golden age of early man in which humans ate their perfect natural diet…the inference from this being that they enjoyed perfect health because of this.

It is my understanding that anatomically modern humans first appear in the fossil record in Africa about 195,000 years ago. Researchers quote the life span of early man as being something between 20-40 years…hardly a peak example of human longevity. Granted, a potentially dangerous environment and lack of modern medicines to fight disease doubtless contributed to early man’s relatively short life expectancy…but according to what I read in Self Healing Crohn’s and Colitis, disease is a myth.

David Klein appears to claim that the symptoms of disease are simply our body trying to heal itself from our assault on it in the form of cooked food or medicines. While I can see the logic and truth in the assertion that fevers, inflammations and the like are the biproducts of our body’s efforts to heal from disease, the whole fantasy of natural man eating some ideal diet falls apart when you ask yourself why early natural man, supposedly eating his perfect diet of raw fruit, was dying of diseases by the age of 40. It just doesn’t make sense.

All studies I have ever seen indicate that pre-fire, pre-tool human-type primates would have been omnivores, eating whatever they could manage to get their hands on be that fruits, vegetables, seeds, nuts, rodents, bugs…literally, whatever they could find and stomach. And, while human-type primates certainly ate raw food before finding fire, I could not find any credible references indicating that early man was a fruitarian – something frequently cited as some shining ideal of perfection raw foodists can strive to someday attain. Again, lack of citations and support in published works were very concerning to me.

Who is Natural Man?
Many primates use tools to access foods. Several different species of birds do the same – finding perfectly shaped sticks that they can poke into holes in order to retrieve grubs beyond the reach of their beaks. Porpoises carry sea sponges with them to assist them in foraging for meals. Does the use of tools mean that these creatures are eating in a manner unnatural to them, or do these skills and tools form a distinct characteristic that sets their species apart from others in a remarkable manner?

And what about man? Homo Erectus used both tools and fire and this species of human-type being predates our own species, Homo Sapiens, by about a million and a half years! How unnatural can something be to human creatures if beings of our relative kind have been doing it for something like two million years?

A central premise of raw foodism is that cooked foods are toxic and unnatural to us, but I found I could not follow this line of thinking when I considered that, in order to return to some previous mode of eating, we would have to go back beyond the origins of our own species – homo sapiens – in order to find models of ancient primates eating raw foods. I would assert that the use of tools, including fire, has been a characteristic of our people for as long as our people have existed, and that striving to abandon this history would involve ‘aping’ another type of creature.

It is also worth pointing out that while all raw foodists eschew the use of fire for processing food, a considerable industry is being developed to supply raw foodists with blenders, food processors and fancy vegetables slicers in order to aid them in making their meals palatable. These tools were, of course, wholly unknown to early man and yet again, the golden Eden-like ideal of perfect natural man seems to fall apart in the face of a diet which condemns the ancient use of fire while promoting the purchase of the latest in Cuisinart contraptions.

Environment and Survival
Polar bears have dense fur for living in icy climes and snails have built-in shelters wherever they go. Man has neither and just as man’s ability to occupy certain parts of the globe is dependent upon the acquisition of clothing and shelter – our ability to inhabit diverse regions of the planet has been historically dependent on our ability to make the most of the food supply we discovered or farmed there.

Whether you see major civilizations as a blessing or a curse to the Earth, there is no denying that every time man secured a food supply (particularly cultivated grain) population jumped and the mode of living we call civilization appeared. Our ability to make foods digestible by shelling them, pounding them, grinding them and cooking them is a unique skill that has been totally critical to the survival of our species. Even in the arid deserts of the Southwestern United States, Native Peoples (some of them, my ancestors) have been able to thrive for countless ages because of their ability to channel irrigation, dry farm, grind corn into meal and boil beans into a digestible state. This is the factual history of our inquisitive, imaginative species.

There are two issues I encountered frequently in my research of the raw food diet that I found troubling because of their apparent lack of wisdom in regards to both our historic experience as a species and our planet’s overwhelming need for the discovery of Earth-friendly living practices.

I encountered repeat mention of raw foodists experiencing physical coldness…sometimes a physical drop in body temperature. One story of a man attempting to live on raw fruit in Scandinavia and feeling freezing all of the time was especially poignant to me. If you study the historic cuisines of the coldest parts of the world, you will quickly begin to see that most cold climate peoples eat a great deal of fat in order to survive chilly weather. There are tribes in the northernmost parts of the American continents who eat tremendous quantities of pure animal fats and they have been eating this way for time beyond recall.

I would have to say that it seems like man has a good instinct inside to turn towards fat when he is cold. If we all lived in the tropics, perhaps this instinct would never assert itself, but only some of the people on the planet live in consistently warm climes where a diet of raw fruits and vegetables might not produce uncomfortable coldness. So, this was the first of the two things that troubled me about the realities of a planet where people live everywhere and need to eat foods that promote a vital body temperature.

Raw foodism does not necessarily mean a no-fat diet. It’s important to be clear about this. But what it does seem to advocate strongly is the acquisition of fats from fruits that are not available locally in most places. This is the second of my concerns. There is heavy promotion of coconuts and avocados in raw foods recipes, and unless you live in Thailand, Ecuador or some such place, the only way to subsist heavily on fatty tropical fruits is to have them flown to you, at great expense and at considerable cost to the environment. I found this to be a striking contradiction in a diet that is often styled as being ideally eco-friendly. Long distance shipping, when founded on fossil fuels, is not environmentally healthy and I began to feel that a person would need to move to South America to eat a raw local diet with adequate nutrients. Such a move would not be reasonable for most people.

I would assert that it goes against the laws of nature and the history of our species to adopt a diet which fails to maintain appropriate body temperatures in non-tropical climates and which may be largely dependent on having foods shipped in from afar. The Big Ag infrastructure could crumble at any time, and a raw foodist living in Norway might well find themselves in a life-or-death situation attempting to subsist on radishes and dill in the middle of a long winter. Try getting fresh local raw fruits and vegetables in New Jersey in January. Without Big Ag and international trade, you are out of luck, and a diet founded on the trade policies of multinational juggernauts may not be in alignment with a wish to live in peace with the world’s poor, upon reflection.

Our genius as a species, for good or ill, has been in our ability to adapt to nearly all environments and find the means of sustenance wherever we have gone. Homo Sapiens has survived for at least 200,000 years in this manner. I’m not sure it’s wise to make a big change in plans now.

Modern Food
South and Central America are the world’s food basket. In sum, the cuisines of numerous cultures are founded on the foods that were first cultivated in places like Peru and Mexico. Corn, Beans, Squash, Tomatoes, Potatoes, and countless other crops have become staples the world over, but they got their start in Indigenous hands on the American continents. Native Peoples took wild foods and cultivated them into new forms and this has been going on for millennia. I mention this here because it is very important to understand that the modern fruits and vegetables most people in the western world consume are wholly different than those which covered the earth when pre-tool, pre-fire man had his day.

I’m bringing this up because I feel it’s necessary to point out that modern raw foodists are not eating the raw fruits and vegetables of early human-type primates. Pre-homo-erectus cultures never ate a Fuji apple or a Nantes carrot or an ear of Silver Queen sweet corn. I believe it’s important to think about the reality that shooting for a pre-homo-erectus, pre-fire diet will ultimately be impossible, simply because evolution and agriculture have utterly changed the green face of the planet. So, again, I found myself encountering unattainable and romanticized ideals at the heart of the raw food diet. I needed to dig a little deeper.

Natural Hygiene – What is it?
After reading the first handful of pages of David Klein’s book about healing Crohn’s Disease, I began to ask myself who in the world T.C. Fry was. Quotes from this man make up a large portion of Klein’s book, and he is widely cited in the raw foods movement, but I’d never heard of him before. I also began wondering why David Klein’s name was appended with the title of Dr. The answer to both my questions lay in the topic of a set of beliefs called Natural Hygiene.

Natural Hygiene is believed to have been invented in the 1830s by graham cracker-inventor, Rev. Sylvester Graham. He gained a small following of people who were dubbed ‘grahamites’ and who, it seems, agreed with his advocacy of fasting, raw foods, no meat, some dairy and temperance. While many modern people might find Rev. Graham’s efforts to fight alcoholism admirable, fewer would be likely to agree with his extremist stances regarding vegetarianism as a means of controlling human sexuality. Natural Hygiene gradually fell out of favor when Rev. Graham died at the young age of 57, despite having promoted himself as a role model of good health.

About a hundred years later, Herbert M. Shelton resurrected the concept of Natural Hygiene and began publishing a magazine which ran for 40 years and in which Shelton propounded his theories of combining of raw foods for an ideal diet. T.C. Fry, another publisher of Natural Hygiene literature, began to be well-known in the 1970′s, and some attribute to him the popularity of raw foodism today.

I wanted to understand why David Klein (who is called Dr. because he is a Hygiene Doctor) found T.C. Fry to be so important that much of his book on healing Crohn’s Disease is devoted to the teachings of Fry. The more I read about T.C. Fry’s life, the more puzzled I became. Fry advocated a purely raw diet and earned his living by promoting himself and this diet as the ideal of perfect health. The truth is rather more complicated than this, and I found this article containing a series of interviews with people who knew T.C. Fry to be both alarming and illuminating. I can easily feel pity and sympathy for a fellow human who is so caught up in the search for health that he is binging and fasting, propounding the ‘truth’ of the Natural Hygiene raw diet one minute, and hiding in a closet eating junk food the next. He is only a human being. But, what is not honorable, in my opinion, was that Fry billed himself as a strict adherent to raw foods, when he wasn’t, and that, when his health began to fail, he hid this from the public and continued to advocate this diet as the cure for all ills.

T.C. Fry died in 1996 at the rather young age of 69 of a blood clot caused by a pulmonary embolism. He was overweight, had a heart condition and very bad teeth. He was not in good health when he died, and when his followers discovered this, many were disillusioned. Further disillusionment came when his followers learned that he had gone to South America for medical treatments for his health problems, despite the fact that proponents of Natural Hygiene insist that disease is a myth and that all sicknesses go away if the person rests and eats raw foods. I don’t delight in speaking poorly of a man who is deceased, but the bottom line of my research on T.C. Fry’s life and work as a nutrition reformer was that he seemed untrustworthy.

And, having established that conclusion, I’m afraid that David Klein’s whole book, as well as any raw foodism literature I encountered on the web citing T.C. Fry, began to take on a very untrustworthy aura. I don’t understand the appeal of founding a set of personal beliefs on the credos of individuals who are pulling the wool over the eyes of sincere and sick people who are looking for help. Advocating a diet as the secret to health while you are secretly seeking medical treatments and getting sicker every day is dishonest and a tremendous disservice to your fellow man. Frankly, I think it’s a shame that people would continue to cite T.C. Fry as a font of wisdom or an exemplar of living a good life.

After careful thought, I had to conclude that Natural Hygiene was founded by a somewhat peculiar man and then championed by a man whose ethics are what I would consider crooked. I began to feel clearer in my mind, at this point, that these were not leaders I wished to follow.

Fundamentalism and Dogma
I’m a believer in faith. I have the greatest respect for individuals who inquire into matters of faith and follow their hearts when they find something that truly makes sense to them. To me, the glory of all religions, spiritual devotions and lifeways is in the questions. Someone who seeks knowledge is genuine. Fundamentalism, however, applied to any type of belief system, is the end of questions and, to me, is a dark road to travel.

Time and again, very decent people have sought answers, thought they have found them in a person or belief system, and stopped seeking. Cults arise when people stop asking questions and the cult leader is considered beyond questioning, beyond reproach, beyond doubt. These dead end scenarios leave the followers open to abuse and influence for bad, and these situations can only happen when people give up their rights to question what they see, hear and experience.

I am not calling raw foodism a cult, any more than I would call veganism, Judaism, Buddhism or Christianity a cult. But, I am disturbed when people of any kind accept dogma without question. When someone comes to you claiming that Jesus is the Savior of mankind, you should really question this. When someone comes to you and says that our goal in life should be to detach from suffering, you should think deeply about this. When someone comes to you and tells you that all ill health stems from not getting enough rest and eating cooked foods, you should seriously question the validity of such a statement. Does it seem right to you? Does it match with what you know of spiritual things, human history, ethical behavior and the search for truth? What does your spirit feel about blanket statements like this? Do they feel like real solutions, or jumping off points for further inquiry?

My hope is that raw foodism looks like a question to you, instead of an answer. David Klein’s book lists testimonials from people who claim to have been cured of serious diseases by raw foods. He does not include the testimonials of people you will find elsewhere, explaining that they began to have symptoms of failure to thrive on a raw food diet. My chief problem here, in sum, is not that a raw foods diet may/may not be a good idea, but that many people are profiting by promoting raw foods as a cure to life-threatening diseases. It is the promotion and profit aspect of this that gave me the last piece of information I felt I needed to make up my mind about whether going raw was right for me.

I am sincerely glad if going on a raw foods diet has helped sick people, temporarily or in the long term, to feel better. David Klein explains that he was living on a diet of junk food before going raw, and I can certainly believe that this switch might have been exactly what he needed to start to resolve his symptoms of Ulcerative Colitis. It may be that any massive change over from a junk food diet to a more plant-based one (be that vegetarian, vegan, raw, or whole foods) would be enough to put a digestive disorder into remission, possibly even permanently. How wonderful for anyone who has known the agonies of chronic illness, to reach a day of wellness, whether they get there through diet, prayer, medicine or some other vehicle. But blanket statements, applied to all people…these, I found I could not swallow.

I mentioned that, to me, the glory is in the question. I am quite ready to concede here that my conclusions may be wrong. Perhaps miraculous healing was just on the other side of that raw banana for me, and I’ve made a foolish mistake deciding that a woman who has been vegan all her adult life is really already eating about as simply and healthily as any woman has, at any point in human history. I will continue to eat my vegan diet, rich in as many diverse raw and cooked fruits, veggies, legumes and grains as I can grow and find. I will make the most of the food source available to me, in the hopes that a healthy species and a healthy environment are to be found in diversity rather than restrictions.

Perhaps I’m wrong about this and will miss out on a cure for Crohn’s disease promised to me if I’ll only abandon the fire-using ways of all my ancestors. But, somehow, I don’t think so. I’ve really searched my heart about this, done my homework and decided that for me, the raw food diet holds no miracles and very few charms. My hope is that you will also seek answers, especially if you are ill, before making any tremendous changes. When you are sick, you’ve already been through a lot. Take it easy, and look before you leap.

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Flickr Photo Credit

The Lytton Band of Pomo Indians would like to make a home west of the town of Windsor in Sonoma County in Northern California. They would like to build 147 homes for their people, as well as a beautiful roundhouse for their spiritual devotions, a community center and a medical clinic. Their very simple wish to make a good home for their loved ones has been met with a self-satisfied, self-entitled, smug and racist reaction from the governor of California, the local government and local people, in keeping with the tune of California’s historical response to Indian people. Opponents are using every trick in the book, from questioning the federal legitimacy of the Lytton People to refusing to let them use local water. I find this so despicable and shameful that I can’t think of a better thing to spend my time writing about in a publication that concerns itself with peace and justice.

The local newspaper, The Press Democrat, has published several articles regarding the situation in Windsor, giving space on their pages to the ire of local officials and the outrageous behavior of the governor who is questioning whether the Lytton Band should be recognized and whether they have a right to build a home for themselves in California:

Press Democrat Article 1

Press Democrat Article 2

Press Democrat Article 3

Here are two telling comments on the Press Democrat articles that offer a disturbing gauge of public sentiment:

“You mean, allowed to carve out chunks of the USA to form their own independent nations and suck up all sorts of tax-free money from visitors? To collect American money by selling to Americans but not to pay a portion back to the US economy in the manner other Americans do?”

“Special rights for people whose long dead ancestors were mistreated by long dead immigrants.”

The first comment encapsulates the tone of accusatory resentment Indian People are often the subject of and the second comment demands a response.

Genocide In This Land In Our Times

The children and grandchildren whose parents and grandparents were killed at Wounded Knee in the Great Plains are still alive. When the majority of Chief Bigfoot’s people were massacred by soldiers on a snowy winter day in 1890, those who escaped with their lives told their story to their children and grandchildren, and those people are still alive. This is not ancient history. It is not something that happened 5000 years ago. It is your grandmother telling you how she ran for her life to a ravine and her mother was shot down right on top of her. It is your grandfather telling you that he was the last survivor of his family, and that he never understood why the soldiers came and butchered everyone, when all of your relatives were just trying to make it through the snow to Pine Ridge Reservation so that Chief Bigfoot could help mediate a problem that was going on there. It is your own family telling you that the gunfire sounded like someone slowly tearing a piece of canvas as it ripped into the huddled crowd of men, women and children. It is your own family telling you how the snow was drenched with your family’s blood, and how the government paid a man 2 dollars a body to dump all of your dead relatives into a mass grave.

Perhaps you’ve heard of Wounded Knee and the killing of 200 innocent travelers. Maybe you have heard mention of the Sand Creek Massacre and the murder of some 130 defenseless Cheyenne and Arapaho People, or of some of the other better-known attacks on Indian People by the U.S. government and private citizens that have occurred within just the last century-and-a-half. These things are not ancient history. They are very, very recent, making it small wonder if you have heard of them. But chances are, even if you live in California, you have never heard of the California Genocide that exterminated some 90% of California’s earlier inhabitants. If you manage to find and read the right books, you will quickly learn that even the devastation suffered by the early Peoples of the East Coast, the Great Plains and the Southwest cannot compare to what happened here in California. When you know the truth about California’s recent history, hateful attitudes like those being expressed by the people of Windsor who are attempting to shun and outlaw the Lytton Band make your stomach turn over. You look at the attitudes of precedence and entitlement and you just want to cry.

Terrible times came to the land called California with the Spanish Army and Franciscan missionaries in the 18th century. They kidnapped, enslaved, tortured and murdered the west coast people, all out of greed and a psychopathic interpretation of Christianity that had literally no relationship to the teachings of Jesus Christ. There is no doubt in my mind that if the actual person, Jesus, had gotten to spend time with Native American Peoples, he would have loved them. The intense sense of gratitude for life, the beautiful appreciation of the natural world, the inherent practice of service to one another and respect to higher powers that are the hallmarks of many Native American lifeways are so evolved and splendid that they would earn respect and admiration from any person of goodwill. But the deranged Spanish friars were tragically blind to the spectacular spirituality of Native Peoples and, in their maniacal quest for power, turned the once-joyful inhabitants of California into the tattered and miserable remnant of a people.

Those California Indians who managed, somehow, to survive the disease, enslavement and death brought to the region by the Spaniards then had to face the murderous Americans who poured into the newly-acquired state in the mid-1800s…very recent times. John Sutter, whose name is still given macabre honor in Gold Country towns and place names, kept California Indian male and female slaves locked in a large room at night to keep them from escaping slavery in his gold mines. Frankly, this is the least of the evil things that have happened in recent California history.

The state and federal governments subsidized the murder of California Indians. That is the bottom line. Insane with the self-serving nonsense of Manifest Destiny, those newly arrived in California during the Gold Rush felt entitled to exterminate all Native Peoples in order to make room for ‘civilization’. And the government paid for them to do so. A group of white men would arm themselves and set upon Indian villages, murdering all whom they found living there, and then would be paid by the head for the victims of their killing sprees. These attacks on innocent and defenseless people were documented without a shred of remorse or conscience in California’s newspapers:

“We hope that the Government will render such aid as will enable the citizens of the north to carry on a war of extermination until the last redskin of these tribes has been killed. Extermination is no longer a question of time–the time has arrived, the work has commenced and let the first man who says treaty or peace be regarded as a traitor.”
- Yreka Herald, 1853

I will never forget an account I read of Native Peoples being rounded up onto boats in Northern California, taken out to sea and drowned in the ocean, en masse. Such peoples who were not massacred were enslaved by the newcomers and the kidnapping and enslavement of Indian children was common practice during these times, just a couple of generations ago. It is so important to me to repeat that 90% of the early inhabitants of California were murdered by the invading Americans. It is so important for all people now living in California to understand that this is the history of the ground we are now walking on, just the blink of an eye later.

Moving toward the turn of the century, the kidnapping of Indian children continued to be seen as the necessary work of ‘civilization’. Now, they were stolen from their families by force and sent to industrial boarding schools where they were abused and forbidden to express their culture. As I write this, I am thinking of a wonderful elder of the Karok People, Charlie Thom, and his account of being the last child left in his tribe on the rivers of Northern California. The last child.

Meanwhile, the trail of Government interference continued into the 20th century as ‘officials’ took it upon themselves to decide which Native peoples would be federally recognized and which wouldn’t; who could have a reservation and who couldn’t. As if it were up to them. Set against the backdrop of the wholesale murder, the theft of nearly all land once cherished by Indian Peoples and the trail of broken treaties, the spectacle of the U.S. government making decisions about Indians makes me sick, plain and simple.

And this is the setting for my total disgust over what is happening right now, in 2009, in Windsor, California. If you are a Native person whose family has lived here for just a few generations, chances are, your family members were murdered, kidnapped and enslaved. If you are a person of European descent whose family has lived here for just a few generations, chances are, your relatives either participated in the California Genocide or, at the very least, read about it in the newspapers while eating breakfast. And, if you are like me, with both Native and European ancestry, and your family has been in California for a few generations, you look at the whole situation with horror and terrible shame.

The Bottom Line
The local government and misguided citizens of Windsor who are trying to keep the Lytton Band from making a home for themselves need to be publicly condemned for their racist attitudes, in no uncertain fashion. I don’t care if the Lytton people are federally recognized. As Native Peoples, their roots in this land go back so far before George Washington that it is simply ludicrous for this to be an argument of any kind. I don’t care if Windsor’s zoning laws say that the Lytton Band wants to build too many houses for the area. I say, thank God! Thank God there are enough survivors of the California Genocide to build a wonderful new place to live in 2009. I wish there were 100 times that many Lytton Band folks.

I don’t care if the Lytton People want to chop down trees to build their houses. We are all living in Indian Country, whether we want to recognize that or not, and what gets done with the land is best decided by Indian People. It is absurd that anyone living in Windsor, where that giant and practically empty downtown section was recently built overnight, would put up a fuss about a housing development. Absurd. It is incredibly repugnant to read of a refusal of water to the Lytton Band. That Americans would refuse the once-clear waters that they have so polluted over the past 150 years…well, it’s just unbelievable to me. Additionally, I am in absolutely no mood to hear worries that the Lytton Band might build a casino in their housing development. Indian gaming is such an old pastime, I don’t think anyone knows when it started and it certainly isn’t up to newcomers to dictate what kinds of games the older inhabitants of California can play. I personally don’t care for casinos, but frankly, if the Native People wanted to build a nuclear power plant in Windsor, it wouldn’t be up to me to tell them they couldn’t. This is their land. No one, and I mean no one, should be walking around in a frame of mind thinking they can tell Indian people what to do in this land known as ‘America’.

And therein, I believe, lies the crux of this utterly frustrating problem. If you think of this land as America, and you attach that idea to this being the province of the U.S. government and your reality excludes the fact that this part of the continent is inhabited by many, many sovereign, independent nations that have absolutely nothing to do with the recent invention of the U.S. government, you are not seeing the picture of what is going on here correctly. If belonging to the Windsor City Council has given you the notion that you can have votes and make laws and govern the lives of Peoples who have called this land ‘home’ since time immemorial, your sense of your own importance in the grand scheme of things is disturbingly distorted.

It is the newcomers who should be petitioning the Native Peoples for permission when they want to build a housing development. It is the ‘Americans’ who ought to have been asking, from day one, if there was room here to share the land and to realize dreams of life and liberty without getting in the way of the already-resident Peoples. Judging by the overwhelming display of generosity and brotherly love exhibited by first-contact peoples towards anyone who showed up on this continent without murder on the mind, my guess is that the people we call ‘Indians’ would have made room for us with kindly hearts. But it didn’t happen that way. The Americans came to California and got it into their smug heads that it would be acceptable to kill every last Native inhabitant of the state…and the U.S. Government paid them to carry out this plan that sits in evil company with the genocidal schemes of Nazi Germany.

This is not ancient history. The assault on and discrimination against California Indians is what has been happening since the Americans first showed up here, and the pettiness, the embarrassing sense of ownership, the belief that racist attitudes will be winked at when it comes to Indian Peoples…these things being evinced by the governor, the local government and the angry citizens of Windsor must not go unchecked. These people should be on their knees, begging the Lytton Band to please come build a home alongside them. They should be pleading with fate to give them a second chance to treat Indian Peoples with the heartfelt respect and admiration they so abundantly merit. They should be asking if they can lend a hand in the building, if they can help at the medical clinic, if they can do anything, anything at all to help the Lytton Band find a peaceful and good home where they can live without threat of violence and dishonor.

Think of those grandmothers and grandfathers, their hearts torn to shreds with the loss of loved ones, their eyes filled with tears for the loss of homes in beautiful forests, on high mountains, on windy sea coasts. Think of them wandering California, the victims of hatred and evil, unbefriended by neighbors, uncherished, uncelebrated. Think of them coming home, at last, in Windsor. Think of how right that would be.

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For further reading on the California Genocide, I recommend this introductory document. It’s never too late to learn.

The above image was captured from a Google Maps’ streetview shot of Hwy 101 near Novato in Marin County. Take a close look at the margin of the road and you will see the telltale strip of dead and dying plants right next to living green plants. This is the result of spray trucks, primarily driven by CalTrans, driving along the freeway spraying herbicides. They do so on both sides of the freeway and in medians as well.

It may be that you’ve never really noticed the sickly brown strip. Or if you have, maybe you’ve absently wondered if the absence of green growth on the road margins might be caused by cars straying outside the lines and running over the plants. Or, maybe some type of giant weedwhacker was keeping the plants short?

Now you know the truth. The dying strip is caused by poisons being sprayed. These poisons are extremely dangerous to humans and animals. To see CalTrans trucks spraying Bay Area roads you drive, look at these photographs.

As I understand it, CalTrans sprays the roads every year with a pre-emergent herbicide and then continues spraying with RoundUp once weeds emerge. Yes, I know…why would they need to spray RoundUp if they have already sprayed a pre-emergent chemical that is supposed to prevent plants from growing? Doesn’t make sense, right? But, as you can imagine, it makes plenty of money for CalTrans and the herbicide manufacturers.

Nature’s rules are that grasses and other plants sprout at different times and grow to their full heights on their own schedules. By spraying over and over again, herbicide users are attempting to combat what nature intends as the various plants we often generically term ‘weeds’ spring to life. It’s not only a losing battle for herbicide users, it’s a self-defeating one. Spraying a patch of mixed greens with an herbicide will generally work for a given amount of time until Nature rushes to defend its dictates that we live on a green planet and enables the plants that are under attack to develop resistance to the chemicals. When herbicide-resistant plants emerge, the herbicide manufacturers respond by creating new herbicides. It’s a never-ending, unsustainable struggle against our planet’s natural laws, and in the undereducated process of attempting to control the lives of plants, Marin County is endangering the lives of its citizens.

Are Herbicides Dangerous To You?
In a word, yes. The various herbicides in use in California, and around the world, cause damage to the nervous system and major organs. Whether it’s your son’s asthma or your mother’s cancer, herbicides may be the well-hidden culprit that is robbing you and your loved ones of health and life. The page of photos I’ve linked to of CalTrans workers spraying offers several toxicology sheets on commonly-used herbicides and they represent a start to your education about the toxins your city managers, state agencies and so-called integrated pest management organizations are polluting your body and environment with.

And it isn’t just officials that are subjecting you to this unwanted barrage of carcinogens, endocrine disruptors and mutagens. It’s your neighbors. Maybe it’s even you! Monsanto and their toxic cohorts have marketed both herbicides and pesticides as safe for home use aggressively enough that Americans believe it and chances are, even if you don’t have a bottle of RoundUp in your garage, one of your neighbors does.

Just as our Google Maps image from Hwy 101 illustrates, dead patches in winter and springtime in your neighborhood are generally an indication that Roundup or another herbicide has been used. Look in parks, shopping center parking lots and around public buildings. Like me, once you know what the signs are, you will begin to see them everywhere.

Is Your City Trying To Kill You?
I don’t blame you if you wonder this, but the sad fact of the matter is, your city and state officials have likely been duped, just as many Americans have, into believing that chemicals are the solution to plants and bugs we’re not happy with. Pesticide and herbicide manufacturers spend billions of dollars in marketing themselves every year and the sole point of that marketing is to persuade individuals and organizations to buy their products. They will lie to achieve this aim and they will take the chance of lawsuits because they can afford them, win or lose. While the recent news about Marin violating its own pesticide/herbicide laws is a case of officials doing exactly what they’ve been told not to, most cases of pesticide/herbicide use are the result of workers simply carrying out the tasks they have been told to do.

The families of Marin officials have been damaged by the massive use of both allowed and prohibited toxic sprays just as have the families of private citizens. CalTrans workers have been horrifically sickened and come forward to talk about the permanent harms they’ve suffered as a result of being ordered to spray chemicals for a living. Countless workers in California’s alcohol fields are sickened every year from being ordered to spray herbicides and pesticides. The epidemics or autoimmune disease, mutliple chemical sensitivites, autism and other destructive malfunctions of the human body’s normal processes that we are witnessing in California may be traced back to the ingredients in the chemicals we are spraying every day, across our state, as being known to cause these exact types of physical and psychological damage. And in Marin County, with it’s #1 cancer rate in the nation, we may look for our hidden enemy in the tons of carcinogenic chemicals that are being poured on the lands and on the people.

Blood money and corruption of politicians most certainly do play a role in America’s current chemical addiction, but I see lack of education as the key culprit, creating a situation in which local city officials step into office and are told that, “In Marin, we control weeds with herbicides,” and those officials do not have the superior education to realize that statement equates with, “In Marin, we are sickening and killing our people.”

Officials are in desperate need of this education, as are citizens.

We’re Dying Because Of Our Chemicals, But Can We Live Without Them?

The chief reason given by city officials for herbicide use along roadsides is, somewhat ironically, protecting public safety. It is certainly true that some plants can grow tall enough to obstruct views and make driving conditions hazardous. But, in the light of the dawning 21st century, educated people are realizing that trading off one hazard for another is not a sustainable approach to problem solving. In the case of our major roads, we must demand a non-toxic solution that will make driving safer on our thousands of miles of highways. Here are three completely sensible options:

1. Get Planting. Marin County, and any other county in the state, could take the vast sums of money they have previously invested in herbicides and spray trucks and invest it in landscapers who could plant our highway margins with dense growing native groundcover plants that, with some periodic maintenance, would choke out the taller, unwanted plants. Lush borders of low-growing plants would not only make our highways more beautiful, they would decrease pollution and fight global warming. These native green borders would, of course, need to be smog-tolerant, drought-tolerant and organically grown. Imagine if each county got to pick its own area-appropriate groundcover and a drive on the highways from Northern to Southern California was transformed into a proud display of each region’s finest native groundcover plant. It would put our state on the map as truly forward-thinking and green-minded. This is my favorite solution.

2. Take that herbicide money and put it toward a ready-made manufactured product like Universal Weed Cover – a man-made, non-toxic weed barrier that is already in use along hundreds of miles of US highways. If other regions are using it, why not Marin County? A one time investment in this would save the county from those costly annual herbicide fees for a long, long time.

3. Keep the same workers in business who have been paid to spray Marin County, but instead of spray trucks give them Highway Weed Mowers. It looks like there are plenty of them to choose from.

All three of these choices would put a powerful end to the use of deadly herbicides on Marin’s roadways, and similar solutions are within easy reach for all other situations in which herbicides are currently being used. Money taken away from herbicide manufacturers and granted to public education programs that retrain the dangerous, unnatural learned aesthetics of a society which has come to view dandelions in a lawn as a threat would be money well spent. And, where plant control or removal is a must, manual labor is at all of our fingertips. City workers will experience far better health pulling weeds instead of being engulfed in poison while spraying them. Manual labor of this kind will offer fresh air and exercise to the worker rather than dooming him to chronic disease.

We Can Learn New Behaviors
This article has taught you how to recognize the visual signs of herbicide use where you live. You now have this knowledge, and there is one fact of life that I would like you to take along with it.

When you begin to notice and reflect on the brown dying strip along the roads you drive, remember that it is not merely an image of dead weeds. It is the visible sign of a poisoned environment – an environment in which you live – just like the grasses and plants that have been overpowered with chemicals. Life is life, whether it is in plants or people, and where life cannot exist for plants, the environment is also unfit for humans.

In our chemical addiction, we have created a place that is unfit for us to inhabit in good health. It is unfit for us, for the birds, the mammals, the amphibians and fish. The dying weeds on the highway are bold road signs reading Danger. Look at the signs and determine within yourself what you want to do about them.

We have the power to learn new behaviors. Perhaps the discovery of the illegal spraying of Marin will be the horrific event that causes Marin’s people to decide that they have had enough of lies, enough of irresponsibility, enough of cancer and disease. I cannot imagine anything more important for local people to be thinking of right now. What do you say?

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It had to be irony I was feeling, then, driving home from the surgical center with a diagnosis of Crohn’s Disease on a piece of paper in my purse. Scar tissue in my ileocecal valve had become so inflamed that it obstructed my small intestine, sending me straight from a doctor’s office to a hospital, feeling pain so intense, I thought I might die. That was round one. 30 days later, it happened again, and I ended up spending this year’s Thanksgiving holiday being poked, prodded, drugged and scanned into a listless stupor in a hospital bed. My frantic husband spent the night at my side, on a cot so old it groaned every time he exhaled. It was a wretched time, and it led to the trip to a surgical center, where I got my diagnosis, and a picture of my future filled with IVs, pills and surgeries. Crohn’s Disease is the 3rd autoimmune condition I have been diagnosed with in the past decade, and in order to explain to you the irony in this, I have to sound a bit like a vegan who is bragging about the superiority of their lifestyle. Follow me.

Pick up just about any health-related book or magazine today and the general advice given for either protecting yourself from disease or helping to get well from disease will read something like the following:

- Get plenty of exercise
- Decrease or eliminate meat and dairy
- Eat mostly whole grains, fruits and vegetables
- Don’t eat processed foods
- Find healthy ways to manage stress

Whether the condition being discussed is acne or cancer, you are almost sure to find some version of the above list being given as your guide to preventing and overcoming ill-health. And, the most enlightened authors, doctors and researchers are taking this advice a step further by warning you to throw out all of the toxic cleaning and cosmetic products in your house. Sticking with vinegar and wiping all that goop off your skin will certainly decrease your exposure to an entire directory of toxins that should never have been invented in the first place, let alone wiped across your kitchen counter or into your face. Over the past couple of decades, people who write about health have caught onto the idea that a plant-based diet and a chem-free body and home are smart choices for pretty much all people. By leaps and bounds, the public is making efforts to catch on, too.

Well, I’m sorry to say that it may be too late. I offer myself and the past 20 years of my life as an object lesson.

How I Live

For the past 20 years:
I have followed an organic, whole foods vegan diet
This means I eat no animal products of any kind
I prepare all of my meals at home, from scratch
I do not eat refined sugar, junk food or restaurant food of any kind
I even bake my own bread
I am product-phobic; we buy the fewest manufactured items for our home we can
There is no cleaning substance in my house stronger than vinegar
I do not use cosmetics apart from a plant-based liquid soap
I have many enjoyable, simple hobbies and spiritual pursuits to help me keep stress levels low
I spend as much time outdoors and in nature as I possibly can
I have an organic microfarm which my family is working in an effort to become self-sustaining

This isn’t meant to sound boastful, but when presented as a list like this, I hope it gives a pretty clear picture of the natural life I’ve tried to pursue. Basically, my goal with my life has been to live as much like a natural human animal as I possibly could. I’ve watched all of the other kinds of animals in my environment, going about the business of being themselves so simply and humbly, and I’ve tried to figure out how a human could do that – live like the earthly sorts of animals we are. Getting rid of all the ‘products’ has been an important part of that. And choosing to live with compassion, trying not to harm the other animals, has been a choice open to me because I’m lucky enough to live in a part of the world with a long growing season that can provide a delicious and nutritious diet without any need to rely on animal-derived foods. I’ve used the gift of free will in a way that seemed authentic to me and in a way I thought wouldn’t cause any suffering to others.

It’s an interesting choice, ‘going’ vegan. This was long before the Internet, long before Whole Foods, long before the doctors were really saying vegetarians were likely to avoid diseases. I picked up a simple paperback book somewhere as a girl – Diet for a New America by John Robbins. Other than the Bible, I can’t think of another book that’s had so profound an effect on my path in life. I was young, but even then, rather painfully distressed by needless suffering, and it was the story John told of the true lives of farm animals that presented me with a choice to either participate in the suffering or withdraw my support from it. I chose to withdraw, ‘go vegan’ as they say these days, and I’ve never regretted it…not for a minute.

The animal stories were the things that stood out to me then. Yes, there was a big section about the health benefits of a vegan diet, but what kid is really going to be attentive to a discussion of cholesterol and high blood pressure? Kids are invincible. No, I stopped eating, wearing and using animal products because I just couldn’t see how my life could be judged to be more important than the life of an animal, in the grand scheme of things, and I didn’t think anyone had given me the right to benefit at the expense of others. And really, I didn’t want to have to go to heaven one day and explain to God that I’d found out I was hurting someone, but kept on doing it anyway. I could almost see that conversation playing out, and I didn’t want to have to have it! This was one of the first real ethical debates I’d ever held with myself. It was an important decision for a young person to make, and I’m still proud of my kid self for choosing what felt right to me.

Many Years Later

It wasn’t until many years later that I came back to the ‘uninteresting’ section about the vegan diet and health in John’s book. I was in my early 20s then, and in the midst of trying to make a life for myself, I was stricken with a strange abdominal illness. The day before, I was as healthy as anyone else. Overnight, that all changed. I lost my job and began the visiting-doctors ritual that was to continue for many years. I was given a blanket diagnosis of Irritable Bowel Syndrome (doctor-ese for ‘I have no idea what is wrong with your guts’) and told to stop eating so much meat and dairy! When I explained my squeaky clean diet to doctors, they were even more eager to see me go because then they really had nothing to tell me to do.

I had already been living a greatly diminished life when weird illness number 2 struck like a thief in the night. Endometriosis left me more or less bed-ridden for a couple of years, in between more rounds of visiting clueless and even dangerous doctors. They wanted to cut out my organs. They wanted to dope me with hormones. One of them gave me a shot called Depo-Provera which gave me sickness number 3 – Fibromyalgia. That drug became the subject of a class action lawsuit as thousands of women fell ill with Fibromyalgia from it. I didn’t join the suit…I was sick in bed, with my 20s passing by somewhere outside the window.

Endometriosis was my first autoimmune disease. I hardly knew what that meant at the time, and I certainly didn’t guess that it was part of a pattern that would continue on, leading up to this year, and the newest diagnosis of Crohn’s. Living now, with 3 autoimmune diseases, each one of them enough to destroy what anyone thinks of as ‘normal’ life, the portrait of my health centers on the angry, red word: inflammation. My body reacts with inflammation to the normal functions of being alive. It’s not just one organ that behaves this way. It’s whole systems of digestive, reproductive and muscular function. What the misguided doctors told me was Irritable Bowel Syndrome 12 years ago was likely my body’s first declaration that, from then on, anything going on inside would be met with an indignant response of inflammation.

When your body loses its ability to distinguish between its own cells and invading foreign organisms, you’ve pretty much ceased to function as you’ve been designed to. Life always tries to support itself. But with autoimmune disease, life tries to commit suicide.

Again, I had to think back to John’s book that had been so pivotal in my life, and its thoroughly sound and excellently researched proofs of hope for the very best of health with a whole-foods, plant-based diet. I’ve been blessed with the pleasure of communicating with John, and he is a wise and loving person. His facts aren’t flawed. Eating an animal-based diet is fraught with health hazards. You’ll be hard pressed to find any doctor now who will disagree with that. But a picture has emerged for me regarding the efforts people can make to eat right, rid their habits and homes of poisons and manage their stress in creative and healthy ways, and it’s a very bleak scene.

Autogens not Carcinogens

What can you expect for yourself if, today, you start eating an organic, whole-foods diet, free of toxic animal products? What can you expect if you throw out your makeup and take your commercial household cleaners to a toxic waste dump? What can you expect if you do yoga, meditate, jog, swim, bike? I can only offer my 20 years of healthy living in our land of America as an answer. If someone like me makes a consistent effort to make all the right choices when it comes to health, and she winds up with 3 debilitating diseases by her mid-thirties, what does this mean for you and for all of the people who have spent their lives trying to promote an enlightened approach to wise and loving care of the human body?

It means that your freedom is disappearing. It means that your choice to be healthy is being taken from you.

Consider these facts:

• 23.5 million Americans have autoimmune diseases now
• That means 1 in 12 Americans
• 75% of these people are women
• The incidence of many autoimmune diseases has doubled in the past 30 years
• 80,000 chemicals have been approved for use in our environment
• An average of 5 new chemicals are approved for use every day
• Autoimmune diseases are called the ‘Western Disease’ because they predominantly occur in industrial, chemical-laden countries
• The rise of the autoimmune epidemic has gone hand in hand with the rise of chemical manufacture

It is the chemicals pouring out of factories, industrial agriculture, pharmaceutical laboratories and the products and plastics we are surrounded with that are triggering the rewiring of the human body, turning it from an elegant, life-supporting machine into a self-destructing mess. The toxic output of ‘industry’ is what is robbing us of the choice to pursue a healthy lifestyle. You can choose to go vegan, go organic, go jogging, but if industry chooses to pump your air, water and soil full of autogens, you are swimming against a tide as large as your whole environment, with nowhere to turn for the basic needs of life.

Donna Jackson Nakazawa is another gifted, wise and delightful author with whom I’ve had the pleasure of communicating, and her tremendous book, The Autoimmune Epidemic, meticulously chronicles the dual risings of pollution and autoimmune disease. Stricken with an autoimmune disease which left her temporarily paralyzed, Donna’s investigative reporting of this crisis in human health has won praise from the likes of Johns Hopkins and the National Institutes of Health. I have nothing but praise for this landmark publication, but as with Diet for a New America, it strives to offer the choice for better health through diet and conscientious shopping. Even as I applaud the author’s insistence that people must only eat organically-grown food, the vegan organic farmer in me heaves a very heavy sigh. And looks at the irony of my life.

Even as a child, I was able to see that it isn’t right to make choices that hurt others. If that meant giving up ice cream and fancy leather boots, I could make that sacrifice. Because it wasn’t really a sacrifice, once I knew I was getting to do something helpful and kind in the world. If a little girl can meet, weigh and make a moral choice on this issue of doing-unto-others, how can it be that the head of a multi-billion dollar corporation or the man in the White House cannot bring himself to do the same? How can it be that after being offered abundant proofs of causing debilitating illness and death, the pesticide planes continue to fly, the factories continue to fill our water and air with poisons and we the people keep handing over our paychecks to keep the system that is killing us going?

When will enough be enough? When the average American woman realizes that her SUV, her hair dye and her microwave dinner may actually be the cause of her Lupus and her children’s asthma and autism? When the average American man realizes there will be no one left for him to marry because all of the women have quietly faded away from multiple sclerosis, fibromyalgia, multiple chemical sensitivities, endometriosis and Crohn’s disease? When the health magazine writers are all out of work because everyone realizes there is no point anymore in trying to make a tofu sandwich when you’re living in an autogenic world?

Healthy living has been a matter of choice for all modern people with the ability to be self-supporting. You could choose to eat the cheese burger or go to the health club instead. Some people made a ritual out of procrastinating about it, waiting until some better time to really get serious about living more healthily. Others went at it whole hog.

At this point, the weaker ones like me, the ones with the genetic predisposition to have our systems be triggered by autogens into a state of self-destruct, are already seeing that our efforts have won us nothing but a growing list of chronic illnesses. We are the canaries in the autogenic coalmine and the pollution is getting us first. Consider the fact that cancer, treated as the great and peerless killer, is less likely to be a woman’s fate now than the acquisition of an autoimmune disease. If someone told you that by giving up meat and dairy today, by paying extra for organic, by growing your own food, you could hope that in 20 years….a doctor would tell you that you had Crohn’s disease, would you even bother to try?

I think we are coming to a time when people will look back to the granola they ate in the 60′s, the headbands they bought for exercising in the 80′s and the organics they paid an arm and a leg for at the turn-of-the-century and wish with all their souls that they could get back to those days when pursuing health was a free choice almost anyone could make. I think my own life is a herald of that time that will come to all people, no matter what their genetics or mode of living. I think that they will look around at the GMOs, the SUVs, the plastics and the filthy air and see that these were their enemies, mute and innocuous-seeming though they were. I think that ‘progress’ is about to becoming the most obscene word in the English language.

What The Autoimmune Epidemic Means For You

I honestly don’t know the answer. I’m not a psychic and I’m certainly not the Creator of this beautiful but toxic planet. I remind myself that the choice to go vegan, live naturally, become an organic farmer was made primarily out of compassion for others, not out of some hope of health for myself. I didn’t want to harm animals or people, ruin their water supply or fill their air with poisons to put food on my table. So, I’ll never regret the choices I’ve made and I will always be thankful for the wisdom of others who inspired me to make authentic and compassionate choices when I was young and everything seemed like a free choice.

We ought to love freedom better than this. We ought to love life too much to sell it out for a tank of gas and a new brand of noxious shampoo. Oh, yes, maybe you still can be better off by making healthy choices. Maybe if I hadn’t made the choices I have to live so naturally, I’d be dead by now. I’ve had that thought many times over the past few weeks. Maybe it’s still bright to make yourself as resistant to disease as you can by pursuing health as though the choice were still as free and real as it once was on our blue and green Earth, before the chemicals began to seep from the halls of industry. Despair is an evil and we humans seem duty-bound to look for hope in the most profoundly black days, if we are to show our appreciation of the gift of life.

But my looks are all dark for the people of industry who have taken away my choice to be healthy, because we *must* have progress, or nail polish, or hamburgers…or whatever they’re selling today. Even as the women fall ill, one by one on the home planet, the people of industry continue to sell us the very things that are killing the mothers, sisters, wives, daughters. The people of industry keep selling. And we keep buying. And one day, that conversation I imagined as a girl will be happening in the next world, and the Great Spirit will be asking us what we did with the beautiful, life-sustaining planet He created just for us, and the wonderful, elegant bodies he gave us to walk about in amongst the oxygen-giving trees. What will we have to say for ourselves?

This afternoon, a friend of mine sent me an ABC feature on a South Whitehall Township woman, Elizabeth Feudale-Bowes, who has been ordered to take down the shelter her husband built to protect her from chemical assault. Feudale-Bowes suffers from Environmental Illness.

Both the title of the article and many of the comments left after it show the problems a woman like Feudale-Bowes faces the moment anyone hears she has this type of disorder. ABC’s subheading puts single quotes around the words environmental illness, suggesting that this kind of ailment is dubious, so-called, not-to-be-believed. They show ignorance of the matter in doing this – a lack of research into the reality of this severe affliction. Comments like this one follow suit:

Just another hypochondriac that expects the rest of us to confirm their fears.

Chilling.

Feudale-Bowes’ neighbors have complained that the environmental safety shelter doesn’t conform to zoning laws, is unsightly and will bring down their property values, and when Judge Carol McGinley ruled that it had to be taken down, she allowed the people of South Whitehall Township to continue living in the grip of amazingly selfish values. What do you think about a town where a pretty yard is more important than the health, potentially the life, of a severely ill woman? What do you think about that town?

I’m sure there must be many good people in South Whitehall Township, PA. but the ones who have brought this disaster down on a woman whose sufferings include migraines, joint pain, bladder inflammation, seizures and temporary paralysis should take a good long look at themselves, the health they are lucky enough to enjoy, and their personal moral codes that have revealed them talking about yard decor while their neighbor is in debilitating agony.

Where are the good people in South Whitehall Township who will hold a fund raiser, volunteer labor hours, go to the city zoning commission, in defense of their ailing neighbor? Who will offer to bring Elizabeth Feudale-Bowes’ safety shelter up to code? Who will visit her, console her and her family, lend a hand in helping her cope with a life of such challenging pain? Who will confront this family’s neighbors and reveal to them that a light has been shone on their selfishness and that this is giving the town a very poor name in the public eye.

Every major world religion embraces the values of charity, care of the poor, help for the sick and love of neighbor. What religion, what system of ethics is being practiced in the neighborhoods and courtrooms of South Whitehall Township, Pennsylvania? Who can look this woman’s suffering in the eye and put single quotes around her pain, quickly moving on to talk about zoning laws and property values? Those meddlesome, self-centered neighbors should be hanging their heads in shame right now and asking the Feudale-Bowes family to forgive them for this totally needless infliction of misery brought on by a distorted sense of values. I sincerely hope that the national news coverage of this story will make those neighbors take a long look at themselves and what has been revealed about the size of their hearts.

And, I sincerely hope that the good people living near this family will react with the outrage and active response this situation calls for. I pray that caring people will give the Feudale-Bowes family whatever assistance they need in order to provide Elizabeth with the safety shelter her illness decrees as a necessity for her.

As I write this, it’s not hard for me to get into Feudale-Bowes’ shoes. Everyone in my family caught a flu two months ago. Nothing to make a big deal out of and my husband, my parents, my siblings and their kids have all recovered. But, because of my own Environmental Illness, I am still sick with it. I’ve been in continuous pain for weeks…the pain Feudale-Bowes described as feeling like, “fire with ground glass in it.” My damaged autoimmune system is taking its own sweet time to recover from a sickness that everyone else shook off after a week or so.

Does the fact that I don’t look too bad mean this isn’t happening to me? Does the fact that I’m writing this article mean that I’m really okay? Or does it simply mean that I’ve learned to live with a level of discomfort and pain that would have most people rushing off to an ER if they experienced it? Like most people with autoimmune diseases, multiple chemical sensitivities or environmental illnesses, I’m a master at coping and I do what I can.

Elizabeth Feudale-Bowes was just doing what she could when suddenly her own neighbors turned on her and brought the law down on her. On top of all of her own sufferings, she has been forced to deal with this stress and humiliation. My cheeks burn with shame for the people who brought this on her. And I cringe to think of the so-called doctors, the judges, the citizens who have forced her to hear, probably for the millionth time in her life, that her sickness is probably all in her head. One of the most damaging things about these kinds of incurable, chronic illnesses is being called a crazy or a fibber, while the pain continues on in mind and body.

Does anyone, these days, anyone at all actually NOT know at least one person with an environmentally-related illness? Has anyone not know someone who died of cancer due to pesticide exposure? Been born with autism because of chemical pollution? Gotten sick at Macy’s from the perfume? Had migraines from commuting through smog? Been bedridden from ‘unknown’ causes? Visited doctor after doctor, looking for a root, a diagnosis, a solution, a cure to a host of environmentally-related illnesses for which modern medicine has no real answer? It’s hard for me to believe that anyone in America these days doesn’t know someone who is suffering from Fibromyalgia, Endometriosis, MCS, Chronic Fatigue and so on…

And if that sufferer is your mother, your brother, your child, your neighbor…what do your ethics call you to do?

As I see it, the people of South Whitehall township owe Mrs. Feudale-Bowes a sincere apology and the offer of their hands, their money and their time to make this situation right.