Enviromental Cancer risk

I've been thinking about this recently, as I discovered (courtesy of Mindful Merchant) that the shampoo I use is potentially toxic and has negative environmental impacts.

Being a new home owner as well, has meant looking at ways of boosting the look and feel of our lawn (our backyard is pretty pathetic and weed covered at the moment). The province has a ban on pesticides, but that doesn't mean that it's being respected necessarily (I remember seeing a CBC report about how pesticides were still available).

In the United States the President's panel on cancer (It's well-established body, not specific to any president) mentioned that there needs to be more research into environmental cancer risk, and that not a lot is known about some of these risks.

The fact that there are so many chemicals that are essentially unregulated, simply because there are no resources and way too many of them is quite scary. There of course is also the fact that the chemicals of course interact with each other and so may be benign in one situation but not when mixed with other chemicals or a different situation.

I read silent spring last year as part of an environmental book club and it was really interesting to see how little thought was given to the consequences or just spraying new chemicals every which way. Of course it was easier to do back then, with no environmental movement, no environmental agencies in government and the whole thing feels as if it couldn't happen again, because it was such a different time.

However the chemical industry has both expanded and learned some lessons in terms of its approach to dealing with these issues. I'm most concerned about the U.S. as their regulatory system seems to succumb more easily to pressure and they are a lot more media savvy so it ma be more difficult to oversee and understand what they are really up to.


I'll close this this:

One of the things I remember from the movie I am Legend even though I didn't really like the movie was the fact that they cured cancer but caused something much worse as an unintended consequence of it, and killed lots of people.

Kind of a scary thought.