LETTER FROM
THE EDITOR
HUFFINGTON
07.22.12
She Was
Right
IFTY YEARS AGO, a
marine biologist named
Rachel Carson began
publishing a series of
articles in The New Yorker, sounding the alarm about the dangers of
exposure to chemicals and the failure of the chemical industry and
government regulators to protect
people from those dangers. Later
collected in the book Silent Spring,
Carson’s prescient insights are the
subject of an anniversary feature
this week by HuffPost’s environmental reporter Lynne Peeples.
She delivers not only a tribute to
Carson but a reminder that her
work is more relevant than ever.
Despite Carson’s warnings, our
leaders are still not doing nearly
enough to regulate the potentially
harmful chemicals we’re exposed
ART STREIBER
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to every day. As Lynne notes,
more than 80,000 chemicals currently used in our country have
never been fully tested, so we
don’t even know how damaging
they might be to humans or to
the environment. And as Harvard
Medical School’s Eric Chivian
explains, when it comes to determining if a chemical is dangerous, the U.S. does not put the
burden of proof on those who introduce it; that burden is on the
watchdogs to prove the danger,
after the substance has already
been introduced. Which is to say,
we have it backward. We’d rather
perform autopsies than biopsies.
And it’s yet another instance in
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