About Life

The Need For Sustaining Life

We live in a polluted world. Every day we breath in car fumes and industrial wastes. We eat foods containing pesticides, herbicides and other agricultural chemicals. We drink milk and eat meats from animals, which are routinely given antibiotics, steroids and other drugs. We eat a countless number of various chemicals in processed foods. We use personal care products full of various chemicals, shown to be carcinogenic and generally toxic for the humans.

Our modern energy conserving homes and offices have become toxic places. Modern building materials, insulation, paints, domestic cleaning chemicals, fire retardants all outgas toxic substances which we breath day in and day out. For example, chemical analysis on outgassing of common carpets and carpet adhesives in modern homes found in considerable amounts such toxic substances as formaldehyde, toluene, xylene, benzene, methacrylate, tetrachloroethylene, methyl naphthalene, pthalates, styrene. All these chemicals are known toxins for a human and we breath them in ample amounts every time we are at home.

Schools, Hospitals Work environments and shopping centres have even higher amounts of toxic substances in the air, that is why so many people feel so tired and drained after a long day at school or work, a long shopping trip or a long visit to a hospital. And as if all these is not enough, we routinely take prescription drugs, drink alcohol and smoke tobacco.

It is clear that our environment impacts our health, in almost every conceivable way. The management and destruction of species and ecosystems ongoing and around the world mindlessly, and needlessly, is lowering the quality of our plant’s natural resources, destabilizing our physical environment, and is hastening the spread of human infectious diseases and the invasive enemies of the crops forests on which our lives depend.

Today, there has been only minimal effort to reverse this trend.

And, there has also been little effort made to utilize natural biodiversity to enhance public health.

I believe that it is these various shortcomings that produce the greatest burden for us and the developing countries, where 80 percent of humanity lives and where most of the health crises erupt.The shift in world view needed is predicated on the increasingly obvious principle that humanity, having evolved as part of the web of life, remains enmeshed within it. We do not float above the biosphere in some higher spiritual or technoscientific plane.

For those reasons and many others, most importantly our own well-being, we need to take better care of ourselves so we can better take care of the rest of life.