Jorge and others,
This is striking not only for the truth it tells but for the gullibility of acceptance. The purveyors of pesticides, in particular, have figured out how to insulate citizen action from the most egregious impacts on human well-being. State pesticide law, for instance, only requires following instructions on the label. The EPA and others have sanctioned their use but due to insufficient funds, staffing and facilities, they cannot do much of their own testing and allow industry or industry chosen laboratories to do their own. The time it takes to prove safety is much longer than to create the poison substances in the first place.
From what I understand, industry’s strategy for success started with the smoking lobby to create doubt on science consensus and to make harms from smoking be proved rather than having to prove safety. It took a long, enormous effort to ban DDT in this country although it is still used on products we import every day from non-banned areas. But new poisons are continually being introduced that will have to be proven harmful later. It seems like we are in a vast laboratory.
Another way they are able to open the flood gates for poisons is due to their invisibility. When people cannot see them, that creates doubt so provability is a greater task. There are other invisibles out there besides pesticides that can cause harm as well–radioactivity, EMFs, etc. The public is not supposed to be worried if the menace is not seen.
Then there is the reworked but old-fashioned money in politics and revolving door that gives agencies the direction to not impede the invisibles from being utilized. The immediate and cumulative harm from pesticides gets ignored or could be retranslated into something else like new diseases or conditions. A wave of new diseases or conditions is something that needs to be proved for causal relationships–very difficult. Invented substances for the purposes of killing life and applied to food, of course, will have nothing to do with causing widespread harms.
To me, it has always been startling that pesticide-applied food does not have a descriptor before it while organic food needs one. Maybe my kind will die out to allow total acceptance living with the invisibles and the harms that cannot be proved, or at least, not in time.
Larry