Human Canaries, Mumby-jumbo and the Silent Spring
Most of you know I’ve been around the block a few times… QUITE a few times, actually.
Back in the late 70s and 1980s, there was a great health movement we called “clinical ecology”. This was post-
Silent Spring, remember, the book by Rachel Carson. For the first time we (well, the smart ones!) began to realize that health could not be divorced from the environment.
Why ecology? If you were living in a dirty, polluted or hostile environment, you might easily get sick. Thing is: IT WASN’T YOUR FAULT! It was the environment doing it to you.
Bumbling old mainstream medicine went on with the stupid view a sick person was “busted” somehow, sick or diseased. They NEVER looked into environment in those days. Even if a person had asthma due a cat dander allergy, and kept lots of cats at home, the doctors would never say “Get rid of the cats; they are making you sick.” They’d just treat the patient with drugs!
Yet the patient had no symptoms, unless they were surrounded by cats! So what’s the problem: the patient’s immune system, or the cat fur?
It all came to a head with the issue of food allergies, which is where—if I may say so—I earned my epithet of the world’s “Number One Allergy Detective” (
Sunday Mail, 1990)
That was me, back then!
I and a handful of colleagues demonstrated conclusively that food allergies were often the real cause of problems like migraine, colitis, eczema, depression, ADD, ADHD, asthma, mood sings, fatigue, irritable bowel, arthritis, and hundreds of other health conditions. The solution was simple: stop eating the damned foods! Ha ha!
But mainstream doctors went on and on, telling patients that what you ate had no impact whatever on your health. You just had “arthritis” and that was that. Wheat allergy, milk allergy, or whatever, were words simply not in their vocabulary. In fact food allergy they called “Mumby-jumbo” in my city!
Chemical “Allergy”
Anyway, starting with the publication of a magnificent book by my erstwhile mentor Theron (Ted) Randolph, with the rather lengthy title of
Human Ecology and Susceptibility to the Chemical Environment (1962), we learned with a
Blam! [Superman talk, get over it!] that people could be made very sick with ambient chemicals in the environment.
I brought to the world the term “Human Canaries” in my 1986 book
Allergies: What Everyone Should Know. Human canaries are those luckless individuals who get sick at the slightest whiff of a hostile chemical. The colorful term comes from the history of mining, in which men took a little canary underground with them, to breathe the same air. If the canary became distressed or, God forbid, should die, the miners knew they must get out FAST, before they too were overcome by noxious fumes (usually methane, which is deadly).
Well, it seemed to me about that time that there were a lot of human canaries around, who were falling sick all over the place, giving us a clear warning of dangerous pollution levels.
But nobody was paying any attention.
The big chemical companies fought the idea with fury and fake science. To this day, their view prevails in official corridors. Somehow they twisted the legislature to the idea that it was up to us, the public, to prove there was a problem and there was (still is) no onus on the chemical manufacturers to prove their products are safe, which is how it should be.
We began to talk of a “clean personal environment”, which meant having to take responsibility yourself for the air you breathed. No legislation was going to come down from the government to protect you. No Siree! Not while $billions were being spent on “lobbying” (which the rest of the world calls bribery).
And that’s about where it stands today. Except it’s a thousand times WORSE…
If there is one thing we’ve learned from the COVID-19 lockdown, it’s that the environment is teetering on the brink of disaster. Thankfully, with just a few weeks respite, Mother Nature has done her wonderful number and fixed it all for us. The birds sing louder than ever; butterflies twirl; and the fish are back in the waterways. But for how long?
The slow overwhelm of Gaia will resume, as soon as restrictions are lifted.
Why am I saying all this? Because on Thursday of this week, I’m going to be hosting a very important webinar around the theme of a “clean personal environment” or “clean local air”.
For your very life and health, you need to come along and listen to what I say.
I’ll be explaining the problem more fully and offering you helpful solutions at the personal and office levels.
When How and Where
We are on Zoom.
Date: Thursday 11th June
Time: 5.00 pm Pacific (8.00 pm Eastern).
Check your own time zone.
Go here now and register yourself. It’s FREE. You’ll be kept informed of any changes.
Take care,