7th Gen Blog

Meet today’s guest blogger, Cristiana Fragola, a student who first crossed our paths when we went to check out Presence coauthor Otto Scharmer’s class at MIT.

Yesterday I finally met a remarkable man who talked about system change and the importance of looking at a company’s ability to generate value and be productive 3 to 10 years from now, not just in the next 11 months. The auditorium was packed, students seemed moved and were frantically taking notes. Yet today, during the business and environment class I am taking at the Harvard business school, many students commented that what Gore says is not practical and we should not even bother to live a carbon neutral life because individual actions cannot make a difference.

I asked those students what would they do if they were in a leadership position, heading a fortune 500 company, and then they said that maybe they would reconsider their position. A few others though quietly followed me at the end of the class to thank me for having taken Gore’s side and articulated that macrocosmos are made up by microcosmos. They even asked me they could use the argument again. There is hope.

25 years ago today, Jimmy Carter signed the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980, better known as Superfund, creating the Federal government's program to clean up the nation's growing and out of control hazardous waste sites. Through the Superfund program, the EPA along with numerous other private groups and organizations cleaned up abandoned, accidentally spilled, or illegally dumped hazardous waste sites that posed a risk to current and future generation’s health and the environment.

If you plan to while away any of your upcoming winter hours staring at the flickering flames of your video box, you should make sure you watch this when you do.

Nobelity is a new film from writer and actor Turk Pipkin. (You’d recognize him if you saw him–he had a featured role in the Sopranos among other things). It’s a travelogue of sorts filmed as Turk traveled the continents seeking answers to the problems the world faces from a cross section of Nobel prize winners and looking at these issues through the eyes of the people who will be most affected by the decisions we make today: the children of the world.

There was an interesting article in yesterday’s Oakland Tribune about the little known effects that chemicals can have on human health. It's well worth checking out. Everybody knows that a big chemical exposure (or smaller exposures over time) can make cells go wiggy and turn cancerous. But there’s also a host of other things that chemicals do, and these don’t get much press even though I think they're as important as the carcinogenicity factor.

For example, there’s what happens when chemicals mix and mysteriously magnify each other’s effects. Or what happens when you’re exposed to something inthe womb vs. being exposed later in life. Not to mention the fact the tiny doses of certain substances seem more insidious than big ones.

Then there’s the issue of epigenetics, which I’m convinced is going to be the next big story where chemical toxins are concerned, much in the same way hormone disruption went from wacky fringe science to mainstream acceptance. Epigenetics theories say that chemicals our ancestors encountered can affect us without mutating our inherited genes. Instead, they work by altering the way those genes are expressed.

The Oakland Tribune article touches on all this and more, and while I think they could have done a better and/or more detailed job of explaining some of the ideas they present and offered a little more in the way of evidence, the article is still the first time I’ve seen most if not all of the hugely under-reported aspects of chemical contamination reported in one place.