The Year 2000 Glitch
The unanticipated impacts of Y2K that I see on the horizon are tremendous. Five to ten percent of small businesses in America are expected to fail due to Y2K- related interruptions.

Our current rush toward centralization has pared down the commercial and civic redundancies that used to provide us with cultural resilience. Whole populations have been stripped of sustenance tools and capacity. The Commons is gone. The knowledge base for living without the influence of electricity, quick transportation, and electronic numbers and dates has almost vanished.

To assume, as some have, that traditional cultures and ecologies will not be impacted by such computer/information failures because of their apparent, but illusory, disassociation from them seems an oversight.

Even the villagers who gather jarabuti from the slopes of the Himal exchange it for cash with traders who depend, in turn, upon the machinery of industrial-age consumption. Interruptions can easily (and already do) bring political instability to an area. Disease, hunger and other hardships can follow.

Y2K is cemented in the bedrock of the technology that grows our dinner. And a lot of us have, through our inattention, our greed, and our delight at the toys we have made, fashioned a brittle bedrock that has a date with disaster. The window of opportunity for equitable proaction narrows with each passing day.
– Cynthia Beal
Eugene, Oregon

Fluorides and the Environment
Thank you Earth Island Institute, Darlene Sherrel and Joel Griffiths for your informative articles on drinking water fluoridation. You are the only major environmental group that has had the courage to take a stand on this issue.

I am a project engineer for [the California State EPA] and find it very disheartening to see hazardous waste being misrepresented as a nutritional supplement and added to the water supplies.

– Andrew Berna-Hicks
Oakland, California abernahi@yahoo.com

Loved your special 16-page report, “Fluorides and the Environment.” Please give as much space as you can to this important issue. And get the new book, “The Secret War” by dentist Geoffrey Smith. There is much in the scientific literature that has not been taken up effectively. Smith’s book highlights this neglect.

With best wishes from the United Kingdom.

– Jane Jones
National Pure Water Association Wakefield, United Kingdom

As a child, it was common for fluoride pills to be given to children for their teeth. I took them until my mother started to realize I was developing brown stains on my front teeth.

We quickly learned more about fluoride when our town was going to add it to our precious water supply. My father wouldn’t stand for our water being poisoned with fluoride. People listened to my father’s advice because he was the town water commissioner.

The more we learned about fluoride – a chemical that was used to kill rats – the more we fought. Finally, the day came when it was time to vote. I stood with my sign that said “Vote No.” It was tense holding signs all day and into the night. We wondered if all our hard work would sway the voters.

The ballots were counted and fluoride was voted out of the water supply four-to- one. We won a battle that helped the town. A lot of people may not realize that with support and strength, you can win. Especially if you have a cause that you feel deeply about.

– Debra Hammond
Holbrook, Massachusetts

Milk: It’s Not for Everybody
My deepest heartfelt thanks to you and your staff for putting together the most provocative and insightful and gutsy publication I’ve seen. Your blend of environmental and political-economic reporting showing the connections not usually revealed by the conventional media is extremely valuable and much- needed.

Your article “Milk: The Deadly Poison” made me decide to be a regular subscriber. I found it right on target. Milk truly is a deadly poison.

– Will Tuttle, Ph.D
Healdsburg, California

Thank You Very Mulch
I’ve been a Journal reader since about 1989. I enjoy your good news and the bad news gets me riled up and talking about the issues with my friends and politicians.

I’ve followed your recent fluoride exposes with avid interest. Like so many things, what I’ve read in the Journal has changed the way I live my life. If I were stuck on an Earth island, it’s this journal I’d wish to read and mulch into my garden.

– Julian de Marchi
Troy, New York

People for the Ethical Treatment of People
You report correctly about a proposed settlement from MIT and Quaker Oats [which paid $185 million to more than 100 retarded students who were secretly fed radiation spiked cereal in the 1940s and 1950s (“Hot Oatmeal,” EcoMole, Summer ’98)]. Boston newspapers carried the story last December 31, a notoriously low readership day.

There is no penalty for noncompliance with federal laws concerning human experimentation. Only three states have laws regulating human experimentation – New York, California and Virginia.

The National Bioethics Advisory Commission has 17 medical and academic members. One is the chief business officer of a pharmaceutical company. The chair is the president of Princeton University, one of several universities which get millions in federal grants each year for human experimentation.

On December 18, 1990, the Deputy Commissioner of the FDA and the Secretary of Health and Human Services granted the Pentagon an exemption from Informed Consent Requirements for Operation Desert Shield. That is when untested antibiotics were administered to US and British troops. Many of them now suffer from Gulf War Syndrome. We have an active and vocal PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) but not PETHumans.

– Roy Bercaw
Cambridge, Massachusetts

Corrections
In the ReThink Paper project report (“Bamboo Paper is Not Forest Friendly,” Summer ’98) the reference to the October 1997 meeting of the Technical Association of the Pulp and Paper Industry was incorrect. The reference should have been to the April 1997 meeting of the Advertising Print Production Association. In an update to the story “Paper and Global Warming,” the 1998 North American Pulp and Paper Factbook reports that annual US consumption of pulp and paper products is now a staggering 735 pounds per person. Cities for Climate Protection is based in Berkeley, CA.