It must be terrifying finding out you live in a dormitory contaminated with dioxin. Imagine: You’re 18 years old and you’re having a great time at college. Then one day at the end of the year, you find out that your building had an electrical fire so long ago that nobody remembers, but not so long ago that the toxins are any better than the day of the event. Nobody told you. You feel betrayed. You learn that the chemicals involved will affect you for life; that your children and even your grandchildren may be affected; that you were lied to; and that there is nothing you can do about it except prevent future exposures, if you can.
We always talk about life on a college campus being a microcosm of the “real” world, and SUNY New Paltz, with its inconvenient toxic truth—four contaminated residence halls—surely qualifies. When I get back to town, sometimes after many months away, I inevitably get involved in this issue again, 16 years after the toxic fires that spread contamination through Bliss, Capen, Gage, and Scudder Halls, Parker Theater, and the Coykendall Sciences Building. Writing about this issue has not made me John Grisham. More accurately, I sometimes feel like the Grim Reaper himself paying a friendly little visit, reminding people of the inevitable.
This has always been a tense relationship for me. Most of you know me as an astrologer who helps light up the inner human world of growth and the personal choices we face. In this role, I can be a bit circumspect and less conclusive. When I slip into my role as a dioxin journalist and community organizer, I need to shift into higher-contrast language and ideology; I must apply my talent for confrontation; and bring up a subject that most people would rather forget about. Yet that Grim Reaper thing has another side, which is, by raising these issues, we push people to confront their personal issues and to grow.
As I continue with this work, not entirely voluntarily, it becomes ever easier to see why so much goes unaddressed in the world. Initiating the discussion takes so much energy, and the messenger is often blamed for the message.
Very few people who become a community anti-toxins activist have any formal training, expertise, or authority. Generally, they start with no knowledge and no preparation.
It’s more often people like housewives (Lois Gibbs of the Love Canal comes to mind) or, in the case of Erin Brockovich, a secretary.
My life is often thrust into chaos as a result of getting re-involved. My business typically suffers, my energy runs low, and, along the way, I have to face my own fears and inner demons. I have to be honest with myself about what it means to be alive at this time in history, particularly in the human environment, which rarely seems willing to stand for too much reality. I have to be willing to have many conversations that people would rather not have, when there are plenty of things I would rather be doing.
When we ask why the global environmental crisis (and the associated corporate responsibility crisis) is not being addressed more directly or more quickly, I think we really need to look at these personal-level issues. With the situation in New Paltz, we have a fairly typical community crisis in our world, but one that is at least workable. Shutting down four buildings is possible, and it’s probably going to be easer than stopping Greenland from melting. Yet the task is daunting enough: challenging a massive, inhuman, and deceptive state bureaucracy to care about people.
One thing that’s different about the contamination issue as it exists in the spring of 2007 is that there are both students and local political leaders involved in taking action. Interestingly, they are almost all women, and the leadership is entirely composed of women. I wonder if this has something to do with their taking the reproductive issues associated with dioxin-like compounds more seriously. I have no other way to explain it.
One aspect of my work has been teaching, passing the torch, passing along information, and also carrying forward an environmental tradition that has its roots in the anti-pesticide movement of the 1970s in the Pacific Northwest, which has provided 90 percent of my education in these matters. In this role, I convey history, knowledge, information about key players and perpetrators, documents, contacts, and a general sense of awareness. I bring people into a larger tradition.
That other part of me who is the astrologer, the student of relationships, the observer and the participant in synchronicity, is watching myself and others as I do this. I am watching my connections with people and how they evolve, and also noticing the themes that emerge in the discussions. Participating with others who are new to these issues, I have a chance to see what it’s like to encounter them for the first time.
I don’t feel ready to write about the people who are involved. I am ready to say I’ve been truly impressed by what I’ve seen (they probably don’t know this, because I push people pretty hard to know their stuff and be firm in their actions, and I probably give the impression that I’m impossible to impress), but that is the truth. I do feel ready to talk about some of the growth issues involved in taking action on the environment.
Fear
To take action means to fully admit to the reality of a situation. When it comes to dioxins and their chemical cousins, the first thing you learn is that we are constantly exposed. According to Dr. William Farland, who supervised the reassessment of the toxicity of dioxin for the EPA in the 1990s, the current body burden of seven parts per trillion is, by itself, enough to cause serious disease in one out of 100 people. Learning about dioxin-like compounds is terrifying.
Yet students who are organizing have another layer, which is the necessity to explain this to other people. There is always that fine line to walk between being alarmist and being straightforward. Denial runs thick; you can be laughed at, your friends can give you a hard time, and you run the risk of being kicked off campus.
There is also fear of surveillance by government agencies, who seem to be back in the mode of their 1970s actions against the Black Panthers. Yes, it’s possible to get an FBI file doing this work; people may mess with you; we know the stories of activists who have had their houses burned down and their cars blown up. Nobody that I know of is obsessing over these things, but they are all lurking around the back of our minds.
Confrontation Issues
This is closely related to fear. To do environmental work involves a confrontation. Many people feel that they have to avoid confrontation at all costs. This is just not possible in a situation where you have public officials participating in poisoning students, or any similar issue. To confront someone, you need to get in touch with your power on some level: your anger, your sense of entitlement to be alive, your sense of justice—something.
Feeling powerful, even for a moment, tends to evoke fear and guilt. This can manifest as being afraid to make people angry, which is an essential thing to get over. You don’t need to proceed with the intent to piss people off, but if you’re scared of doing so, you’re going to get crushed.
All of this involves what we typically call parental issues. Taking on authority is a metaphor for challenging one’s parents. College administrators are in loco parentis, which means they are in the role of parent. Usually, people are much older than 19 or 20 when they do this. Often, people allow their parents to run their lives long after their parents have made their bodily exit from this lifetime.
Toxic Emotions
Students who are put in toxic dormitories sometimes come from toxic home environments, including those who have a history of being abused. Because their homes were toxic, a few things are possible. They may not notice the state of their building being contaminated, or may not care; or, they may even believe a contaminated place feels great, because it is less toxic than where they came from. Their attackers are not there. They can live in relative peace. But they may still carry the fear of rising up against the people who hurt them or who held them down. In addition, they may be afraid to get out of their dormitories, fearing that they will be sent someplace worse. There is indeed a close relationship between emotional toxicity and physical poisoning, and both work on the body in similar ways. As we attempt to clean up our world, we need to start with our mental and emotional environments first, which will help us make room for the attention we need to give our planet.
Reproductive Issues
Most environmental issues involve reproduction. Dioxin-like compounds (which include dioxins, dibenzofurans, PCBs, many pesticides and herbicides, and many heavy metals) mimic estrogen. In other words, they act like extremely durable, synthetic estrogen. Basically, they wreak hormone chaos, causing or being associated with a large array of issues from endometriosis to birth defects. Men are affected by being feminized; their sperm counts go down, boys born to PCB exposure victims are known to have smaller penises, and there may be many other effects caused by living in an environment of extremely durable female sex hormones.
To find out about this, and to learn that you may have been exposed, confronts one with reproductive issues, including negative (as in terrifying) ones, at a much younger age than would normally happen. The entire subject is sensitive. Though people may have been sexually active for a while, that is different than being sexually aware. However, learning that your dormitory is contaminated with dioxins is a truly unfortunate way to become sexually aware.
But it’s an issue that we need to face. PCBs, dioxins, and heavy metals are what is called ubiquitous. They are in everyone’s blood; it’s a matter of at what level, and what level in an individual causes a response. The only way to control this, in the long run, is by diet, and as a young adult you still have a lot of eating ahead of you. It’s actually not a bad time to find out about these issues.
Death
I’ve heard people say that young adults feel immortal. I never had that feeling, so I’m not sure I can relate, but I believe all the people who tell me it’s true. Encountering this issue of the deadly quality of toxins, or pushing others to do so, is a kind of meeting with death: the idea of death, and a shared reality that we all face collectively. Most people don’t want to do this at all, much less between the ages of 18 and 22, when they are in college.
All of this makes a good case for offering extra counseling services to New Paltz students, as well as for closing down Bliss, Capen, Gage, and Scudder Halls. The students need a therapist on their team. Are there any volunteers?
This article appears in June 2007.
