Killing Us Softly
Extract from our new publication ‘Silence’.
Baskut Tuncak UN Special Rapporteur on human rights and toxics
Veronica Yates, Director of CRIN, in conversation with Baskut Tuncak UN Special Rapporteur on human rights and toxics.
In your recent work, you talk about toxics as a silent pandemic, can you explain what you mean by that?
Pandemic refers to the rates of diseases and disabilities around the world
that are prevalent, and in many communities increasing at rates that can only be explained by childhood exposure to toxics and otherwise hazardous substances, from pollution, contamination and consumer products.
The silence of the pandemic, largely refers to the fact that this is something that’s invisible. It’s invisible in terms of the cause and effect, the exposure and the health hazard that we see years, or even decades later. The harm, the culprit, the perpetrator is also invisible. It’s very difficult, if not impossible, to know that we’re being exposed when we’re being exposed.
But also the victims themselves, their families, and the broader community is silent. They don’t know they’ve been violated, so there’s a very practical impediment to them speaking out.
The silence also extends to the broader public which is largely unaware
about the degree to which everyone is being subjected to scientific, human experiments of sorts, without their consent, contrary to international human rights law.
Beyond disease and disabilities, many who could be more vocal on this issue remain mostly silent. Why do you think that is?
I think it depends on who we think needs to be speaking out on this issue. The first people that tend to come to mind are parents, doctors, other health professionals, policymakers, regulators, responsible businesses, and the public at large. Each of those constituencies, one would expect would be, at the very least, asking serious questions if not calling for immediate changes to be made to protect people’s health and the human rights that are implicated by exposure. But that’s not happening.
I think the issue of silence also comes from the fear of the unknown: not having conclusive evidence saying this substance is responsible for this adverse effect. And I think that’s what’s paralysed a number of people that we would expect to be speaking out. But the reality is that it’s not just one substance; it’s a cocktail of hundreds — if not thousands — of hazardous substances. And we don’t have the information to make those conclusions. But we do have the information about the adverse impacts, and that should be the starting point. We need to slow — if not stop — this toxic trespass that we are all being subjected to, and not wait for conclusive scientific evidence because there will always be scientific uncertainty which gets exploited and keeps people from speaking out and speaking definitively on this problem.
The issues you highlight in your work are not confined to poorer countries, or less developed, or those with higher levels of corruption; it is truly a global problem. So why has this issue not become a global emergency?
I think because the issue continues to be characterised far too narrowly. We’re focusing on individual substances, and in some rare cases, classes of substances or multiple substances; but this issue is much broader. We are exposed to a toxic cocktail of substances which can interact with each other producing adverse health impacts their regulators didn’t foresee and didn’t predict, and this is all happening without our consent, without
a participation, and in many cases, without our knowledge.
The other part is that there has been a tendency to apologise for the continued use of toxic chemicals and health impacts from pollution as though it’s some sort of necessary evil, that in order to survive, in order to feed a growing population, in order to have the medicines that we depend upon, we need toxic chemicals.
As a chemist, I strongly say that I don’t buy into that. I think if you give innovators, researchers the proper parameters within which to operate, they can do remarkable things. [Until then] the number of substances that are on the market inadequately assessed continues to grow and it plays exactly into the industry’s hands.
When I first learnt about toxics and your work, besides anger, it would have been so easy to fall into despair. How do you keep going despite so many hurdles?
Where progress is made it seems like two steps forward one step back, but this is all the more reason to work on this issue.
Unlike a lot of the human rights challenges that we are facing around the world, for this issue I think solutions are more readily available. We have solutions to reduce childhood exposure to toxics, and if we don’t have them already, they can be developed, I have no question about that and that gives me optimism.
I find optimism from exciting businesses that are working to do their part to reduce exposure, both within their products as well as their supply chains. I find optimism from judges and juries that will stand up to the world’s most powerful leaders, the world’s most powerful corporations, defending us and our rights against corrupt politicians, powerful businesses. I find inspiration from people like you who get the issue, and it helps to motivate me to do this work.
This is really an issue that concerns every single person on the planet. How can we get people to engage meaningfully? And I obviously don’t mean by buying organic food and recycling.
I think first we need to change the narrative. [We’re] too caught up in either the technicalities or the fear factor. It needs to be simplified: this issue is about poisoning us, and poisoning ourselves, and allowing businesses to poison us and our children. It’s about exposing us to health risks without
our consent.
Can you imagine if people put cigarettes in your mouth, lit them, and demanded that you smoke them? I mean no! But we’ve somehow consented to companies being able to inject hundreds of toxic chemicals into our bodies without [our] consent.
I think that needs to be the message. This is just a gross violation of our rights, and it needs to be framed in that way. It’s just complete rubbish that it’s caught up in these acronyms that people can’t keep straight, these words people can’t pronounce; it’s complete nonsense and, again, it plays perfectly into the hands of the industry. This is very much a human rights issue, [so] it’s mind-boggling to me the way that some in the philanthropy field on toxic chemicals continue to think of this issue as a scientific technical issue and not to think in broader terms about rights and values and principles.
As a scientist, how do you deal with the push by some to discredit scientific evidence?
In my recent report to the UN I suggest that States make the manipulation of scientific evidence or the deliberate delay of scientific processes to perpetuate exposure to toxic chemicals a crime. To me, it’s a criminal act. It’s essentially increasing the chances that people will die as a result of delaying action by discrediting scientific information. And it has paralysed governments, it has paralysed businesses and individuals from taking action, and it seems like, for every independent scientific article raising the risk of some substance, you have hundreds of studies being funded by the manufacturer of that substance saying that it’s safe — it’s outrageous and it’s deliberate.
So I guess as a scientist I think our options are limited. You can critique studies, you can debate the methodologies used and some of the conclusions that are drawn, but all of that takes time and that plays into industries’ hands. As a scientist, I think that’s a flawed approach and we need a better approach, [one] that prioritises prevention to exposure even without completing a near complete scientific evidence of adverse health impacts.
Beyond fake news and disinformation campaigns, there is a real need to develop children’s critical thinking abilities — though perhaps not just children’s. In this age of information overload, how can we do this within work on toxics?
I think that’s spot on because this issue will not be addressed within five years or 10 years or even 20 years; it’s going to be addressed by children of today, so we need to start sensitising them today to this issue and making them as aware as possible, at an early age, of what the consequences of the toxic environment are. Much in the same way that we’re teaching them about many health subjects within schools, there needs to be education about environmental health and how that affects a whole number of things.
When you are conditioned at a young age to recognise those risks and the consequences of what your actions or inactions mean, including on environmental health, I think that’s really important. And we shouldn’t discredit children and their ability to understand what toxic substances are, what the health impacts can be.
An interesting aspect of your work and mandate is that it crosses professions and sectors. This is not just for the lawyers, or the scientists, or the NGOs; quite the contrary. How do you manage that? And can you give us some examples of how you have worked with different groups?
I think this is a challenge for everyone. But that’s one of the beauties, I think, of human rights: it provides the foundation in theory which everything should be based on, as a set of values and principles, which all these different constituents can gather around and could agree on as a basis, and use that for communication.
[But] the human rights narrative can only take you so far and then when it comes to speaking with health professionals it’s important to speak in their language; when you speak with human rights activists versus environmental activists vs doctors, they all require a different sort of language.
There are certain businesses that have taken a real leadership role in moving far ahead of governments in terms of phasing out toxic chemicals from their supply chains, and making sure that systems
and procedures are in place for monitoring pollution, contamination, and worker protections and things
of that sort. Unfortunately they also seem uninterested in carrying a message around human rights; that what they’re doing, what their efforts on toxic chemicals are about is their effort to respect human rights. I think that’s a shame and a lost opportunity.
Beyond the issue affecting everyone, certain groups of people are more affected or at risk. Why is this? Can you give us some examples of how such groups are fighting back?
One example that comes to mind is Destiny Watford in Baltimore who was recently awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize for her efforts to keep a waste incinerator out
of her community which would have spewed poison that is known to be a particularly dangerous form of pollution for children. She was in high school when she launched this campaign and she was successful at changing the plans for the waste management. Unfortunately we don’t see enough cases of children taking the lead on the issue of toxic chemicals, unlike climate change where we have child-led lawsuits popping up around the US, and in other countries.
What role might creativity play in your work?
I love this question. I think it can play a huge role and there is room for growth. One thing I have heard so much is a reference to The Handmaid’s Tale when I talk to people about my work. Its premise is the dystopian future that was created by a toxic environment. This isn’t discussed in great detail in the TV series, but the potential consequences of a toxic environment really seems to have resonated with people and stuck in their minds.
Another type of creative outlet I think that could play a much larger role is art and marketing, and trying to take the science and make it more thought-provoking, more creative, perhaps even fun or funny in a way, but also motivating and inspiring. I still remember as a child the advertisements that we had in the US trying to keep kids off drugs: we had the frying pan and egg cracking and it said “This is your brain on drugs. Any questions?” That to me was a strong message and we need something like that on toxic chemicals.
When I was in Mexico a few months ago, an NGO called Poder, a civil society organisation that works on corporate accountability, came up with a fantastic menu for a reception after an event where they took a number of cases that I had worked on involving toxic pollution and crafted a menu around those cases, so they had different appetisers of fish that were poisoned with pesticides in Guatemala, or they had something made from non-renewable fossil fuels.
There are a lot of opportunities to do things like that, to make people think, but also in a way that isn’t off-putting, that doesn’t make people feel
‘I can’t deal with hearing more bad things in the world’. So yeah, I think creativity can do a lot for changing the narrative. Be more creative!
I want to talk a bit about climate change; not about remaining deniers, but about the links between toxics and climate change.
I think a lot of people are thinking about how to build synergies between climate change and toxic chemicals. One of the areas where we are seeing this is in the use of fossil fuels for plastic and campaigns to reduce plastic use, especially single-use plastics, given the origins of those plastics with fossil fuels that are also largely responsible for climate change.
I think one of the issues that has probably not got enough attention in the mainstream public is that one of the biggest mitigation measures against toxic exposure over the past decade has been sequestering toxic pollution in Arctic ice, and to some degree, the Antarctic ice as well. We’ve essentially frozen large amounts of our pollution, our dirty habits from the past and present, in ice. But now thanks to climate change those toxic emissions are being re-mobilised as the ice melts, and they’re finding their way back into water systems, back into the food system, the food chain, and eventually they will find their way back into people’s bodies as well.
What role does power play here?
Well I think power plays on the one hand a very limited role because those who are in power are not doing what they should to protect people. But on the other hand, power plays a tremendous role in terms of paralysing decision-makers, regulators, governments, even communities, from taking action. Oftentimes, communities find themselves essentially — and sadly sometimes literally — with a gun to their heads, blackmailed, that if they raise concerns, if they raise alarms about the pollution that is adversely affecting their children or even themselves, that those polluting industries will leave, taking jobs and economic benefits that they provide with them. That’s an incredible degree of extortion and blackmail by powerful industries that should have no power to do such things.
If you were asked by a stranger at a bus stop what your job is, how would you explain it?
My job is to try to keep people from being poisoned and to help people who are being poisoned.
And to an eight-year-old?
I would give the same answer.
Thinking about silence as a positive thing, what does it mean to you?
Thoughtful reflection, meditation.
What is your jargon pet hate?
Sound chemicals management.
What’s a saying you know on silence?
“The most dangerous silence is the one where the impending danger is even more silent.” — Mehmet Murat Íldan.
This interview originally featured in the magazine Silence, which is free to download here: http://home.crin.org/s/What-Lies-Beneath-Silence.pdf