The Poison You’ve Been Dreaming Of

You cannot get through a single day without having an impact on the world around you. What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make. – Jane Goodall

The other day Corrinne’s friend was over and I happened to come out of my office to the kitchen to get a bit more tea when I overheard her saying, “you’re a real downer with your off-gassing rugs and your crazy diet.”

For context, we’ve been trying to buy a rug. Yes, something that really ties the room together, but also that isn’t made with, more or less, poison. This turns out to be hard; more on that in a minute. Also, my wife is on a very restrictive diet for personal health reasons. Yes it is working and no, with any luck, she won’t be on it forever. But.

Here’s the thing. Corrinne’s friend is right, suddenly starting to pay attention to where things comes from and what they’re made of, how they’re made, who makes them and so on down the production chain very quickly turns you into a mildly-paranoid downer of sorts. The thing is though, it’s not just rugs and the antibiotics in your meat — it’s everything. And it’s happening whether you’re paying attention to it or not.

I really don’t care what you want to look at in your everyday life, could be your food, your house, your clothes, your shoes, your car… it doesn’t really matter, below the surface I can almost guarantee something is deeply, deeply fucked up about it. There’s toxic chemicals everywhere, I think on some level most of us know that by now, but of course it’s worse than that when you start digging. Get a little below the surface and you’ll find that slave labor keeps the price of fish reasonable and hey, how about chocolate? You like chocolate? I do too, but the slave children who picked it for us probably have different feelings.

Everyday we go to the store and blithely buy things without ever thinking about how they got here or what the cost of these items beyond the obvious — money we have to spend — might be. And the problem isn’t just Walmart or Target or whoever you want to boycott this week. It’s not limited to the U.S. or the west either. Exploitation is a universal problem that looks exactly the same in every country I’ve set foot in. It’s a pervasive within a capitalist system. In fact it might be the basis of the capitalist system.

But that’s a huge chunk to chew on. Keep it simple. Just look at one thing. Let’s stick with rugs and personal health since that’s something you might be able to control to a degree.

You probably would not think your rug needs to be coated in flame retardant toxins and held together with 10 different toxic glues. Yet it is and you inhale them every time you walk in the room. I am presumably, inhaling them right now as I type this. Is that worst thing in the world? You didn’t click on those links to the child slavery stories above did you? No, toxic rugs are most definitely not the worst thing in the world.

Yet toxins in rugs and furniture seems like a really easy thing to fix. After all 100 years ago rugs were considerably less toxic, if they were toxic at all. So why are those toxins there now? Why does you rug need to be toxic at all? Does flame retardant really save that many lives? Is it worth saving a handful of lives at the possibility of shortening all the rest?

What’s most troubling to me is the brutal economics of toxicology. Here’s the hard reality of it: if you want a non-toxic rug you will pay at least 3x times as much as you would for a rug with misc gene-altering petrochemicals deeply embedded in it.

In other words, if you’re either poor and the cheap rug is your only choice or you just don’t want to spend too much of your life energy on a rug, you will either have to increase the number of petrochemicals in your blood on a daily basis or not have a rug. And while no one seems to know how bad these things are for you, everyone agrees they’re not good. Particularly if you’re very young like all of my children.

According to even the conservative estimates from groups like the EPA, all of these chemicals have long term repercussions. It would, as I understand it, not be wholly inaccurate to say you will die sooner because of them. Might only be a month sooner, might only be a week sooner, but you lose a little life. Because you bought the cheaper rug.

This gets more depressing when you apply it across a broad spectrum and realize that the same economics of toxicology apply to food, where you live, how you move through the world, the shoes you wear, the things you apply to your skin, your hair, your kid’s hair.

Sure there are worse problems in the world, there are far worse problems in the world. I just find this one interesting because it’s an entirely consumer culture created problem. The need to produce cheaper goods drives manufacturing methods and materials down until you get the rug equivalent of Soylent Green. It’s not people (as far as I know) but it will kill them, both as they make it and as it sits in your house. That’s consumerism.

But what is consumerism? Or better, why is consumerism? The socio-biology answer is perhaps the most illuminating in this context: modern consumerism provides domesticated primates like ourselves with a means of attaining and identifying one’s social status within a group. The one with the coolest rug is the homo sapiens sapiens equivalent of the gorilla with the biggest chest thump.

Ah Culture. In order to attain a higher position in the group (and of course really tie the room together) we are willing to inhale poison on a daily basis. We trade our lives for stuff to illustrate the state of our lives to other people and increase our status in their eyes.

As Tim Jackson puts it in a talk called “an economic reality check”, “We spend money we don’t have on things we don’t need to create impressions that won’t last to people we don’t care about.”

We literally trade our time (all we have) for money to buy things that are killing us and the people we love. And we consider this totally sane. But it’s not. If someone walked up off the street and offered to spray the same chemicals around out house for free we would call them insane.

Why do we do it to ourselves? Because we’ve come to expect that our houses have rugs, that we can eat chocolate, that we can eat seafood. Because a lot of those things have nothing wrong with them. It’s not all awful. Sometimes a fish is just a fish. Sometimes a rug is just a rug. But sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes the bare floor ends up being more comfortable.