Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 But one thing many people don't think about actually deserves mention as potentially the most profound effect of the digital camera revolution: how digital cameras greatly reduce the destructive impact on the environment compared to film cameras.
At first, you might think, "How can that be? My film camera didn't harm the environment!" Even though it wasn't your camera that harmed the environment, your film processing did indeed harm it. Any time you take your pictures to a photo processing center, that film is run through batches of chemicals. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 So, if you take a cow, pig or chicken and you look at the way it's treated in a commercial ranching or farming environment, you'll find that it's a very unhealthy food source, because it has consumed and concentrated all of these toxic chemicals. When a human being consumes that meat, those toxic chemicals are ingested into that human's body, where they function as cancer-causing chemicals, liver-damaging or hormone-disrupting chemicals. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 Recycling is then presented as a solution to make these people feel good even as they are destroying the environment with every single product they consume.
Purchasing choices are far more important than recycling
You know what's really important in protecting the environment? Buying eco-friendly products in the first place.
When you live a healthy lifestyle, a lifestyle that truly prioritizes respect for the planet, you don't end up with a lot of excess packaging to recycle in the first place. You don't end up with aluminum cans around the house or plastic bottles of diet soda. |
Gary Null and Amy McDonald
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 I developed serious food allergies and sensitivities to everything in my environment. I became allergic to everything in my own home, I reacted to plastics of all kinds, and I couldn't breathe outdoor air. The air inside my home had to be filtered especially for me and I had to wear charcoal face masks to breathe. I was literally a captive in my home for the first year.
Also, I had depression, mood swings, and a lot of confusion and memory loss. I would go into one room and forget why I was there. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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| Those chemicals are going to end up in the environment somewhere.
So the next time you load up that curbside bin to be picked up by your local recycling company, ask yourself, "What are the environmental impacts of these products?" If you think you are saving the planet just by recycling the containers, you're kidding yourself. You are not saving anything. You are just making yourself feel better while you continue to poison the planet. If you really want to save the planet, stop buying and consuming toxic chemicals. Put the chemical companies out of business by refusing to buy their products. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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| But whether or not the public really gives a hoot about the environment is beside the point in this particular case -- people are buying digital cameras in record numbers, the digital camera market continues to grow and film cameras are finally becoming obsolete. In my view, it couldn't be a moment too soon because a world without film cameras is, of course, a healthier world with fewer chemical contaminants.
One final thought: I do realize there's a potential negative impact to the environment related to the use of batteries in digital cameras. |
| And even high-end estimates of this manufacturing impact are relatively tame compared to the repeated destruction to the environment caused by film developer chemicals.
That's why I say the digital camera revolution is a net positive for the environment. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 But did you know they can also be toxic to your home and the environment?
Fluorescent lights are filled with a gas containing low-pressure mercury vapor and argon, or sometimes even krypton. The inner surface of the bulb is coated with a fluorescent coating made of varying blends of metallic and rare earth phosphor salts. Fluorescent light bulbs are more energy efficient than incandescent light bulbs of an equivalent brightness, and the efficiency of fluorescent lighting owes much to low-pressure mercury photon discharges. |
| A researcher at the University of Illinois at Springfield sums up the basic point behind these fluorescent bulbs: "People need to understand that these bulbs are considered "hazardous" and can cause long term damage to not only the environment, but if broken can cause health problems with people as well. Mercury has the ability to cause humans, as well as animals, serious health problems such as permanent nerve and kidney damage if exposed. |
| One manufacturer has calculated the ETTF (Estimated Time To Failure) for their LEDs to be between 100,000 and 1,000,000 hours, mostly depending on the operating temperature (the cooler the environment, the longer LEDs last). Fluorescent tubes, in contrast, are typically rated at about 10,000 hours, but in practical application, they only last about 2,000 - 3,000 hours. Incandescent light bulbs typically burn out every 1,000 hours. LEDs mostly fail by dimming over time, rather than with the abrupt burnout of incandescent bulbs. |
Gary Null and Amy McDonald
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| Think about all of the auto tires on the road that are spinning off cadmium in their wheels as they wear down, all the 50,000 chemicals in the environment that weren't there 50 years ago. We are all being exposed to toxins. Dr. Davis from England has shown that these gradually and insidiously accumulate in our systems with every decade that we live. So we have to face the strong likelihood that this toxic buildup is interfering with our enzyme function. |
| We always build up our own internal toxins from the food that we eat and also external toxins that we take in from the environment. The main organ that handles all these toxins is the liver.
"The system needs amino acids, vitamins and minerals and other such nutrients to function properly. If this is not functioning properly, these toxins will again build up; instead of being excreted into the stool as they should, they will be reabsorbed into the bloodstream. |
| Attention Disorders In Adults
It is my belief that, just as we have pathologized children's behavior and mental disorders, and at the same time refused to examine the role of the environment?including sugars; caffeine; artificial sweeteners; empty calorie diets; and overuse of cell phones and computers, which cause electromagnetic pulses into the brain and disturb sleep patterns, impacting a child's behavior and causing symptoms that mimic ADD or ADHD—so too have we done the same with adults. Life has consequences. We cannot always control the outcome of things. We fear loss. |
| From simple irritants like forgetting where you put your glasses or keys, to forgetting names and faces, brain impairment with aging is, most of all, a product of lifestyle, environment, and nutrition. "The brain cells are our largest and most energy-demanding and most fragile cells," Dr. Kidd says. "They are particularly vulnerable to toxins like aluminum, mercury fillings, lead from car exhaust, pesticides, even monosodium glu-tamate and aspartame. As the years go by, cumulative toxic damage will affect function. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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| Even though it wasn't your camera that harmed the environment, your film processing did indeed harm it. Any time you take your pictures to a photo processing center, that film is run through batches of chemicals. These chemicals are environmental hazards, and once they are used to process film, those chemicals must be discarded. These chemicals include both developer solutions and fixer solutions.
All film photo processing centers use these chemicals. The question is, what do they do with these chemicals after they use them? |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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| Everybody talks about how recycling is good for the environment, but we never really talk about what's inside those bins. Have you taken a look at what's in there?
People are recycling old cardboard boxes from laundry detergent made with toxic ingredients and chemicals that wash down the drain and pollute the streams, groundwater and, ultimately, the ocean. They're recycling soft drink cans loaded with either high-fructose corn syrup -- the sweetener that promotes obesity and mental disorders in children -- or artificial chemical sweeteners that cause cancer and neurological malfunction. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 So whether you want to create a cleaner environment for future generations, or a healthier population in the next five years (or another similarly noble goal), InFiveSteps.com can either lend you a voice, or magnify the voice you already have if you're currently writing for a website, blog, commercial site or other content organization.
Yes, it requires a bit of writing, but you don't have to have perfect spelling, and you don't need to be a journalist or professional writer. All you need is something valuable to share with the world.
And we all have that. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 The article "Pharmaceuticals and Personal Care Products in the Environment: Agents of Subtle Change?" appeared in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives.
This landmark article discussed how "priority pollutants," such as agrochemicals, were "only one piece of the larger puzzle" of human-made environmental risk factors. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 We take water out of the environment, pollute it, then dump it back into the environment. And yet we don't pay Mother Nature for any of this. If we take all these resources from the planet, we should give it something in return. We should replace and replenish these resources. At the very least, we should offer thanks for it.
Traditional herbalists -- whether they're Native American, Aborigine, Australian, South American, Incan, Mayan or from any other culture -- would ask plants for permission when they harvested them from the natural environment. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 These are known toxic substances that are not only toxic to the humans who consume them but also to the environment. Mercury fillings, for example, currently release 34 metric tons of toxic mercury into the environment each year. That's about as much as all the coal plants in a sizeable nation, yet the EPA pretends mercury fillings have no environmental impact whatsoever.
Aspartame, too, is a known toxic substance that's well documented as a neurotoxin. And fluoridation? |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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| That's how you save the environment: Through purchasing decisions, not by recycling the discarded boxes of toxic products.
There is great hypocrisy in the recycling system. If it is about saving the planet, you shouldn't be buying those products in the first place. If it is about saving the planet, stop putting those pesticides on your lawn. If it is about saving the planet, stop poisoning your body with prescription drugs. There are detectable levels of prescription drugs (like antidepressants) in municipal water supplies today.
You might wonder if I am against recycling. No, not at all. |
| What's the point of recycling all this packaging if the products being purchased and consumed are toxic to the environment in the first place?
Recycling programs are created to eliminate consumer guilt
Do you know what occurs to me in all of this? Recycling isn't about saving the planet. If it were about saving the planet, people wouldn't buy these products in the first place. Recycling is a system for eliminating consumer guilt. It is designed to give everyday consumers a token measure that they can feel good about. |
Gary Null and Amy McDonald
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| At issue here is a patient's connectedness, or lack of it. "We are talking about this on a level of disconnection," says Dr. Gentile. "The person's own response to their illness, once contracted, that's disconnected if they cannot develop higher ways of understanding how their life has lead them to this point of illness. If they view their illness as the outside superimposed in?I caught a germ"?that's typical disconnected, linear, analytic thinking, very much the way our medical sciences approach problems. They're on to traditional medicine, doing lots of tests and finding nothing. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 This means changing the way we live in harmony with our surrounding environment and taking an honest look at how we pollute the rivers and streams, oceans, airways, and the entire planet.
There is no "them," only us
Whether discussing cruelty towards people, animals or plants, all cruelty stems from a prevailing distortion carried by nearly everyone on this planet: the belief that we are separate. If person A attacks person B, it is only because he believes he is separate from person B. If a society attacks and destroys nature, it is only because it believes it is not part of nature. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 These chemicals are found throughout our environment now. Cows are essentially accumulators and concentrators of environmental toxins. They eat tons of grass, literally, throughout their lives. And, they tend to concentrate any toxic chemicals spread on the grass through pesticides or contaminated well water.
So, when you eat a piece of beef, you are eating, quite literally, a highly concentrated form of saturated animal fat containing environmental toxins that would never be present in those quantities in the natural environment. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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| We welcome Five Step Solutions on gardening, green living, renewable energy, health care reform, saving the environment, animal rights, tax reform, personal finances and just about any subject that helps readers find solutions for a better life. The solutions must be well written, of course (we review and approve or reject each post), and they must offer real solutions without being overtly commercial. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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| The products I saw in my neighbors' bins are so toxic to the planet and the environment that the recycling effort hardly seems to matter. It's sort of like saying, "Let's poison all the fish with these chemicals, and then recycle the box they came in so we can save the planet!"
Recycling consumer delusions
I have also visited friends or been in other people's houses where their pantries and refrigerators were full of the most toxic products you can imagine. Their house smelled of fragrance, laundry detergent, dryer sheets, perfumes, colognes and shampoos. |
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