 Those
of you who have studied Gaia Theory will have an appreciation of the
awesome and self-regulating complexity of our Earth-organism, and its
evolved ability to enable and encourage staggering diversity and
evolution while optimizing both the quantum and well-being of
all-life-on-Earth.
Since I got sick last summer, I have studied
the workings of the human body enough to appreciate that it is, in many
ways, an equally awesome, self-regulating and complex organism,
designed to advance and sustain its constituent organisms in a state of
evolving and resilient well-being.
And I'm becoming convinced
that what ails our planet and what ails our bodies is the same thing:
poisoning by massive amounts of toxins produced by irresponsible people
and corporations. But because our planet and our bodies are so complex,
we will never be able to prove it to the satisfaction of our shoddy
legal and political systems, which are designed to protect the
perpetrators of this poisoning.
Today, the (arch-conservative) Canadian federal government took the extraordinary step of publicly censuring an Alberta doctor
who dared connect the horrible level of environmental diseases suffered
by the indigenous peoples in his community, to Canada's eco-holocaust,
the Alberta tar sands dirty oil sludge project, directly upstream from
the community. Why? Because it clearly connects irresponsible pollution
with human suffering. Can't have that, or what will happen to our
economy? If the corporatists can be held accountable for poisoning the
citizens, the lawyers paid to defend them and protect their profits
will not be able to do their jobs. These mega-polluters will go out of
business and their wealth will be transferred back to the people they
stole it from. And the leading sources of greenhouse gases, other
pollutants, and water depletion in the country will be shut down.
Unthinkable!
These corporatist polluters are not just destroying
Gaia, the billion-year-old balance of life on our planet, they are
destroying our personal health with the toxins they put in our air, our
water, our soils and our foods, which end up in our bodies. There is
growing evidence that most of the epidemic diseases of the modern world
are consequences of damaged immune systems, either immune deficiency
diseases or, increasingly, immune system hyperactivity diseases. Now
there is evidence that the virulence of the horrific 1918 Spanish Flu
and of H5N1 influenza, the one predicted to cause the next pandemic,
can be attributed to immune system hyperactivity in a form called a 'cytokine storm'.
That's why the devastating 1918 flu hit the healthiest citizens hardest
and spared many children and seniors: Healthy people are most prone to
immune system hyperactivity.
The fluwiki link above likens a
cytokine storm to a rogue SWAT team. Faced with a riot, a SWAT team is
supposed to go in and quell the illegal behaviour, by separating or
diverting the combatants if possible, and by arrests if not. But
sometimes, either because they get instructions indicating the riot is
out of control when it isn't, or because the SWAT team members
themselves lack self-control, the SWAT team overreacts, exerting excess
violence at the site of the disturbance or attacking innocent
bystanders indiscriminately. (If you've ever been in a demonstration,
you know this happens easily and often.)
If your immune system
is damaged, cytokines, the system's messenger proteins, send
inappropriate messages that cause the body's T- and B-cells to
overreact to quell the disease, just like an overly aggressive SWAT
captain's inflammatory rhetoric. Or, the cells can misinterpret the
context-sensitive messages and attack the wrong targets, just like
overzealous SWAT police. The result is severe inflammation and
irreparable damage to critical healthy cells and tissue, which can be
crippling, agonizing, or fatal, as in arthritis or diabetes or lupus or
endometriosis or MS or chronic fatigue syndrome or asthma or allergies
or inflammatory bowel disease or any of the dozens of other chronic immune system hyperactivity diseases.
Cytokines not only summon immune cells to attack, they activate the
ability of those immune cells to produce yet more cytokines, producing
a positive feedback loop that, in the absence of other types of
cytokines that normally put the brakes on the loop when the target has
been defeated, produce a cytokine storm, like a huge army of rogue SWAT
cops killing everyone in sight. There is now some evidence that the
1918 flu strain had, and the H5N1 influenza strain has, evolved an
ability to provoke cytokine storms.
Anti-inflammatory drugs
merely treat the symptoms, like nurses treating the bystanders injured
by the rogue cops. There is no cure for autoimmune diseases, because
the immune system is so staggeringly complex we are only beginning to
understand its behaviour, let alone what causes that behaviour to go
awry. Steroids are even worse: they cripple the immune system, which
stops the rogue cops and the good cops, but leaves the body utterly
defenseless against all kinds of lethal diseases. Chemotherapy can have
the same effect, as, of course, can AIDS. Immunodeficiency diseases are
the flip-side of autoimmune diseases: Instead of a hyperactive immune
system, their sufferers struggle with a suppressed or completely
disabled one.
As I mentioned, the operation of our immune system
is so utterly complex that we will never be able to prove beyond doubt
what causes it to malfunction. But there is now overwhelming evidence
that the damage to the Earth's regulatory system is caused by human
pollutants and toxins in such massive quantities that the system can no
longer cope with them (read The Weather Makers
for a full explanation of this). So isn't it logical to assume that
human pollutants and toxins are also the cause of the epidemic of
equally complex regulatory system failures (autoimmune diseases) in our
bodies?
Of course, the powers that be don't want you to think that. It's genetic, they'll tell you, blame your parents. Or it's caused by some kind of unknown virus or other microbe. We'll find it (or invent it if we have to).
The fact that your food and water and air are full of artificial
chemicals and toxins, and now bereft of the micronutrients essential to
replenish our body's natural defences is just a coincidence. And
they'll dare you to prove otherwise.
Image: Cytokine storm by Gary Carlson
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
