Hormonal chaos
Hormonal chaos: The Scientific and Social Origins of the Environmental Endocrine Hypothesis
By Sheldon Krimsky
The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002
256 pages
To come to any understanding of the time we lie in the study of stress is essential. It is one of the key factors that must be included in any deep analysis of our increasing hectic and uncertain modern world now everywhere due to cell phones, Twitter and the other great interrupters which now define our life.
There is no escape as many wedding or funeral attendees have found out when U.S. bombs have turned a solemn ceremony into a bloody mess.
As the now deceased Norman Mailer said about fifty years ago: “we live in a time that interrupts the mood of everything alive.”
He thought that interruption was cancerous – an intuitive leap that has turned out to be true, but perhaps ultimately more important are those regulators of mood: our hormones, and the endocrine system that our evolutionary history has created to regulate them.
They help create the internal context in which we live, breathe and act out our daily ritual of living that is now under threat from a global climate change that is partially of our own creation, due to the profligacy of our energy rich life style; a change that some say has gone beyond the point of our ability to stop the catastrophe that massive climate change implies, for the food that sustains us is deeply constrained by the need for the climate it has evolved with.
Bottom line: the provisions that maintain our existence are deeply threatened by the uncertainty introduced into their growing seasons by the climate change now underway.
We have also introduced into our environment endocrine disrupters whose action upon us in the foetal state – a time when millions of biochemical reactions must occur with clocklike precision if a healthy organism, which can reproduce, is to be born and live out an adequate life.
These disrupters, in minute amounts that cause no apparent harm to the adult organism can produce an entire range of problems in the foetus which manifest years later in ADHD, lowered sperm count, breast cancer and a whole host of other problems that “could change the character of human societies.”
The scientific and social process that leads to the awareness of the dangers to our very survival is the theme of Sheldon Krimsky’s book.
In 5 crystal clear chapters he describes the process that lead to public recognition of the threat posed by the unthinking use of chemicals. Chemicals which have been integral to our body and threatening to both our moods and our future.
It would be interesting to know about the body states, with reference to chemical impact discussed in this book, of those who participated in and watched a long gang rape in Oakland during the last week.
Such impulsive, unthinking, uncaring behaviour is indicative of the changes that are “changing the character of human societies” wherein people kill women and children, through the use of suicide bombs or drone propelled missiles as if they were in a computer game.
Our freedom is progressively abused in the name of national security in spite of electing a constitutional lawyer as president.
The dreams of many for a just humane society are bowing in the wind.
