Our Synthetic Environment (Ch 4)
CHAPTER FOUR: The Problem of Chemicals in Food The Consumer and Commercial Foods With the rise of an urbanized society, the production of food becomes a complex industrial operation. In contrast with earlier times, when very few changes were made in the appearance or the constituents of food, much of the food consumed in the […]
Our Synthetic Environment (Ch 6)
CHAPTER SIX: RADIATION AND HUMAN HEALTH The Effects of Radiation It is hardly necessary to emphasize that since the explosion of a nuclear weapon at Alamogordo, New Mexico, in July 1945 ionizing radiation has become the most serious threat to man’s survival. If nuclear weapons are further developed or increased in number, it is quite […]
Our Synthetic Environment (Ch 7)
CHAPTER SEVEN: HUMAN ECOLOGY Survival and Health Despite mounting problems and difficulties, most official statements on environmental change tend to be reassuring and optimistic. We are told repeatedly, for example, that the amount of strontium-90 in a quart of milk or the quantity of DDT in a fruit is “trivial”; that in order to ingest […]
Our Synthetic Environment (Ch 3)
CHAPTER THREE: URBAN LIFE AND HEALTH The Changing Urban Scene Man’s environment attains a high degree of simplification in the modern metropolis. At first this may seem surprising: We normally associate metropolitan life with a diversity of individual types and with variety and subtlety in human relations. But diversity among men and complexity in human […]
Our Synthetic Environment (Ch 2)
Our Synthetic Environment CHAPTER TWO: AGRICULTURE AND HEALTH Tuesday, November 18 2003 @ 01:28 AM PST Contributed by: murray By: Murray Bookchin Problems of soil and agriculture seldom arouse the interest of urban dwellers. Town and country have become so sharply polarized that the city man and the farmer live in widely separated, contrasting, and […]
Our Synthetic Environment (Ch 1)
Our Synthetic Environment Chapter 1 Tuesday, November 18 2003 @ 01:22 AM PST Contributed by: murray By: Murray Bookchin CHAPTER ONE: THE PROBLEM Our Changed Environment Life in the United States has changed so radically over the past one hundred years that the most wearisome historians tend to become rhapsodic when they describe the new […]
Our Synthetic Environment (Ch 8)
CHAPTER EIGHT: HEALTH AND SOCIETY Individual and Social Aspects of Health A new approach is likely to gain easier acceptance if it involves individual rather than social action. The majority of people tend to look for immediate, practical solutions that they can adopt without having to face major social and environmental problems. They search for […]
Our Synthetic Environment (Appendixes)
APPENDIX A: CHANGING CONCEPTS OF ILLNESS -An Excerpt from “The Healthy Environment” by John D. Porterfield, Deputy Surgeon General of the United States* Our dazzling technological progress since World War II has yielded a random harvest of mixed blessings, and a bumper crop of new health challenges. These challenges differ from our traditional health concerns […]
