Avoidable Harm
I have been preoccupied lately with the many threats to home and health over which we have little control. The harms that we can see and feel, but cannot on our own avoid. I see this type of heart-wrenching threat in a feature about a recently-revived prison project in Letcher County, Kentucky that will be out soon in our Summer 2024 print issue. The prison, should it be built, would sit atop a former mountaintop coal mine in a part of Kentucky that has lost some 300 mountaintops to mining. Its construction would compound the toxic harms foisted on a community that has long suffered the environmental ravages of extraction. It would also expose those locked within its walls — predominantly poor and BIPOC men who have no say in where they sleep, what water they drink, or what air they breathe — to those same contaminants. There are other harms that are less obvious but even more pervasive. We tackle two of these in the new issue as well — the unavoidable threat plastic poses to our children’s health and the rising rates of chronic kidney disease in Sri Lanka, which can be both helped and made worse by drinking water, especially groundwater contaminated by agricultural runoff . And, of course, it is impossible right now to ponder these kinds of all-encompassing threats without thinking of the people of Gaza, Ukraine, and other war-torn countries. People who, caught in the middle of armed conflict, have already lost so much, and will continue to face relentless threats to their lives, and communities, in the aftermath. These dangers, though vastly different in scale, can all feel inescapable at the individual level. But many of these harms are avoidable in the broader sense. America does not need to build another prison, much less atop a toxic mine. We need not allow the fossil fuel and agrochemical companies free rein to endanger our water, our land, and our bodies for the sake of higher profits. We need not accept the loss of entire cities as the inevitable cost of war. In fact, we not need accept violence as a means of resolving conflict. We must continue to stand up against these avoidable harms. There is still time to write a different future.
|
