The Poisoned Apple

"And the Lord God commanded the man, 'You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die."

Thus it seems that God already knew his wilful creation would undoubtedly eat of it for he said "when", not "if you eat of it" and so it has been. Man (and woman) has taken bite after bite ever since, until now the fruit of the garden is nearly exhausted, leaving little alternative to the promise of the biblical myth that we "will surely die".

A similar lesson is produced in Greek mythology when Prometheus is warned by Zeus about the dangers of stealing the fire of the gods. In a recent interview on the last broadcast of Bill Moyers' Journal author-ecologist, Barry Lopez, translated the myth to mean that technology can be your undoing if you do not deal justly and with reverence for all things to make it work.

Yet in spite of all the efforts of the thinkers, writers, activists and revolutionaries scattered among its still increasing numbers, our species continues to ignore those ancient lessons. In spite of the now obvious damage we continue to inflict on the flora and fauna that supports us, we insist on succumbing to the demands of the post-industrial money machine to consume every fleeting and untested experimental new technology touted in the now global market place, possible dangers to ourselves notwithstanding.

The risks known and unknown are legion; our responses to the few generally covered by our media only when they have saleable news or entertainment value, are sorry and indifferent. What can we do, after all? Witness community and government responses to a few of them:

• Rapid polar climate change. The response seems to be, "We must take advantage of the opportunity to claim national ownership of the newly accessible land and water and exploit its natural resources for our benefit;


• The recent offshore oil rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico that is turning that entire body of water into a toxic and potentially lifeless sump. A well intentioned president can do little but order a drilling moratorium bvut indications are that the old barons will persuade authorities to expand offshor drilling with promises of doing better and abiding by regulations more strictly enforced.


• The recent speech of U.S. President Obama to college graduates warning of the dangers of new technology, while at the same time he has and continues to advocate the rapid and unregulated spread of broadband Internet channels so every person, especially children, across America has access to it, likely by the spread of wireless towers all over every city and village in the place. Furthermore the president uses his personal Blackberry constantly with no apparent thought of its health risks.


• The recent release in Canada of a report on the cancer risks of cell phone use, four years after obviously incomplete and tainted information was collected, according to critics of the report, which is nothing more than a down-playing of the dangers, particularly to children.

We are all guilty of indifference and apathy, cheering on the "green" industries seen by business as new sources of capital. Many such ventures turn out upon further examination to do more harm than good and are mere costly experiments. A group called Citizens For Safe Technology has collected a great deal of information and collated many online resources on the dangers of radio frequency microwave radiation and related matters and I urge all readers to check out their website at http://www.citizensforsafetechnology.org/ .

The dire warnings of the gods of those early myths may already be beyond remedy. In time there is no doubt we and our progeny "will surely die", though some of them "may ultimately prevail and procreate new and dominant species" as Darwin thought possible in his Origin of Species. In the same paragraph he did warn, however, that "of the s;pecies now living veery few will transmit progeny of any kind to a distant futurity; .... the manner in which all beings are grouped shows that the greater number of species in each genera, and all the species in many genera, have left no descendants, but have become utterl extinct." May we all rest in peace.

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