“Teach your children what we have taught our children — that the earth is our mother. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of the earth. If men spit upon the ground, they spit upon themselves.” ……We know that the white man does not understand our ways. One portion of land is the same to him as the next, for he is a stranger who comes in the night and takes from the land whatever he needs. The earth is not his brother, but his enemy, and when he has conquered it, he moves on. He leaves his fathers’ graves behind and he does not care. His fathers’ graves and his children’s birthright are forgotten. He treats his mother, the earth, and his brother, the sky as things to be bought, plundered, sold like sheep or bright beads. His appetite will devour the earth and leave behind only desert…… What is man without the beasts? If the beasts were gone, men would die from a great loneliness of spirit. For whatever happens to the beasts, soon happens to man. All things are connected.

These well known words are attributed to Chief Seattle, the great leader of the indigenous Suquamish people of what is now Washington State, part of a letter written to President Franklin Pierce in 1854 and a speech given in 1855 lamenting the end of his people’s traditional way of life with the arrival of the voracious and environmentally insensitive European. They are words of obvious wisdom from the head of a native people who lived on the land thousands of years before the late arriving white man took it over. Among environmentalists they are words to live and create land use policy by. They have the ring of deep truth, and, like many who believe in deep ecology, environmental integrity, large areas of wilderness, free running streams free of cow manure and urine, and national parks without snowmobiles, I am among those who like the romantic imagery of these words coming from a noble chief of an American Indian tribe.

The problem, as most people familiar with Chief Seattle’s speech know by now, is that Chief Seattle never spoke, much less wrote, those words.

For fans of Chief Seattle’s speech that is a big problem.

For critics of Chief Seattle’s speech and its underlying meanings, most of whom are in logging, ranching, farming, mining, snowmobiles, ORVs, SUVs and land development and prone to romanticize the lives of modern Americans, it is evidence of a hoax and the fraudulent premises of environmentalism.

Both fans and critics of the supposed words of Chief Seattle are a bit off base. While Native Americans certainly kept far better care of the land we live on and from than do modern Americans, the environmental movement does them a disservice to romanticize their lives and put them on an ecological pedestal from which they will fall or be pulled down by foes of environmental ethics. While critics of Chief’s Seattle’s bogus speech/letter are correct in denouncing its inauthentic attribution, they are disingenuous to pass over the genuine wisdom in the words. Though the Chief never wrote the President, he did give two speeches in 1855 at the Port Elliott Treaty negotiations. A Dr. Henry Smith, a physician, took notes at those speeches which he translated into English and published as a single speech of Chief Seattle in the Seattle Sunday Star of October 29, 1879. No one knows how accurate Dr. Smith’s rendition of the Chief’s words is, but it is reasonable to assume that Smith came as close as he could. We do know that Chief Seattle was a great leader of his people who tried to live peacefully with the white man and in harmony with the world, though in younger days he had been a fierce and intelligent warrior for his tribe. In 1969, William Arrowsmith rewrote Smith’s version into more modern English, but the essential content of the speech was unchanged. A couple of years later, a screenwriter named Ted Perry asked Arrowsmith’s permission to use his version of the speech in a film script. It was a film designed to raise people’s awareness of the earth’s ecology. Perry correctly called the speech he wrote a fiction, but the film producers did not credit Perry for the writing of Chief Seattle’s speech, thus beginning a huge misunderstanding that persists today.

Perry’s fictional speech is what we know today as Chief Seattle’s speech. I have seen it printed as “Chief Seattle’s Statement on Ecology.” Even though it’s fiction, it’s a valid statement and well worth studying and incorporating into an environmental ethic for America. Just because Chief Seattle didn’t say it doesn’t mean the speech attributed to him isn’t full of wisdom and deep truths.

Ted Perry’s statement on ecology, with credit given to William Arrowsmith, Henry Smith and Chief Seattle, is a beautiful and profound (and practical) expression of a workable environmental ethic. It should be required reading for every citizen. Just these few words—-“….the earth is our mother. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of the earth,” is an environmental ethic to live by.

On February 19, 1942, Executive Order 9066, was signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, authorizing the internment of American citizens of Japanese descent and Japanese immigrants living on the west coast of America. Less than 10 weeks after Pearl Harbor more than 100,000 Japanese Americans were rounded up, stripped of their rights, property, belongings, jobs, and in some cases separated from their families and interred in 10 inland detention camps in six western states and Arkansas. In 1988 the U.S. Congress passed and President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 which officially apologized for the internment on behalf of the U.S. government. The legislation noted that the government’s actions in 1942 were based on “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.”
The internment of Japanese American citizens in those camps is a dark stain on American history.
One of those camps was named Topaz, located near Delta, Utah. Topaz, like other camps, has been referred to as a war relocation center, relocation camp, relocation center, internment camp, and concentration camp, and the controversy over which term is most appropriate continues to the present day. It was originally called the Central Utah Relocation Center, a name abandoned when it was realized the acronym was pronounced “curse.” It was briefly named Delta for the closest town until the Mormon residents of that community objected to their town being associated with “a prison for the innocent.” Topaz was named for a nearby mountain and eventually was home to 9000 Japanese Americans and covered 31 square miles, most of it used for agriculture, and was the 5^th largest community in Utah at the time.
Among its citizens/internees were David Tatsuno and his entire family. David, a devoted family man who had been (and would be again after the war) a prominent businessman and civic leader in the San Francisco Bay Area, was also an avid home movie buff. Things like movie cameras, still cameras and short-wave radios were not allowed in the internment camps and Tatsuno left his movie camera with a friend before leaving the Bay Area. Tatsuno was put in charge of the camp’s co-operative where his superior, Walter Henderick, was both a sympathetic man and a home movie buff. Breaking the law, Henderick arranged for Tatsuno to receive his camera in Topaz.
The rest, truly, is history, American history as recorded by one who lived it. “Topaz” is the only 8mm film inducted into the Library of Congress’ National Film Archives besides the Abraham Zapruder film of the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

Journalists are often denounced for lacking “objectivity” in their work. Such accusations, in my opinion, are more often than not without merit, even though they are true. As a journalism student at the University of Nevada in the 1950s I don’t remember “objectivity” being discussed specifically as a tool of the second oldest profession, though the concept was understood to be a sacred tenet of the trade. How could one not be objective about who/what/where/when/why and how? Objectivity was never actually defined (how could it be?), but it seemed to encompass such concepts as fairness, truth, balance, presenting all sides of an issue, checking facts with a critical and skeptical mind and to never, ever accept without question and independent research the ‘official’ (usually press release) version of anything given out by the political, corporate, military, bureaucratic and even personal front men we referred to as flacks but which now have other titles, both pretentious and colloquial, including press secretary, public relations officer, spokesman and spin doctor. In my opinion, it is on this latter point that American journalists deserve bountiful criticism, not for lacking objectivity.
This was useful information, objectivity as a reliable ideal, a goal. Fortunately, our journalism professors, A.L. Higginbotham and Keiste Janulis, were men of the real world of gradation and doubt and organic, unending questioning, not fundamentalists with obdurate answers to limited questions, though ‘Higgie’ could be evangelical when it came to the importance and value of good journalism and a free press to a free society. In every class (especially Janulis’), without making it an issue, it was made clear that pure journalistic objectivity was as unreal as such imaginative concepts as virgin birth, Santa Claus and the more recent phantasm of compassionate conservatism. Journalism, like everything it reported, was not black or white, good or evil, with us or against us, but, rather, an on going dialogue, discovery and evolving perspective as reported by flesh and blood and all too subjective human beings. Objectivity, it seemed, was all too subjective. How could it not be? A hundred journalists will have a hundred different definitions of objectivity. In recognition of this dilemma, the Society of Professional Journalists dropped “objectivity” from its ethics code in 1996.
Janulis had worked as an A.P. reporter and traveled the world and viewed the affairs and machinations of man with a bemused skepticism befitting a professional journalist. He was Lithuanian and had been news editor of the Baltic Times in Estonia, covered World War II for the Chicago Tribune, earned a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University and had studied German and Russian propaganda at the University of Lithuania. He knew that the world was filled with nuance and danger and that neither safety nor truth could be found in absolutes. Janulis’ perspective appealed to me in part because it was so human. That is, ethically he was a professional, not a proselytizer. Journalism was a profession practiced by humans, and anyone who expects objectivity from humans is being neither objective nor attentive.
I have always been thankful that Higgie and Jan were my teachers in that formative time.
In one course our textbook was a well known national weekly news magazine. We were primarily print media students and we read the magazine cover to cover each week, examining every photo, advertisement, story, review, editorial and letter to the editor. It was considered the standard of good journalism at that time, but we learned that pure objectivity about even who/what/where/when/why and how was easier said than done. We learned to look for what was left out of a story and we talked about how the story could be written differently with the same set of facts. We compared letters to the editor with the previous stories that inspired them, and discussed letters we might write concerning the same stories. We looked for the particular bias and perspective (the angle) that produced the story. Years later a friend who wrote for this magazine told me about quitting after covering the story of the sinking of the U.S. nuclear submarine Thresher in 1963. He interviewed dozens of family members of the 129 men who died in the accident 200 miles off Cape Cod. Many of them reported that their dead loved ones had anticipated such a failure on what was reputed to be the most advanced submarine ever built and had complained their safety was compromised. The magazine refused to include these pertinent remarks in the article because they reflected badly on the U.S. military, not a popular perspective in those Cold War days. While there may be some national security justifications for such editing, it is neither complete nor objective (whatever that means) journalism, but it was an insider’s illustration of the particular biases and perspectives we studied in school.
And, of course, even then, in those days of the decent if bland, squeaky clean Eisenhower and 99.9 percent pure Ivory soap and calling for Philip Morris, we noted and looked for correlations between advertising and the editorial and news content of a publication. Then, as now, they were easy to find.
In addition to the purely human obstacles to objectivity in journalism, there are economic ones. Journalism, too, is a business. This is not to condone or excoriate the excesses and limitations of journalism, but only to recognize them for what they are and what they are not.
The only objectivity is outside the purview of journalism as we know it, that which includes everyone and everything. Jim Harrison said it best: “….reality is an aggregate of the perceptions of all creatures, not just ourselves.”

In 1854 there was a cholera epidemic in London, England. Many people died and nobody knew the biological cause of the disease. Dr. John Snow, a London physician, made a map of the locations of the deaths to see if there was a discernible pattern. He found that the majority of the deaths took place within 250 yards of a public water pump. Without having irrefutable scientific proof, but possessed of good instincts and common sense, Snow suspected that the water from the pump was the source of the contagion. He had the handle removed, making the pump inoperable. The plague ended.
This is one of the earliest and best known examples of the use of the Precautionary Principle to protect the health of the public. Precautionary Principle is short for the “principle of precautionary action,” which was eloquently explicated in a statement in 1998 by an international group of scientists, government officials, lawyers and labor and environmental activists after a meeting in Racine, Wisconsin. The gathering was called the Wingspread meeting.
It was deemed necessary as a response to what the group sees as a primary danger to the health of the planet and its inhabitants. Its statement reads in part, “The release and use of toxic substances, the exploitation of resources, and physical alterations of the environment have had substantial unintended consequences affecting human health and the environment…..We believe existing environmental regulations and other decisions, particularly those based on risk assessment have failed to protect adequately human health and the environment, the larger system of which humans are but a part.”
Among many other disturbing, destructive and dangerous failures which led to that belief are the Love Canal, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Thalidomide, DDT, species extinction throughout the world and man induced stratospheric ozone depletion and global climate change. Closer to home are the resultant high rates of learning deficiencies, asthma, leukemia, cancer, birth defects and other ailments which, like the London water pump of 1854, are grouped around sources of radiation, asbestos, pesticides, chemical dumps and industrial pollution.
Part of the Wingspread statement reads, “When an activity raises threats of harm to human health or the environment, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically. In this context the proponent of an activity, rather than the public, should bear the burden of proof.”
Indeed, the public so often bears the burden of proof in the role of test subjects, human guinea pigs who are expendable, replaceable and, under current law, powerless. A study by the Harvard Center for Cancer Prevention concluded that only two percent of cancer deaths are caused by industrial toxins released into the environment. Only two percent is 11,000 people a year in the U.S. whose horrible, painful and unnecessary deaths can be scientifically attributed to industrial toxins. A case could be made that these 11,000 deaths represent a form of homicide. A case could be made that these deaths represent a form of terrorism. Each year, at least three times the number of people who died in the horror of September 11 are killed in America by industrial toxins in the environment. Instinct and common sense says the number is much higher.
Unfortunately, there is no war against this type of terrorism. The reasons for this apathy are complex and involve things like campaign finance reform and decisions based on what is called “risk assessment.” Wingspread participant Joe Tickner of the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, said that decisions based on risk assessment asks questions like “How safe is safe? What level of risk is acceptable? How much contamination can a human or ecosystem assimilate without showing any obvious adverse effects?”
Corporate risk assessment is not new. It is reflected in such ancient aphorisms as “Nothing ventured, nothing gained” and “Let the devil take the hindmost.” Nor is the Precautionary Principle new. It is seen in such common-sense aphorisms as “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” “Better safe than sorry,” and “Look before you leap.”
The world is sorry, and a sorry place, and paying many pounds of cure for the past follies of the nuclear industry, the horrors released into the environment by the chemical industry, and the on going irresponsibility of the asbestos and mining industries, among others. And now those same industries, and even some of the same companies, have assessed the risks to the public and environment and decided there is money to be made in genetically modified foods. Critics of genetically modified foods, the seeds they grow from, the seed companies that sell the seed to farmers and the chemical companies that own the seed companies would like to see the Precautionary Principle applied to the genetic manipulation of the food we eat and of the environment we all live in.
So would I. Wouldn’t you?

My youngest son Jason is a fine, responsible, active man of 41 and a joy in my life. He is a college graduate who makes his living as a paramedic/fireman. As a professional, he knows a great deal about the science and effects of many drugs on the human system. When he was in the first grade he was termed “hyperactive,” what came to be known in the pop psychology of pharmacology as ADD, or Attention Deficit Disorder and, later, ADHD, or Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder. That is, Jason was a natural boy of six with an abundance of energy and intelligence who was bored out of his gourd, bored to tears, bored to action and movement by sitting at a desk in a row while a teacher tried to keep order in her classroom through conformity and rote memorization. There were aspects of his life at home that were disturbing and unacceptable to him, and school was one place to vent those aggravations in his life. He did not sit still nor remain quiet for the standardization that is a public school first grade classroom. He disrupted his class. He was not a good soldier nor a candidate for the future organization men of America. I was neither surprised nor as disturbed as I should have been by his social recalcitrance, and, as a consequence, I was not nearly attentive enough to it. Jason’s energy and intelligence were a gift to him, a joy and a pleasure (and, on occasion, an amazing frustration) to me. It is not hard to understand that his school teacher and administrators took a different view. And they had the perfect solution to what they saw as Jason’s problem and that I viewed (and view) as their problem—-daily doses of Ritalin.
Ritalin is the brand name for methylphenidate, a “mild” stimulant of the central nervous system, whose exact mode of action on that system is not completely understood. Though I did not know it at the time, Ritalin produces hallucinations and paranoia in a significant number (about nine percent) of those who take it. In the pharmacological/psychiatric trade, it is credited with “unmasking” latent clinical depression, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder in its users, conditions which that métier addresses with regular doses of other drugs whose exact mode of action on the central nervous system are also incompletely understood. It is my opinion that the word “unmasking” is erroneous; “causing” is the more accurate word. Alcohol, too, is known to “unmask” those same conditions as well as a variety of other social disorders, including hostility, violence, idiocy, lethal driving, boorish behavior, really boorish conversation and even more boorish breath, but to my knowledge no moderately dependable person prescribes more or other drugs as a cure. Common sense and objective observation dictates that the cure to such “unmasking” is to cease ingesting the original drug. While my knowledge of Ritalin was scant, my instincts were excellent and my personal, experiential knowledge of many other drugs was significant. And no one was going to secure my permission to chemically mutilate my son’s behavior or mood so that he could more easily blend in with the school furniture. If only instinctively, I knew what Dr. Peter Breggin wrote many years later in the New York Times: “Attention deficit disorder does not reflect children’s attention deficits but our lack of attention to their needs.” That lack in myself at the time it was needed is something I deeply regret.
I was called to a meeting with Jason’s teacher, the principal and the school nurse. I knew that Jason’s problems in school were a direct result of his life at home (i.e. my own problems and failings, stresses and disorders), as well as the school’s inability to deal with each child’s individual needs. Being all too familiar with hallucinations and paranoia, I assumed they believed all of Jason’s unwillingness to fit into the school curriculum was my fault.  Nevertheless, with some if not full awareness of my own failures, contradictions and hypocrisies in the matter, I told them I thought they were crazy to be drugging children in order to get them through a day of school. Even then, sitting in a room with three proper and competent educators, including Jason’s teacher, a beautiful single woman, who I sometimes saw drinking and dancing in the local bars, I was acutely aware of the incongruity of the scene: three proper, conservatively dressed American public school educators of the 1970s and me—dressed in faded denim pants held up with a colorful hand-dyed tied woolen belt from Argentina, huaraches, a turtle-neck shirt and a sheep skin vest, a head of black hair falling to below my shoulder blades and a full beard to the middle of my chest—discussing the advantages and disadvantages of schools legally drugging six year olds with the consent of their parents. I assume they were aware of the situation’s ironies, and I hope it gave them a smile and some insight into our culture’s contradictions. It certainly did me.
(I refused the consent and Jason never became a Ritalin junkie. He is now a fine and responsible and active man, and still a joy in my life. He is thankful that I did not allow the entrenched school system to flood his developing system with mild stimulants. He has told me so many times.)
That, of course, was in the early days of systemically altering human behavior with chemicals. It is now an enormous business having a profound effect on our culture, the practice of medicine and the living experience of millions of people. They are not health food, but anti-depressants are a staple of the diet of the wealthiest nation in the history of mankind. I, for one, agree with Dr. Breggin about ADD, and his point applies to several other maladies of our time. Their solutions lie in attention to and confrontation with their roots, not in masking their manifestations with chemicals. The quick chemical fix, whether it be insecticide, pesticide, mild stimulant of the human central nervous system, anti-depressant or defoliant, has always had a hidden cost. They may make life easier in the short run, and it is surely good business for the pharmacology and petrochemical industries, but there is always runoff, and there is always an unexpected consequence somewhere downstream, and it is cumulative.