Jane Smiley Quotes
everything is toxic. That's the point. You can't avoid toxins. Thinking you can is just another symptom of the toxic overload stage.
Smiley, Jane. Moo. Alfred A. Knopf, 1995.
Issuing a statement over the health threat of dioxin in 1983:
The Congressman was never known to be a literati. A “toxic” by definition is harmful. Later. DeLay was convicted and sentenced to jail for money laundering and illegally spending and raising campaign funds. He was also reprimanded by the House Ethics Committee for unethical methods of fund raising for other earlier actions.
Fracturing underground shale—fracking—releases natural gas which the US has in an energy equivalent of two Saudi Arabias. However this is done by injecting water and chemicals into the underground shale. The shale is generally below the water table but the concrete shaft that carries the fluid and the gas at high pressure through the water table. There have been serious accidents where drinking water has been polluted. The George W. Bush administration, led by VP Cheney whose company was in the fracking business had a law passed which gave the gas fracking industry the right to endanger or pollute drinking water without the inspection of meeting the standards of the Clean Water Act and other state and federal protection laws. They are also exempt from having to disclose what poisons or carcinogens are in the fracking fluid or how much they are injecting into a community’s land and water. So the best potential option for American Energy independence got caught up with disputes over proper safety and disclosure procedures and the exemptions that were granted by Congress.
This scientific quotation is politically important because it defines the difficult problem of setting acceptable and safe environmental and work standards for air or water quality and contact with potentially toxic substances. As this quotation illustrates, everything is toxic if given in large enough doses. Table salt can kill a human if enough if ingested. Tiny amounts of even a poison will do no harm. What makes setting of standards still more complicated is that human beings differ in the amount of a substance it would take to produce a toxic reaction. Allergies are the best example, but the variability of sensitivity always exists.
Jane Smiley is an American novelist. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1992 for her novel A Thousand Acres (1991).
