“I have arsenic poisoning,” said the woman sitting next to me at dinner.

“I have no idea how I’ve been exposed to this,” she continued. “My well water checked out okay, but there’s a long list of things like laundry detergents and pesticides that contain arsenic. I’m wondering about my cookware.” It was supposed to be stainless steel. A seven piece set, with lids, made in China. All for the low, low price of $17 at a mega-mart.

This was our first conversation, after a long day at an Energy Medicine training in Florida. The woman — let’s call her Linda — was attending with her sister Mary, an acquaintance of mine. As it turned out, the man seated across the table from us was a specialist in groundwater and septic systems. He didn’t have any answers, but did offer an opinion on the menu: “It says the fish is ‘sua,’ but you never know what kind of fish you’re really getting when you order it in Florida. And I’d never eat anything that came out of the Gulf of Mexico.”

Then he peered into a small pot of an unidentified condiment on the table, and said, “that looks like a good reservoir for pathogens.”

A prophetic statement, it turns out, because Linda showed up for the next morning’s training without her sister. “Mary seems to have food poisoning,” she told me. “She was the only one of us who ate the pork.”

Now, I don’t want to sound like a prophet of gloom and doom myself, but it does strike me that we should connect the dots in this conversation.

As I see it, the unifying theme in this story is that we are constantly engaged in a system of exchanges with our environment. We and our surroundings are permeable to each other’s energy flows, whether “animal, mineral, or vegetable.” To fully modernize the phrase, we should also add “synthetic chemical, radioactive, or electromagnetic.” How we do things, make things, grow things, transmit things, transport and sell things, all matter on an extremely personal, physical level. A gut level.

We’ve all been taught about the food chain and the water cycle, and the average person knows a lot more about things like watersheds, groundwater contamination, bioaccumulation, and antibiotic resistance than ever before, simply from catching snippets on the news. But as a society, we still seem very slow to recognize just how much we are living and breathing the negative results of our own industrial, medical, and agricultural activities, and how detrimental this is to our basic systems.

Back in 2002, I was shaken awake to these issues by reading Stephen Harrod Buhner’s book, “The Lost Language of Plants: The Ecological Importance of Plant Medicines to Life on Earth.” In it, he documented increasing evidence of growing contamination of natural waterways by residues and active compounds from personal care products, birth control pills, antidepressants, toxic chemotherapy wastes, and other pharmaceutical agents.

He also described the rise of antibiotic resistant bacteria in details that, depending on your temperament, will either fill you with awe at the intelligence of these microorganisms, or will absolutely make your skin crawl. He includes an observation from a former FDA commissioner that captures our permeable relationships perfectly: “the evidence indicates that enteric microorganisms in animals and man, their R plasmids, and human pathogens form a linked ecosystem of their own in which action at any one point can affect every other.”

That last line bears repeating: Action at any one point can affect every other.

What with all the fear circulating about swine flu, we’re more alert lately to the part of the equation that flows toward us from the animal world, but H1N1 is really just the tip of the iceberg. Laura Sayre’s article in the February/March issue of Mother Earth News points to studies “that have detected resistant bacteria in the air up to 30 meters upwind and 150 meters downwind of industrial hog facilities,” and a university study that “traced a multi-state outbreak of urinary tract infections among women in 1999 and 2000 with a single strain of drug-resistant E. coli found in cows.”

Sayre notes that “public health experts are beginning to suspect that a whole host of infections not previously thought of as food-related may ultimately be linked to the overuse of antibiotics in animal agriculture.” In other words, we may have started this one. It is our actions that are making us sick, as the way we are raising livestock is putting humans and animals at greater risk. Our quest for cheap, abundant food is generating toxic waste and super strains of things like Salmonella, Campylobacter, MRSA, E. coli, and Enterococcus. The 2008 report by the PEW Commission documents the role played by industrial agriculture, and reaches the following conclusion:

Our energy, water and climate resources are undergoing dramatic changes that, in the judgment of the Commissioners, will require agriculture to transition to much more biologically diverse systems, organized into biological interactions that exchange energy, improve soil quality, and conserve water and other resources. “Long-term success will depend on the nation’s ability to transform from an industrial economy that depends on quickly diminishing resources to one that is more sustainable, employing renewable resources and understanding of how all food production affects public health and the environment,” says Michael Blackwell, PCIFAP Vice Chair and former dean of the University of Tennessee College of Veterinary Medicine and former Assistant Surgeon General, (Ret.) USPHS. (http://www.pewtrusts.org/news_room_detail.aspx?id=38438)

How we choose to fight flu may also have unintended consequences down the line. Evidence now in from Japan shows that widespread use of Tamiflu is resulting in river contamination. Tamiflu is excreted by users, and “once ingested, virtually all Tamiflu will end up in the environment in the active form,” says an article in last month’s Science News. It is not removed by wastewater treatment, takes several weeks to break down, and flows into areas populated by waterfowl. In fact, “ducks love hanging out around warm, nutrient-rich outflows of treated water during winter-flu season,” (http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/47971/title/Excreted_Tamiflu_found_in_rivers). The implications this raises for resistant forms of avian flu are pretty scary. Gives new meaning to the old adage, “what goes around comes around.”

We all need to consider the larger impact of our actions, and encourage our policy-makers and health leaders to move with more deliberation as we engage in our permeable relationships. Choosing environmentally sound practices — such as hand washing with plain soap (not antimicrobial: this is implicated in sewage sludge and resistance as well!); a balanced diet of whole, sustainably grown produce and humanely raised livestock; daily exercise and time spent outdoors; plenty of sleep; and enough time to reflect on our actions so that we move mindfully through the world — can go a long way toward creating a healthy ecosystem.

But we must also let our public officials know that we are concerned about overuse of antibiotics in agriculture; inadequate regulation of manufactured materials; overprescription of pharmaceuticals when lifestyle changes may be in order; and insufficiently-researched chemical fixes for emerging infectious diseases. All together, it’s a big assignment, I know. Almost overwhelming. But one of the most important assignments you’ll ever take on.

About the author: Ruth Ann Smalley, Ph.D., is an educator and a certified Eden Energy medicine practitioner with a practice in Albany. She’s also an Honest Weight Food Co-op member worker, and writes a monthly column for the co-op’s newsletter.

Greenpoint welcomes input, commentary and questions from readers. Email your thoughts to greenpoint@dailygazette.net.