Steven Bissell wrote:
>If you want to make meaningful comparisons, find out what US Nike workers
>(if there are any left) make and compare that to Indonesian workers and
make
>sure to adjust your figures to the standard of living for each country.

Actually there is something that you have left out here. There is a basic
existential element which has been ignored. In the US any citizen can obtain
welfare. In Indonesia there is no welfare. So the wage of $2.56 US per day
would not even cover what some person makes who is too lazy to work even for
a minimum wage of $7.50 US per hour.

Steven:
>By the way, what has this to do with Environmental Education?

I think that a better example is in Puerto Rico. In Puerto Rico, a US
possession, the drug companies manufacture lots of birth control pills.
They have not been very good at keeping the estrogens out of the
local water supplies. As a result there is a high incidence of sexually
precocious children in the areas near the factories. Children that are
6 to 7 years old develop breasts and so on. If you go to Grateful
Med, there you can check the abstracts. I read about this in
"The Feminization of Nature".

If children in the US started becoming sexually mature at 5 or 6 years old
because of the estrogens in their water, there would be a real crisis. There
are lots of estrogens downstream from the estrogens that are used for birth
control, but most people do not drink the water from downstream....but in
Puerto Rico there is not much that is done.

Incidentally glyphosate is an endocrine disruptor. It interferes in
steridogenesis and becomes a liver toxin.

Steven:
>Sounds as if you are politicizing your students, which is exactly what
>Stossel and his ilk accuse EE educators of doing. I said below "I have seen
>examples of educators misleading students in EE programs, but I have found
>this to be the exception, not the rule." I hope you aren't the exception.

Political science is  a form of 'prudence' or 'common sense' and the sooner
the young adult becomes competent at recognizing what is prudent, the
better. A lot of voters in the past did not even vote, and cared nothing for
taking any leadership roles in the community, whether it be with the school
district, or the local parks board, or a conservation organization.

The student that organizes a petition drive to ask local and regional
authorities to make a company that proposes to build a copper smelter
downwind use the latest and best technology to remove heavy metals from the
emissions stack, is doing something that is 'non-partisan'. It is not the
meaning of political science to vote for an ideology. Ideology and prudence
are antithetical....

chao

john foster





Steven
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