We’ve been through a week of exemplary astrology — really beautiful stuff: the Jupiter-Chiron sextile, which Mercury comes dancing through; the signs Taurus and Pisces involved; and Jupiter sitting right on the discovery degree of Chiron. I’ve long associated Chiron with environmental issues and the healing of the Earth. No sooner did I ask my question — how is it that the dioxin issue surfaced in a big way today, and has been popping up in smaller ways for many weeks — than I had my answer, at least from an astrological standpoint. Frankly you would think that working as a dioxin activist would drive anyone to be an astrologer, but it’s only happened once.
Environmental toxins issues move so slowly and against such odds it’s amazing they get anywhere, ever. But occasionally they do. The standout event today was the EPA finally, after some 20 years, releasing its reassessment of the toxicity of dioxin.
This study — really, a review of every known study — has been brewing since the 1990s, which cannot have been 20 years ago but it was, amidst truly incredible scandals.
Those astonishing scandals (hardly the first in history; the story of dioxin is the story of nonstop coverups) were so successful at obfuscating the issues that I’ve only seen dioxin covered (or even mentioned) on television about three or four times in all of those 20 years, when really it’s so significant it should be discussed every night.
Dioxin is bad for fetuses. It’s bad for the female and male reproductive systems. It’s bad for any animal (plants don’t seem to mind it, but then animals eat the plants).
How bad is bad? So bad you’re not supposed to know about it. Let’s see if I can get the backstory into one paragraph. In the early 1990s, the paper industry wanted to cover up the growing awareness of the extreme, as in ridiculous, toxicity of dioxin. So they commissioned a reassessment of that toxicity by the EPA, figuring that they could run their coverup from there. But as the data started coming in, it was damning. Dioxin was far worse than they thought, it affected more organ systems at lower levels and more was in the environment than they suspected. The reassessment ran out of control and became the international headquarters for proving how bad the stuff really is. That was largely thanks to two scientists: Dr. William Farland and Dr. Cate Jenkins, two people who actually understood the problem.