ECHOES AND UPDATES

Some further examples of how the nuclear police state is being avoided by the greater freedom of ecological living:

Sweden's new animal protection laws let any citizen sue on behalf of any animal; a man who went hunting and bagged a squirrel was sued for "the senseless murder of a helpless creature" (Shooting Times, Aug89). "Can ban" legislation prohibiting the sale of freon in 14-oz cans has been enacted in several states, lest individuals repair refrigerators without a license from Big Brother. A world-wide tax on carbohydrates is being considered to placate the Greenhouse Gods. The Clean Air Act aims at, and will succeed in, driving Americans from mass transportation (in their own cars) to collective transportation of the type favored by Mao Dze Dung and Brezhnev. The City of Boulder, a fortress of frenzied eco-freaks, has just prohibited wood burning; l intend to ride my bike in a sweat shirt "Split atoms, not wood."

The corporate wimps of General Foods are too timid to counter the boycott of Folgers coffee (from San Salvador) by ex-plaining that the activists favor terrorists over an elected govern-ment. However, not all the killing in San Salvador is done by Castro's stooges: on 10/13/90 a natural geothermal well exploded, kill-ing 13 and injuring 20 --quite close to the Chernobyl statistics.

So crazy have the crazies grown that it is getting difficult to distinguish spoofs from straight-faced insanity. In a Wash. Times article "Eco-catastrophe will reshape the earth" (10/5/90) one of these enigmas writes about the coming disasters and ends "If need be, we must cordon the last places, surround the last trees, and thereby fulfill the obligation to our ancestors to protect the balance and beauty of nature;" and a recent meeting of the Amer. Soc. of Human Genetics was disrupted by members of the "Anaerobe Liberation Front" waving posters "Every time a loaf of bread is baked, approximately 150,000,000 yeasts are killed."

The French have checked for leukemia deaths near their nuclear sites and found their number slightly below average (Na-ture 10/25/90, p.755-7). A study by the Audubon Society and Columbia U., has shown that there is no increased cancer in-cidence in a 10-mile radius of TMI. And a National Cancer In-stitute 2-year study found no increased risks around any US nuclear plants (Health Physics Soc. Newslett. Nov. 1990). That such studies should be necessary is depressing: they point to a society that no longer believes in laws linking measurable causes to measurable effects, that radiation doses can be measured by reli-able instruments in objective units, or even that nature is con-sistent.