Sunday, April 08, 2007

Your Sofa Will Probably Kill You...

I got an email from the Natural Resources Council of Maine the other day that said in essence, "hey, you are a Maine blogger- would you do us a favour and link to a video we have made?"

Sure:
"You're in Jeopardy"


The video is a pretty cool way for the NRCM and Maine House Majority Leader Hannah Pingree to help spread the word about some of the nastier chemicals lurking in everyday products that might well be leading to a decline in public health both locally and globally.

Visitors to the sister blog of Wisdom Weasel might well recall the trouble we went through to get a decent, non-toxic mattress a few weeks back. My humble advice to all and sundry is to watch the above video and do some checking in with local retailers about better products. If the political avenue represented by Hannah doesn't appeal, don't forget your wallet gives you great power over what stores try to sell you. Three local mattress stores lost out and one is about $1,000 richer thanks to Country Mouse and me exercising our consumer choice. If 10 of the visitors to this site were Rocklanders, and all 10 were in the market for a good non-toxic mattress (and by crackidy, our mattress rocks), the store with the nice natural latex mattress would be $10,000 to the good and the others would catch on pretty damn quick.

I'm not a biologist by any stretch of the imagination but I am a firm believer in the law of unintended consequences and in the reality of inertia. Those wonder-chemicals designed 30 years ago or more to protect us from fire, or bed bugs, or having our pajamas runch up in an irritating manner might well be coming back to bite us in the ass. I don't have the facts and figures for you (ask the NRCM, I'm sure they could tell you more- or better yet, do a little independent research) but I do know that there are many other cases of animals suffering depredation due to long term chemical exposure. It would be ironic in the extreme if the very things that we feel set us apart from other species (furniture, clothes, Woody Allen movies) were accelerating the accumulation of toxins in our bodies that might one day do something along the lines of this or this to us.

4 comments:

T. Oklahoma Bandwagon said...

Hmmm ... third eye. That could be useful. Remember, it ain't a rivah unless you can set fire to it.

Wisdom Weasel said...

I've been following along at Arguably So Rick, and I think it hinges on whether the Supreme Court defines a river as a "wet, wiggly thing with the occasional fish in it" or not.

Anonymous said...

(and by crackidy, our mattress rocks)

You want a cradle that rocks, not a mattress. Although (as I understand these things), you wouldn't be ending up with one of those new babies unless your mattress rocked at least a little bit.

Wisdom Weasel said...

Ah yes- I failed to explain: being a Nelsonian Norvickian and a salt crusted Mainer respectively, our mattress is in a hammock.

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