Like many people born in a city, I grew up thinking that food comes from grocery stores; water comes from a faucet; electricity comes from flicking a switch; cheap long distance phone calls start at 11pm; medicine = aspirin, antibiotics + birth control pills; driving to work gives people time alone; everything sold is safe (except for cigarettes); garbage gets picked up on Tuesdays; everyone has enough money; and nature is where people go for summer camp.
Ive had a lot to un-learn.
In my twenties, when sugar and bread made me sick, I started questioning pesticides, GMOs, MSG and soy. At 32, I could identify carrots and onions in a garden.
After a prescription made me sicker than the infection I needed to heal, I began looking for alternatives to pharmaceuticals.
By 40, I pined for Internet access, but my eyes simply would not tolerate a computer screen. (I bought and returned about ten of them.)
And then I began learning our societys rules and regulations around technology: they supported corporations. They usually failed to protect the public or environmental health. Meanwhile, very few people knew these laws.
RULES & REGULATIONS
Throughout history, many societies have recognized that human survival depends on a healthy environment. Indigenous children learned to respect water, soil, animals and plants as relatives. People considered land and water part of the public commons, not for individual owners.
The Hippocratic Oath gave physicians the clear direction to first, do no harm.
As technologies emerged, some societies created ways to ensure their safety. Hammurabis code, written around 1750 BCE in Babylon (modern-day Iraq), determined that if a bridge collapses and harms a person, the bridgemaker holds responsibility.
At the turn of the 20th century, with the introduction of electrification, states enacted statutes that required liability-carrying professional engineers (PEs) to ensure the safety of a project (i.e. a power plant, a water treatment facility, a telecommunications network, a smart utility meter system) before it could go live.
SHIFTING RULES TO SUPPORT CORPORATIONS
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