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Toward a True "Culture of Life"

G. Leigh Wilkerson

I work as a nurse in a newborn intensive-care unit. Sometimes the three premature infants I’m assigned weigh six pounds if you add them all together. They struggle vigorously to live. Thin chests strain up and down while tiny lungs work overtime to breathe. The entire medical team shares one goal: a healthy baby going home to a healthy life.

I am surrounded by a “culture of life.” When President Bush began to use this phrase, I noticed. I wondered what a “culture of life” would look like if applied to human health. Perhaps because I’ve witnessed a child wide-eyed and pale in the midst of an asthma attack, or because the lungs of the premature babies I care for are their most fragile system, I’m very interested in clean air. How does Bush’s “culture of life” play out when applied to environmental policy? For example, how does a “culture of life” handle polluting the air that is breathed by infants and their families?

It seems unimaginable that corporate polluters give millions to political campaigns and then are granted permission to kill more Americans than current law allows, all so that profits are maintained at a rate agreeable to shareholders. Stated so directly, it is a repulsive scenario. But rather than eliminating such scenarios, the current administration makes sure it is never stated so directly. Instead the public is given vague and cheery titles attached to laws that a true culture of life would outright veto. With regards to air pollution, one example is Bush’s “Clear Skies Initiative.”

One view of President Bush’s actions on air pollution comes from the essay, “For the Sake of our Children,” by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.. Kennedy says when Bush was running for office in 2000, the Environmental Protection Agency was prosecuting 75 of the worst coal-burning power plants for pollution beyond the legal threshold. Coal-burning power plants release the bulk of particulate and ozone pollution related to asthma and lung damage for children in particular. EPA research indicated that just the illegal portion of pollution from these 75 plants killed 5, 500 Americans yearly. According to Kennedy, Bush accepted upwards of $100 million in contributions from this industry. Once in office, he ordered the EPA to drop the cases against the polluters.

In 2003 Bush relaxed regulations on coal-burning power plants to allow more pollution without fear of lawsuits. It was not put in those terms. The issue was discussed under the technical title “new source review.” The Washington Post reported on August 23, 2003, that Bush’s changes on behalf of industry would “save billions of dollars in pollution-control equipment costs while continuing to emit hundreds of thousands of tons of pollutants.”

Bush’s latest “Clear Skies Initiative” would again weaken existing clean air laws. Despite the sunny-blue title, the fallout for the common breather is polluters get more freedom, we get more pollution. Clear Skies appears stuck in committee for the moment. Meanwhile the administration is working on allowing more mercury -- the mercury related to neurological damage to unborn babies -- to be released from coal-burning power plants.

Are we really willing to harm or take the lives of our neighbors in order to save a few dollars on our power bill? Are we willing to have more brain-damaged infants so the coal industry doesn’t have to upgrade it’s equipment and stockholders get a few more dividends?

A true culture of life would champion fierce clean-air laws . A culture of life would not tolerate polluters profiting at the cost of children toting their asthma inhalers on the playground. A true culture of life would turn American ingenuity to efficiency and clean sources of energy that poison no one. A true culture of life would be willing to conserve energy. To the cries of “it’s too expensive” or “it will cost jobs” a culture of life would would answer: if we can put a man on the moon, create cellphones that transmit pictures and email, do surgery with lasers, and peer inside the human body with MRI machines, we are ingenious enough to create both jobs and energy that won’t kill children.