journal features

the fluoride in Toronto's water

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Toronto, 2012.05.16

I doubt this will surprise the people who know me, but I'm starting to side with the tinfoil hat wingnuts on the fluoridation of water.

It's because a) the fluoride that's added to our water isn't the natural version of the substance but is a "byproduct" scrubbed from smokestacks in the fertilizer and aluminum smelting industries (for instance, see the second-last paragraph in this coverage and b) and among the places I've lived several don't add fluoride to the water (e.g. all of Japan, the Niagara region, Vancouver and Calgary). What I think finally convinced me on this issue was this unusually good coverage in the Globe and Mail (which points out, among other things, that the practice of fluoridating water is essentially unknown and unmissed in outside of the Anglosphere).

Happily, this isn't something to simply watch in dismay. I can sign a petition and watch in dismay.

rand()m quote

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness... The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

—Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (1995)