The Gaia Reports

By Theodora Filis As the 8th Annual International Asbestos Awareness Conference (Asbestos: An International Public Health Crisis) comes to an end today, an email from Libby, Montana, pops up in my mailbox. It's from a gentleman who has just been diagnosed with Pleural Thickening – a common side effect of exposure to asbestos, and an early warning sign for mesothelioma and asbestosis – seeking answers to questions he has no idea he should be asking. In February of 2004, W.R. Grace & Co. along with seven current or former executives were indicted in a federal court in Missoula, Montana, for breaking environmental laws and conspiring to cover up what the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has described as the biggest environmental disaster to human health it has ever faced. According to the EPA: “W.R. Grace and its executives, as far back as the 1970s, attempted to hide the fact that toxic asbestos was present in vermiculite products at the company’s Libby, Montana p...

By Theodora Filis Every year, over 10,000 people die from complications related to asbestos exposure in the US alone. Despite everything known about the danger of asbestos, halting its use has been a difficult process in Canada and the United States. In the 1990s, many countries adopted bans on the use and importation of asbestos to protect their citizens – except the US and Canada – strong economic and political forces still conspire against the movement to ban asbestos. When France announced in 1996 that it would ban the use of asbestos, Canada (a major exporter of chrysotile asbestos) felt threatened. The Canadian government took its concerns to the World Trade Organization (WTO) to argue that the ban was an “unreasonable restriction of international trade.” However, disputing the resolution panel, the WTO rejected Canada’s argument, finding that France and other countries involved in the ban had valid public health concerns. Today, asbestos has been banned in more than 55 co...