How’s your pH, these days?
If you’re on a fast-food diet, heavily-caffeinated, burning up the road and burning yourself out, you may be acidifying your system, say numerous health researchers.
But don’t feel alone! All of this high-speed combustion is giving the entire world indigestion, scientists warn, as we embark on one big acid trip through our bloodstreams, mountain streams, atmosphere and oceans.
To understand the problem, we might begin with human health, since it gets our attention the way mountaintops and oceans don’t.
The human bloodstream requires a slightly alkaline pH. If it starts to acidify, the blood leaches alkaline minerals from the body’s bones to restore balance.
This re-balancing effort takes energy from other life processes, like the immune system—as well as leaching vital minerals. Some research links even slight acidification of the body to cancer, tooth decay, osteoporosis, heart disease, insomnia, irritability and depression.
How did Americans begin this acid trip? Well, we burned our way into it, refining, processing, beefing-up and transporting our food enormous distances, then buying it on-the-go, through the car window.
Once a more local, plant-based menu (along with plenty of plain old water), the American diet has moved to highly-processed, acidifying fare sprinkled with additives and pesticides, washed down with coffee and colas, compounded by acid-producing stress—all helping decrease pH, leaving our engines prone to what old-timers called “rust.”
The pH scale (in case your high school chemistry is also rusty) runs from 0-14, acid to alkaline—or “sour” to “sweet,” as American homesteaders used to describe their soil or springs.
Ironically, the same energy-burning habits required for so much food processing and transporting have soured not just human health, but the land, water and air.
In the 1970’s, the term “acid rain” evolved to describe acid entering the landscape, largely from coal-fired power-plant and auto emissions of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide.
Acid deposition had been occurring since the Industrial Revolution, but attracted little study. Then Eastern U.S. mountaintop trees began dying, along with native fish and crawdads. Ecologists realized the eastward drift from various coal-burning power plants was providing a continual acid bath for the Appalachians and Smokies.
This acid deposition continues, despite somewhat cleaner emissions, poisoning soil organisms and stressing native plants and trees like sugar maple—now less able to withstand weather extremes, insects or disease.
Meanwhile, alkaline soil minerals like calcium and magnesium get leached away by the constant acid rinse, compounded by nitrogen saturation. With less alkaline soil buffer, acidified groundwaters then free up natural aluminum deposits and send them into waterways, where they threaten aquatic species. The acid load itself can make for an unlivable pH in Eastern waters once teeming with trout, mollusks, and other natives.
Acidified Eastern rivers then damage coastal waters. But here, another acid problem is eating away at ocean life.
Over the years, carbon dioxide emissions have not simply retained solar heat and then “floated away.” As carbon comes from the earth, it returns to earth—about 1 million tons per hour landing in the sea. Having now accumulated over 500 billion tons of it, our oceans have grown 30% more acidic than before the Industrial Revolution.
What’s this done?
For one thing, oceans “breathe.” Their inhabitants require oxygen, just as we do. As the forced intake of CO2 rises, oxygen expires from the sea, leaving lower levels for marine life.
Meanwhile, corals and shellfish are subject to corrosion by the carbonic acid formed from CO2. Unabated, acidification levels may be intolerable for shellfish by 2050. Their extinction would have a ripple effect on other creatures—including us
If we think of oceans as the “belly of the world,” having to digest whatever we drop into them, while still nourishing the planet, it’s clear that we’ve unwittingly created an enormous bellyache—one we must try to feel now—not after it’s progressed to irreversible pathology.
Scientists see one tonic. Action—now.
A first key to balancing a soured system is to stop pouring acid into it. The reduction of atmospheric carbon should be delayed no longer by special interest claims of “not-enough-evidence” or “too costly.” The simple pH scale is not a matter of opinion or politics. And surely life has more value than anyone’s particular profit.
Protecting a livable earth means real effort to shift from our high-carbon energy diet of fossil fuels to solar, wind and hydrogen—while striving for much leaner, more efficient consumption—something each one of us can do.
Reforestation is also vital for carbon absorption. Regenerating native Eastern forest, after clear-cutting, will be far more difficult in acidified soil, so mature forest is highly-valuable and worth protecting—as are the trees in your neighborhood.
The question may arise: won’t this kind of nature-balancing prescription sour economies already burdened with the cost of human health-care?
That depends on where we think money and health actually come from. A dying planet? Or a living Earth that can heal?
Liza Field is a hiker and conservationist. She teaches English and philosophy in the Virginia Governor’s School and Wytheville Community College. This column is distributed by Bay Journal News Service.
