Looking Back to Move Forward
Reevaluating how we do things for better health in our homes
Illustrations: Sergio Ramirez
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In the late 19th century, paintings, some as old as 32,000 years, were discovered in the subterranean caves of France and Spain. We now know how their work was made (ochre and other pigments were ground with mortars and pestles), but we still debate what their work meant. Were these images straightforward stories of the hunt, or were the artists trying to make sense of the stars and the natural order of things?
By comparison, we may also wonder at how future generations will view us as ancestors. Most likely, they’ll note that we’re responsible for that ominous blip on the human narrative known as the 20th century, in which we hurtled ourselves into the future like lemmings, propelled by technology and the belief that technology is progress.
Our advances in technology are unparalleled, for now, the aims of which seemed to equalize us. And while some of it did, in fact, make our lives easier, enough of it resulted in pesticides and genocides, mushroom clouds and Twinkies.
Even the American Dream can now be seen as a bit of a nightmare: Henry Ford’s dream married socialism (mass-producing affordable automobiles for every man, woman and child), democracy (with cars, we could now go anywhere, anytime we wished) and capitalism (he became a very, very rich man, and, if you follow the model, so can you).
Ford’s dream, we now know, gave birth to other ways in which to get rich quick. Ford had perhaps the longest coattails the world has ever known, and we rode them into the future, mostly by drilling for oil. With so many new cars on the road, more oil was needed, and so, more explorations for it. And as we kept refining oil, we created more and more by-products which, rather than dispose of, we found uses for, mainly in plastic of any kind, and so was born the most insidious of modern technologies: the seemingly benign and ubiquitous plastic shopping bag.
Petrochemicals harvested in oil drilling also found their way into other new wünderproducts, such as paints, stains and sealers that dry faster and harder than those used by our ancestors.
One of the most obvious principles of survival can be summed up thus: Unless you plan to swallow it, don’t put it in your mouth (and then, not even then). That’s why for the last three decades or so, people once pejoratively referred to as “health nuts” are now seen as beacons of good sense. If we could eat it 100 years ago (which means we’d already been eating “it” for thousands upon thousands of years), it’s safe to say, it’s probably safe to eat now.
We now try to keep our bodies away from anything on which we’ve slapped the Jolly Roger. We choose the farmer’s market over genetically-modified crops. And lead-based paint and asbestos? Well, it all worked well, until it didn’t.
With paints, stains and sealers, in particular, “old” is now the new “new.”
Paints, stains and sealers generally have four elements: resin (a durable hardener), solvent (keeps it liquid until application), pigments (color) and additives (which enhance the three previous ingredients). In the last century, petroleum-based solvents contained such compounds as acetone, lead, methanol and pentachlorophenol, the likes of which we now call VOCs, or volatile organic compounds.
Exposure to out-gassing high-VOCs can cause damage to our livers and central nervous systems, and can cause a different kind of sickness when they’re out-gassed outdoors. High-VOCs bond to nitrogen oxide particles exhausted in auto fumes, which form ground-level ozone, a key ingredient of smog and other forms of air pollution, which of course also takes quite a toll on human health.
While government, from federal to local, does legislate to restrict the use of products now known to adversely affect human health, many contractors and homeowners are taking steps to lower the VOCs to which they’re exposed.
“Imagine if you’re a saucier and you find out that olive oil or garlic or something you use in everything is toxic.” That’s how Tom Walcher, of Fresh Air Finishes, sees what he does when applying finishes to wood. Walcher and his brother, Byron, independent contractors who grew weary of the adverse health effects they suffered from applying solvent-based sealers, developed over almost a decade their own unique way of applying water-based sealers which they say are as strong and as colorful as any chemical-based finish. >>>
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