Dossier, Volume 13 #4Making Sense of Our Times--Third in a Series
Dossier, Volume 13 #4
Catholic Press Association: Best Interview in a Catholic Magazine in North America in 1995| ROSALIE BERTELL, GREY NUN OF THE SACRED HEART, has been a leader in raising awareness of public health issues, especially those surrounding the nuclear industry. A native of Buffalo, N.Y., she came to Toronto in 1980 as public health specialist with the Jesuit Centre for Social Faith and Justice. In 1984 she and others founded the International Institute of Concern for Public Health (IICPH), and she served as president of the institute from 1987 to 1994. Although retired from the institute (now undergoing reorganization), she continues her public health work. |  | ||
| In a conversation with Compass associate editors Mary Rose Donnelly and Louisa Blair, Dr. Bertell reflected on her life, her work and the practices and priorities of our society. The conversation, of which the following is an edited transcript, took place in March. At the time, reports of the poison gas attack in the Tokyo subway that killed ten people and injured 5,000 were prominent in the news, and Dr. Bertell had recently returned from Bhopal, India, site of the deadly 1984 accident at a Union Carbide chemical plant. | |||
| Louisa Blair: | You had quite a few interesting positions in the United States, and then you took a job at the Jesuit Centre for Social Faith and Justice in Toronto. Why did you do that? |
| Rosalie Bertell: | I've spent twenty-five years working in the area of environmental health: how the environment impacts on the health of the community. When the Jesuit Centre invited me to come to Toronto, it was offering me a good chance to work on what I was trying to do, which was to develop a level of medical care for communities, thinking of the community as a patient. What you're looking at here is the proportion of different illnesses. There's something wrong with this community--there's too much kidney disease, or their reproductive outcomes are negative, or they have too much respiratory illness. This is very different from a general health promotion approach where you get everybody jogging and that sort of thing. I found in my work that there are two standard approaches. One is pretty legalistic. They bring in chemists or engineers and test for so-called controlled substances. They try to see if any controlled substances are present and if anyone is breaking the law. And if nothing is breaking the law, they say, "Everything's fine, it's just your imagination." The other approach is to bring in a university epidemiology group and do a major epedemiological survey for $2 or $3 million. They want to produce information that will be good any place in the world down through time--universal knowledge. Generally that's not appropriate for a small community with a local pollutant. You end up either trying to make the sample big and moving in people who aren't exposed, which dilutes it, or else not finding anything because you're looking for something too rare in a small community. So they end up as unsuccessful. From the point of view of the community that's not very helpful. And usually the community doesn't know what they're exposed to. It might be a toxic waste dump, which is a mixture, and you can't do an epidemiological study on a mixture. That's why you have unrest. The community's got a legitimate need, they're asking reasonable questions, and there aren't any answers in this society, so it's an unmet need. So that's what I've been trying to do: fill that void. It's a long tradition for religious communities to see what's not done in the society and do it. It's a tough road because it's unfunded and unappreciated, but it's necessary. After a while people realize that they can do something and that it's a structural problem. It's not exactly ill will: it's just that there's no way to do it within the present structure. As soon as it gets into the structure I think that religious should move out and do something else. |
| Mary Rose Donnelly: | Has your community always been supportive of your work? |
| Rosalie Bertell: | I'm a Grey Nun. Marguerite d'Youville, the founder of the Grey Nuns, always did what needed to be done in a pioneer village. She used common sense. So I've got a good history in my congregation for this kind of thing. But we don't have money for it, so we operate on an edge. |
| Mary Rose Donnelly: | With your activist life, how do you balance the active and the contemplative? |
| Rosalie Bertell: | If you look at the contemplatives, Teresa of Lisieux is the patroness of missionaries; Francis de Sales, who was a missionary, was a contemplative; and John of the Cross, who was one of the greatest contemplatives, wanted to go to Mexico. He also was president of a university. So it's not a historically based question. This active/contemplative division is bureaucratic. It's a superficial stereotype. |
| Mary Rose Donnelly: | Maybe you live your spirituality to such an extent that it's in your pores. But I find that if I'm so immersed in something, it's hard to make a shift, to keep my life open enough that I'm talking to God. How do you do that? |
| Rosalie Bertell: | You're probably thinking of prayer as one of your activities, and saying, "I don't have time for all these activities." You can be very active and be married. You can also be very active and be contemplative. It's the base from which you do the activities. Your base can be marriage; your base can be community life; and your base can be contemplation. And you come out of that for your activities. |
| Louisa Blair: | You went to Bhopal recently. And you've also been speaking out about Canada selling CANDU reactors to China. In the global economy, Third World countries are supposed to be getting technologically on board, and if they don't, they will be left behind the way most of Africa has been. Is it possible for a country like China or India to be on board without having Bhopals and nuclear power? |
| Rosalie Bertell: | The "on board" business is the same thing that used to take place between the cities and the rural areas. And now the things that are not viable in the First World are being sold in the Third World. It's a way of getting rid of unwanted technologies. I think you have to look at the two poles: what is running your civilization and what is being traded off or depreciated. What's running our society is money. That's the bottom line, and most decisions are based on what's cheaper, what's more efficient. What's traded off is life and health. People do this even in their personal life. The prototype of the millionaire today is not the lazy person who sits around and plays games, as in the Middle Ages. It's Type A, ready for a heart attack. They're workaholics, trading off their own health for money and power. |
 Photo: Eric Street (38K) |
What's running our society is money. That's the bottom line, and most decisions are based on what's cheaper, what's more efficient. What's traded off is life and health. |
| So what I do is make visible the impact on life and health. What I want to do is strengthen what's being traded off, make it visible. What they really need is to quantify the losses. Mostly the losses aren't even talked about, so even making them visible helps. But not only to make them visible but also to quantify them and eventually to put a dollar sign on them is the only way to tip the balance back. That's why I don't look at the economics. I think there has been too much emphasis on the economics in the ecumenical coalitions. They started around health, and they moved into economic analysis. When you do an economic analysis you're on the ground of the dominant culture, which does its own economic analysis, so what you're doing is duelling with them on their ground, with their rules. And basically you have to change these rules of profit and loss. |
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| Louisa Blair: | But in your work with the atomic energy people, in a way you're fighting on their ground, because you know that world, and you're talking about very practical remedies, like not burying waste in the ground. |
| Rosalie Bertell: | Yes, but on the basis of health, not on the basis of money. I don't get into the economic arguments, except that I will quantify the loss of health, and I will quantify the cost to the health provision system. That's different. |
| Louisa Blair: | So you're saying that the coalitions need to move out of economics. |
| Rosalie Bertell: | I think it's more effective. Otherwise you also leave the public behind. If you listen to public concern, it's usually about life issues. It's employment, it's health, it's babies, it's school--these are life issues. A lot of this is human rights-type thinking. If you conquer a country or you're top dog because you've got the best economy or whatever, you set the rules. You tell other people what to do; you "lay down the law." But human rights says, "Well, maybe you're the boss and maybe you can do whatever you want, but you can't go beyond this line." So you have to work on that idea of "you can't go beyond this line," and that's usually life and health. That's why human rights are so important. They are a barrier to despots. Human rights are divided into two big sections. One section is the so-called civic rights: the right to free speech, the right to assembly, all those kinds of things. The other area includes the right to life and health and the right to decent housing and food and freedom from pollution. There has been quite a bit of codification of civic rights. Many people, especially in the United States, felt that if people got these civic rights, then they could get the other rights for themselves. These people didn't bother much with the human rights, and the human rights are not respected in most western countries, and they're probably least respected in the U.S., where there are some thirty million people suffering from malnutrition and probably three million on the streets, homeless. My work in Bhopal feeds into the Permanent People's Tribunal, which is the current name of the Bertrand Russell court. The purpose of this group is to develop international law in the area of human rights. It's trying to codify that other half of the human rights document. Its document is right now being distributed for comment, and then it goes to the General Assembly of the United Nations, the World Court in The Hague and the Human Rights Tribunal in Geneva. When you work in this area you work at the grassroots level and you work at the highest international level, and you skip the national level, because your issues and your solutions are at the grassroots level, but the mechanism to get them implemented is at the international level. |
| Louisa Blair: | So you would say that these collections of nations are basically a good thing. |
| Rosalie Bertell: | I like the UN. I think it's a very feminine organization. I like the fact that it's relatively powerless. It's then forced to use feminine tactics. I think it's neat. I don't want a Big Brother government telling everybody in the world what they have to do. That's kind of a horror. But if you look at the UN, they have a very weak structure. On the other hand, they have focused global attention on water and air and human rights and children and peace. With the conferences they've staged, they've developed a system of organizing the whole world around the big issues. And it's really quite amazing. It's quite feminine, actually. It undercuts all of the big power struggles and big armies, and it leaves some of the most powerful nations with egg on their face in the human community. Now I think the UN needs strengthening. Especially it needs a court: one that is open to international players as well as countries. Now you have to be a nation to have status at the court, but there are a lot of international organizations, like international labour unions, international professional associations, churches, that are international by their nature. They should be able to be recognized in some court of the UN, and that would make corporations eligible too. |
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Photo: Eric Street |
The UN is a very feminine organization. I like the fact that it's relatively powerless. It's then forced to use feminine tactics. I think it's neat. |
| You can't take a court case against Union Carbide, for example. One of the big fights with Union Carbide after the accident in Bhopal was whether the case would be held in New York or in India. Because the corporation was based in the United States and the accident took place in India, the first struggle was, "Where do we have the case?" And this is not unusual today: there's no place to go. So there are a lot of structural things needed and there are a lot of people working to make those structures happen. But it's totally outside most people's realm of thinking and it's totally unfunded work. | |
| Louisa Blair: | Obviously you see the UN as a hopeful structure. Where else do you see hope for a new generation that will reverse our destructive patterns? |
| Rosalie Bertell: | At the grassroots. I see people in small groups solving the problems and setting the models that will work in the future. And you find a lot of alternative communities. You find a lot of people experimenting with lifestyles, food, building materials, energy sources--all kinds of things. As a civilization crashes, there are others around that are ready to step in with a viable model. That's healthy, that's important, and I see that happening all around the world. I think life tends to survive. And I think usually we get in the way: we do more harm than good. I like Dorothy Day's idea of organic growth. The principle of growth and health is already in the earth and in the population, and it will come out if we don't frustrate it. |
| Louisa Blair: | Can you give an example of something that is giving you hope at the grassroots? |
| Rosalie Bertell: | There is a community in British Columbia that is a totally barter community. They share whatever gifts and giftedness and expertise they have with one another. When I was out there the only thing they were paying for was hydro and I think they now have their own generator. They did provide food, clothing, shelter, all the basics of life, within the community through the work of the community. There are things like that. There are guaranteed annual wages, which is a better way of sharing within the population, making sure everyone has food, shelter and clothing. If we really are one community in a nation, then the nation's wealth should be shared, and this idea of looking down on people on welfare doesn't belong in a family. Nor do you have superstars with stretch limousines and their own jet planes. There's something wrong in the way we don't share, even within the society. |
| Mary Rose Donnelly: | The older I get the more cynical I get that that will ever happen, because I see the profound acquisitiveness and inability to share all around me. |
| Rosalie Bertell: | I think there are two things here. One Native person said to me one time that the difference between white people and Native people was that Native people are able to live in the midst of abundance. If they see abundant fish or abundant herds, they don't figure out how to make money from them. They can live with them. They don't exploit them. They don't try to get the most out of them. But there is also something about having things you need and taking care of them. And if you share them too much they just get wrecked and nobody can use them. So I think there are some prudent limits here. Know what you need and how much you need and then don't hoard above that, but also protect it if it's a genuine need. There's an area in there that I think is sane, and you get insane if you go out of it. I had an aunt who gave everything away. She was just impossible to be responsible for or try to help. It drove my father crazy. |
| Louisa Blair: | In another culture it might be considered wealth to have a whole sack of potatoes for the rest of the winter. |
| Rosalie Bertell: | Something that I've thought about a lot is that the future doesn't lie for anyone in individual decisions. It lies in belonging to a community, and the more diverse your community--the more you can expand your community to include diverse groups--the more stable and corrected your group decisions will be. But when you start going down this path from a religious point of view, it gets scary because you start to move into the area of personal salvation in a way that many people would consider heresy. You start to realize how interdependent we really are, and that to save yourself and let everybody else go to hell doesn't work. The Bible is full of talk about the nation. It doesn't talk about individuals. But once you really accept that, then it's scary. Then the nation has to be saved if you're going to be saved. And you're not in charge. You can't be saved as an individual. "Go forth and teach all the nations." It doesn't say teach individuals. So nations are going to be saved. The meaning of nations might not be clear, but it's obviously not individuals. So you belong to a community, which will be saved or not saved, and therefore you need to be part of that and you need to input into the faith and right living and rectitude of that community, which is then an obligation. It's not a nice extra. |
| Mary Rose Donnelly: | That's a bit of an overwhelming thought. It's hard enough to get your personal act together. It's worse if I have to get her act together. |
| Rosalie Bertell: | It is scary, and I don't think we're really clear on all it means, but I really feel that that's where we're headed. And if we have a global village, that's what you're talking about. The Mystical Body of Christ is something that we've thrown around as an idea since Pius XII in the 1940s, but it's a very organic unity. It's not a bunch of individuals who say the morning offering and then go to heaven. It doesn't work. I can't answer all the questions, but I think the next leap of evolution is to understand yourself as part of an organic unity. Moses died in the desert: he never went into the promised land. He didn't make it, but the people did. Not all individuals make it. But I think the society will make it, if they don't do something really crazy and blow it all up, which they could do. I see people can commit suicide; I think societies can too. I think the life force is stronger than the death force, but I still am afraid, because I think there are some very reckless people who have their hands on some very scary materials, like that subway gas attack in Tokyo. It's unbelievable that anybody could do that so systematically and deliberately. That's really frightening. They're supposed to be a religious group too. |
| Mary Rose Donnelly: | Who are the people who have influenced your life? |
| Rosalie Bertell: | Oh, lots of people. My mother and father probably prime, and then the organist at the church. She taught me to play the organ when I was in high school. She played a big part. One person who stands out is a boy I used to go out with. He's never married. He was very supportive. |
| Louisa Blair: | Are you still in touch with him? |
| Rosalie Bertell: | I see him once in a while. He turns up at things. We don't correspond or anything like that, but we're still friends. I get blamed for the fact that he never married. He and I are okay about it, but everyone else gets upset. |
| Mary Rose Donnelly: | And professionally? Who are the people who've sent you along the way? |
| Rosalie Bertell: | One of the people who impressed me the most was Dr. Alice Stewart. She's the doctor in Britain who first pointed out that we shouldn't be X-raying pregnant women. Everybody laughed at her and said that these little X-rays wouldn't hurt anything. She's always been a mentor and friend. There are others who gave their lives: there have been quite a few killed over the nuclear issue, as well as some attempted murders. |
| Louisa Blair: | These people were all murdered? By whom? |
| Rosalie Bertell: | If we knew who, they'd be in jail, but there's a whole bloody history of people who spoke out against the nuclear industry. It's dangerous to your health. There are all layers of the nuclear industry, including a kind of mafia in plutonium. When you step on it, you don't know what you're stepping on. You're not sure what's underneath. For example, Karen Silkwood was calling attention to what she thought was a workers' health problem, but there was also trafficking in plutonium to Israel and South Africa going on. So when she called attention to losses of plutonium through what she thought was company carelessness, it was upsetting the people who were siphoning plutonium out of the plant. You think it's an ordinary, straightforward workers' health problem, and it really isn't. |
| Louisa Blair: | Have you ever been threatened? |
| Rosalie Bertell: | Yes. |
| Louisa Blair: | In Canada? |
| Rosalie Bertell: | Yes, but more in the States. |
| Louisa Blair: | What would you say the most threatening industries are, apart from the nuclear industry? |
| Rosalie Bertell: | I think the nuclear industry is the worst, but all the military-based industries are threatening, because the things they created were created for megadeaths, and their side-effects are all deadly. And people have no idea of the amount of the current culture that comes in that strain. I'm thinking of the chlorine gas in the First World War, for example. That was the first time they separated out chlorine as a gas. It doesn't occur that way in nature. And then they got the peaceful chlorine program, and chemists spent their whole lives on nothing but chlorine chemistry. They produced chloroform and carbon tetrachloride, and they got into all the pesticides, herbicides and defoliants, and PCBs and DDT and dioxin and all this deadly stuff. That's all chlorine chemistry. There are now more than 11,000 compounds with chlorine, including the chlorofluorocarbons that are destroying the ozone layer. This is all coming from a poison gas in the First World War. That's why I say it invades the society. It's like a cancer. And so we've got a death culture. We've been making death at quite a great rate with all our money and our brains for some hundred years now. The spinoffs that this death culture has created are deadly. I think if I could do one thing, I would like to root out the military and the consequences of all the military science that has gotten into the main culture. I also think the military is totally unnecessary. You need a police force, but you don't need an army, at all, anywhere. I don't know if you're old enough to remember the first hijacking of planes, which happened because they cut off transportation to Cuba. The only way people could get to Cuba was to hijack a plane. So instead of running a plane to Cuba, which would have stopped it, they started fighting the hijackers. And it kept escalating. You had to have more security, and then worse hijackers, and then more security. Now poison gas in the train is going to start another whole thing. So how are they going to stop it? Are they going to put more security in the train? It's the same dead-end thinking. |
| Louisa Blair: | So what would be the equivalent of putting on planes to Cuba in that situation? |
| Rosalie Bertell: | You've got to find out the cause of it. I don't know what these people want, whether they're just crazy or what, but it's got something to do with what I call the limits of democracy. Democracy has now become as despotic as the emperor was. If you're a minority in a society, you never get to make a decision. You're constantly outnumbered. We need to get beyond democracy and have diverse responses possible. We're using democracy to keep minorities down, and it's bursting apart all over the world: Yugoslavia, Burundi, Rwanda. It's bursting apart. It's not going to last. You can't keep cultures down like that. So I think that's where it's coming from. It's the despotism of democracy, and that's got to change. Democracy tells you how to get to a decision, but it doesn't tell you how to implement it. Something gets you to a decision, but from then on we take the army model, where everybody has to do it. There's no reason why we can't have diverse ways to get to the same end. It's messier. It's like the way women run families. They don't have to have every kid do the same thing. You can run a household and allow diversity. It's not as orderly, and it drives some people crazy, but you can do it. I just think we need to brainstorm. We need to try new things. We're in a very new situation, and we've got to rethink things. |
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© 1996 Compass, A Jesuit Journal and Gail van Varseveld