The Cow and the Bison (with an urgent call to action after)

This article contains a brief essay. Then information on influencing your state to have cleaner air and water due to urgent dangers from the current regimes PFAS deregulation. After all that you’ll find the ER free books, booklets, and legislation.

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There is a type of storm on the open plains that you can watch coming for an hour before it reaches you. It looks like a dark wall of cloud and rain as it builds in the west, moves across the flat country, and every animal standing under it has to react.

The cow runs. Running has kept cattle alive for thousands of years, the same behavior that once saved them from wolves, and now it sends the cow east, away from the storm. The trouble is speed. A storm moves faster than a cow, so within minutes it catches up, and from then on the cow and the storm travel east together, rain falling on the cow’s back, wind blowing past its ears. The longer the cow runs, the longer it stays under the rain and wind. Some cattle run until they reach a fence, and they panic as they crowd against the wire while the rain and wind keep striking them, and ranchers sometimes find them afterward dead in a pile, having run into the fence while trying to get away from the storm.

The cow works hard the entire time. It moves, it strains, it answers the danger with all the strength it has, and all that strength carries it in the one direction that keeps it under the storm longest.

We have watched the people whose job is to fight the worst of this era make the same mistake the cow makes. They felt the pressure, and they turned away from it. The wind and rain stung their face and they made the seemingly logical choice to move in the other direction and away from the painful stimuli. They stayed busy. Prosecutors file civil suits instead of criminal charges, the injunctions and lawsuits that sit in court for years and threaten no powerful person, and they leave the GOP’s crimes uncharged. They chose other crimes over the crimes that matter most, and every month they spend on the safe case is another month the rest of us spend under the rain and wind. Other officials obeyed rulings built to trap them. A court threw out maps that voters had just approved, and the people with the power to respond said the court has ruled and turned to the next election. The other side, handed the same kind of ruling, used the maps anyway. Every official who obeys a rigged decision because obeying feels safe teaches the next court that the next rigged decision will be an effective tool for authoritarian consolidation. They tell themselves they’re being responsible and judicious and respecting the system as they allow it to be torn down. And in the interim, we hurtle with increasing rapidity towards our existential destruction by a rapacious storm.

The bison does the opposite of what the cow does. When the storm arrives, the bison turns toward it, lowers its head, and walks into the wind. The bison does not know how large the storm is either.

The bison gets one fact right that the running cattle get wrong: the fastest way out of a storm is through it. The storm sits between the herd and the clear sky, and the animal that walks into the rain reaches the clear sky first. This answers the frustration so many of us feel, the daily wish for the storm to end, the question of why it has not ended yet. No one is owed a small storm. The storm lasts as long as it lasts and hits as hard as it hits, and wishing it were smaller is the cow’s mistake, the mistake that produces all the most damaging possible response.

No one will carry us to the clear sky. The people who turned away might realize their error in time. In the meantime, we walk into the storm.

You aren’t alone if you make that choice. I’m here with you. So are 53,188 other ER readers.

We are the bison. We turn toward the storm while others run from it, often those others hold titles like “Governor” or “State Attorney General".” We walk through it, because the storm is already here, and the only choice left to any of us is the direction we face.

I hear the plains are beautiful under those clear skies, where the storm has finished passing.

Part 2

On May 18, the federal government moved to strip away the rules that keep PFAS, the forever chemicals linked to cancer, immune damage, and developmental harm, out of your drinking water. It is ordering the limits on four of these chemicals gone, removing the requirement that water systems filter them out, and handing the rest until 2031, two extra years, before they have to comply.

Fortunately, every state runs its own enforcement, and any state can keep protecting its water no matter what the federal government does. New Jersey set its own PFAS limits years before the federal government acted, and a Rutgers University study published this April found that the forever chemicals in its drinking water dropped by 55 percent. Michigan’s governor created that state’s PFAS program by executive order in 2019. Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Wisconsin, and Washington have all set their own enforceable limits. New Jersey did not wait for the federal government to protect its people, and that is exactly why its water is cleaner today. Every state had the same power. The ones that used it have clean water. The ones that relied on the federal government are about to find out what happens when that floor drops.

So ask your governor and your state legislators for one thing: an executive order or emergency declaration directing the state to set and enforce its own PFAS drinking water limits, including the chemicals the federal government is ordering gone, regardless of what the EPA does.

Here is how, and it takes about five minutes. For your governor, go to usa.gov/state-governor and select your state. For your two state legislators, go to open.pluralpolicy.com/find_your_legislator and enter your address. Both give you direct contact information.

An important note: Do not copy the message. A copied message gets logged as a form letter and set aside, it will rarely result in more than a form letter as a response. The calls and emails that get read and counted are the ones where you say who you are and why you care.

Here is an example, and it works for a call or an email, just replace the parts in brackets with your own life.

“Hi, I’m [your name], a constituent in [your town]. I just learned the federal government is rolling back the rules that keep forever chemicals out of our drinking water. New Jersey set its own limits and cut its contamination in half, and I want our governor to do the same here. [Here is where you say why you care: your kids, your well, your health, the river by your house.] Will you publicly support doing this using an Executive Order or State of Emergency powers due to the extreme public health and safety danger it represents?”

Now put it in your own words, and if you want to multiply your influence, you can send this to one person who will do the same, or even to an entire organization that might have their members join in this brief exercise of public influence on public policy.

We still need those 10 new activist subscribers per article. Believe it or not, we don’t hit that number every article. Think of it like the bystander effect, everyone assumes someone else will handle it.

Don’t let this be the reason you skip a meal or miss rent.

But if you found this of value and want it to keep delivering for millions of activists, being a subscriber is a gift you give to keep the lights on for everyone.

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