I told you this would happen!

[Linus has just read something interesting and goes to tell Lucy about it.]
Linus: When Juliet asks 'O Romeo, Romeo, whereforth art thou Romeo', she is not wondering where he is. Rather she is commenting on the fact of his being named Romeo!
Lucy: Now that I know that, what do I do?

I just came from a discussion on the effects of global warming in the arctic. It was very informative. I learned that as a result of some of the lower profile, minor constituents of fossil fuel and other industrial emissions that are highly fat soluble, women in the arctic are being advised not to breast feed. The indigenous cultures in extremely high latitudes tend to rely on large high trophic level organisms like marine mammals and large fish for food. Higher trophic levels bioaccumulate toxins. If that isn’t enough, they also store fat in order to insulate themselves from the cold. “Fat soluble” means that these toxins are preferentially stored in fat. The people preferentially eat the fat. By the time she’s an adult, the concentration of toxins in the mother’s tissues, and therefore her milk, is high enough to be toxic to her infant. So she has to buy formula. Her source of income, and that of her entire society, is fur. But all the well fed activists of North America and Europe have effectively ended the fur trade.

Just when you think it can’t get worse, it does. As heartless as it sounds, there was actually a debate when this information became available about the ethics of telling her or not. In the end, we told her. The virtue of not telling her became painfully obvious after the fact. We also gave her the internet (why, you might ask, didn’t we giver her baby formula?). Seems generous. Except that now she knows just how screwed she is and just how not screwed I am. This sparks an epidemic of mental illness (mostly depression, but not exclusively) because her culture is dying--what educated child would continue to live her way when we are promising him that he can live my way instead? Her society has no way of dealing with her new illness.

The moral of the story:

There is a severely depressed woman in the arctic who has no safe and economically feasible way of feeding her child, and it’s MY fault.

I agree that this is important information for me to know. The climatological science is even interesting from a purely academic perspective. But now that I know this, WHAT DO I DO?