Rachel's Democracy & Health News #829 October 27, 2005 EDITORIAL: A NEW AND SLIGHTLY DIFFERENT VIEW FROM RACHEL'S With this issue, we have changed the name of Rachel's Environment & Health News to Rachel's Democracy & Health News. Since 1986, we have been reporting on studies linking environmental deterioration to declining human health. We will continue to report on those studies, but we want to expand our view a bit to reveal more about the underlying causes of the problems we all face. As we say in the new masthead statement in this issue of Rachel's, "The natural world is deteriorating and human health is declining because those who make the important decisions aren't the ones who bear the brunt. Our purpose is to connect the dots between human health, the destruction of nature, the decline of community, the rise of economic insecurity and inequalities, growing stress among workers and families, and the crippling legacies of patriarchy, intolerance, and racial injustice that allow us to be divided and therefore ruled by the few." In a democracy, there are no more fundamental questions than, "Who gets to decide?" And, "How do the few control the many, and what might be done about it?" When we started Rachel's in 1986, information was hard to find. We used to visit a library every week and photocopy medical studies and summarize them for our readers. Now things are different -- the world is awash in information. What's missing now is a coherent picture of how the pieces fit together. We think the decline of democracy -- the few now controlling the many for narrow, selfish purposes -- is an idea that can help make sense out of the disconnected information we encounter daily. We hope you agree. Please let us know what you think. Peter Montague (peter@rachel.org) Tim Montague (tim@rachel.org) Editors