Chapter 16

Polluting the World

A Green History of the World

Clive Ponting

Chapter 16: Polluting the World

pages: 346-392

Reviewed by:
Ted Nellen
Caleb Blair Perkins
Rosana Isabel Pedrazzi
Elizabeth N. Wood

The images and sound that would best enhance a reading of our summary come from Godfrey Reggio's 1983 motion picture "Koyaanisqatsi," a feature-length montage set to the music of minimalist composer Philip Glass. "Koyaanisqatsi" is a Hopi Indian word meaning "life out of balance." Reggio's film juxtaposes images of the natural world with those of the man-made world, highlighting the negative impact that human "progress" has had on the environment. The soundtrack, which is essentially variations based on the repetition of short musical "cells" of four or five tones, conveys the frenetic pace of modern life, the repetition of human folly in our continual worship of progress, and the intractable nature of the problems we have created.

Polluting the World: Broad Strokes

According to Clive Ponting, the question of how to dispose of waste and manage its unavoidable consequence of pollution has been problematic to human beings as far back as the hunter-gatherer societies roaming the earth over 10,000 years ago. For these early societies, the primary waste issue was determining how to dispose of human excrement and urine without polluting the limited water supply. Because the population was small, the scale of their pollution problem was small. Pollution was local, and the impact made on their environment was relatively minimal.

By contrast, in the late twentieth century our pollution problem is of a massive scale. Contamination is global, and the damage inflicted upon the environment is intense and often irreversible. The disposal of human waste is no longer the central problem--today the by-products of large scale fossil fuel consumption and chemical waste from agriculture and industry have taken center stage.

Ponting cites three primary factors responsible for this evolution in the scale, scope, variety, and intensity of pollution. A skyrocketing global population partially accounts for the increased scale and world-wide scope of pollution--more people everywhere equals more waste everywhere. The industrial revolution accounts for new varieties of pollution (e.g. from the burning of fossil fuels) as well as increased intensity of pollution--the efficiency of factories means more waste is produced faster. A post-WWII emphasis on producing synthetic chemicals that resist natural degradation and thus accumulate rapidly in the environment (e.g. pesticides) further accounts for increased variety and intensity of pollutants.

The global nature of pollution is also largely result of the mistaken belief manifest throughout history that pollution will somehow disappear if it is dispersed or diluted, thus engendering the "exportation" of pollution. Sewage and industrial waste are dumped into rivers, lakes, and oceans in hopes that it will dissolve and be carried "safely away"; industrial smoke stacks are as tall as can be so that chemical by-products can be spread over long distances by the wind; pesticides banned in the United States are literally exported for sale in Third World countries.

Global pollution will increase and persist long into the future due to the myopic decisions of people in positions of power in both industrialized nations and the Third World. Ponting shows that throughout history efforts to control and contain pollution have been thwarted by a lack of cooperation and a lack of environmental regulation enforcement. Government and industry are ambivalent or hostile to such regulation because of their interest in economic growth. Civilian populations, equally myopic in the belief that we are somehow entitled to ever-increasing consumption and comfort, are equally ambivalent or hostile. Thus, future reduction of pollution levels will be largely dependent upon drastically altering human attitudes.

Polluting the World: A Closer Examination

Water Quality: Sewage Disposal

One of the age-old challenges for every civilization has been finding an adequate quality water supply. The disposal of human waste, animal excrement, urine and animal carcasses were the largest contributors to the poor quality of water for the first settled societies, so much so that rivers, streams, and ponds in Europe were contaminated well before the Pilgrims landed in America.

The growth of industrial cities, together with overcrowded housing and a lack of suitable ways to dispose of human and animal wastes rotting on city streets, produced an unbearable stench, which was accepted as part of the living environment. While plans for the disposal of waste and sewage were easy develop, implementation of such plans was expensive, and more than half of a 19th century European city's budget was devoted to this task. Other logistical problems constantly stymied efforts at coping with the ever-accumulating waste problem.

It was not until the middle of the nineteenth century, with improved sanitary conditions in the home, more effective underground sewage systems, and the use of sewage treatment and water purification methods, that drinking water of a reasonable quality could be supplied. Even at the end of the twentieth century, however, sanitation problems persist in long-industrialized countries due to the reluctance to foot the bill for treating sewage before dumping it into the sea. Even worse, current Third World conditions are reminiscent of those in early nineteenth century Europe-- 80% of people living in the developing world still have no sanitary facilities, and 60% do not have access to safe drinking water.

It should be noted that despite the advances in sewage treatment and disposal, water quality is still an issue because of a newer form of contamination--that of industrial pollutants.

Water: Quantity

Until a few decades ago, most areas of even the industrialized world had limited, communal water supplies. Because water was not piped directly into the individual home, limitations on consumption were imposed by constraints of time, energy, and social disapproval. Better water systems that supply individual houses and improved treatment methods have led to a quadrupling of water use in the industrialized world since 1940.

Because less than 0.4% of the earth's water is freshwater, the world's nations share an unevenly distributed, dwindling, and endangered water supply. Industrialized nations use far more water than developing countries, although 3/4 of the world's supply is not used for industry, but rather for irrigation. All over the world, underground acquifers are used up faster than they are being replenished.

Industrial Pollution: Air, Water, Ecosystems

The industrial revolution of the nineteenth century marked the beginning of a new phase of intensification of destruction of the environment. Primary causes included the burning fossil fuels for cooking, heating, and industry, especially the heavy production of iron and steel, and the mining of metal ores. The former polluted the air and killed trees, and the latter began to destroy plant and animal ecosystems of entire regions.

Human beings are not immune to the hazardous consequences of pollution created by industry, in fact human liabilities include increased cases of disabilities, illnesses, and early deaths suffered by people who work in industry and the population living in the surrounding areas. Exposure to pollution can lead to ulcerated lungs, mercury poisoning, byssinosis (a lung disease), and an increased risk of contracting cancers and genetic defects, especially via exposure to r adiation, to name just a few.

Increasing amounts of sulphur dioxide and nitrous oxides in the atmosphere produced by industrialization has yielded acid rain, rain that is more acid than normal levels. Such acidity corrodes the stone work of buildings and kills plant and animal life in lakes, rivers and streams. Because sulphur dioxide and nitrous oxides travel long distances carried by air currents, acid rain occurs worldwide and threatens entire ecological systems.

At the end of World War II, industrial processes largely shifted to the production of synthetic chemicals that do not degrade naturally in the environment, and the world has since witnessed a resultant accumulation of new pollutants. Synthetic chemicals such as DDT, other pesticides and fertilizers, and PCBs have exposed plant and animal life at all nodes of the food chain to carcinogens and other harmful substances. Once infused into ecosystems, the concentration of these toxic chemicals increases as they make their way up the food chain, an effect that is impossible to mitigate.

The wildly popular and rarely regulated internal combustion engine spews carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, toxic organic compounds and smoke into the air creating 'photochemical smog', a poisonous haze that blankets any metropolis with an abundance of automobiles, for example Mexico City or Los Angeles. As the number of vehicles continues to rise around the world, significant air quality problems continue to increase. In the 1970's and 1980's, industrialized nations finally took some measures to reduce the amount of smog in cities, although to date there remain countries where little has been done to ameliorate this problem.

This photochemical smog is a primary contributor to the 'cocktail effect', a process in which the damage created by any one hazardous chemical in the air is magnified due to the preponderance of other hazardous chemicals in the air simultaneously. The 'cocktail effect' is responsible for the destruction of plant life, especially forests. A group of chemicals known as chlorocarbons both destroys pigments necessary for photosynthesis, as well as reacts with ozone and ultraviolet light to produce trichloroacetic acid, or TCA , a potent herbicide.

Nuclear power is the most hazardous of the new chemical technologies. The two principal dangers involved in its production are accidents leading to sudden, intense pollution and prolonged exposure to low levels of radioactivity. To date there is no known safe method of disposing of nuclear waste, and already workers and members of populations surrounding reactors have become victims of this lack of knowledge. The results of the Chernobyl explosion--reindeer in Lapland found to contain seven times more radioactivity than normal, 220 villages abandoned, 10,000 square km too dangerous for human habitation, and 21,000 people expected to die of cancer--illustrates how environmental destruction and human death are viable outcomes of contamination.

Pollution has become a world phenomenon and has increased dramatically in volume as more countries continue to industrialize and the size of world industrial output expands. The Soviet Union, Japan, China, and Eastern Europe have adopted the western model of modernization and, as a result, greatly added to the number of contaminated areas in the world. In addition, the rise in the volume of world trade has increased the likelihood of industrial and chemical accidents, such as the major disasters that have occurred in the transport of petroleum products.

One example of how this world phenomenon has effected global regulatory mechanisms is manifest in the problem of ozone depletion. The use of chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, found in refridgerators, air conditioners, and spray cans, has greatly depleted the ozone layer and weakened its ability to protect the earth's surface from the sun's harmful ultraviolet rays. A thinner ozone layer may translate into failed crops, destruction of phytoplankton essential to the oceanic food chain, and an increase in human skin cancers and eyecataracts. Despite bans on CFCs, they will still continue to affect the ozone in the upper atmosphere until well into the next century because substantial regulation has simply arrived too late.

The world's most threatening environmental problem is global warming. Many scientists believe that both the massive use of fossil fuels and ongoing deforestation practices with their resulting release of greenhouse gasses, particularly carbon dioxide, into the atmosphere have caused global temperature and sea levels to rise. If current practice continues, much of the earth will suffer droughts, floods, and famine as changes in location of vegetation belts, in level of rainfall, and in temperature cause mass migration and disruption. Limiting use of fossil fuels and deforestation will be a difficult and delicate process, as Third World countries still look forward to their opportunity to industrialize. Continued or increased levels of fossil fuel consumption will generate irreversible changes to the world's climactic system on an unprecedented scale .

Coping with Industrial Waste: Regulation

The disposal of industrial waste has become an increasingly difficult task in recent decades. The United States is constantly looking for new ways and places to dispose of such waste as non-returnable bottles and toxic chemicals. Much of the waste is dumped into rivers and oceans, exposing large areas to carcinogenic compounds. Nuclear power and the use of uranium has made disposal even harder and the potential for harm even greater.

During the twentieth century most industrialized countries have introduced some regulation of water and air pollution. However the only aim of these standards is to keep the environment and health risk at an acceptable level, and unfortunately the overwhelming pressure to maximize output impinges on their enforcement. Attempts to reduce pollution have not been fast enough to compete with an increasing population and the strong desire to continue to industrialize.

The Role of the Internet

The major environmental concern raised by Ponting is not with saving the Earth, but instead with saving Mankind's existence on Earth. The Earth will survive. She survived the dinosaurs. If Man destroys the environment that supplies him life, the Earth will still be here. We will not be leaving her the way we found her, but she will be here and we will not. Another form of life may evolve after we are gone. What we call natural disasters may be Earth's way of warning us. Well placed earthquakes, floods, volcanic eruptions: Man is history. We have a way of answering her warnings and that is to pay heed to how we treat our environment for our own sake.

The Internet has provided a method for solving this global problem with global networking and communication. The Internet provides information and a forum on which issues may be discussed. There are many agencies supplying information about preventing pollution. But the problem has been providing the world with this information. The Internet may be just the tool for disseminating that crucial information.

We have provided a mere 55 links to said agencies around the world which now use the Internet to supply us with information to protect ourselves against ourselves. It is just a sampling of what is available and of what can be done.

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