Archive for the 'Environmental Pollution' Category

The effect of environmental pollution on human life is quickly becoming undeniable. One in five people around the world are dying every year due to factors related to the effect of environmental pollution on human life, from improperly-ventilated cook fires to poisonous ground water leading to the spread of malaria-carrying mosquitos. But the most dangerous effect of environmental pollution on human life yet is most likely the greenhouse effect. And according to the “One Hundred Months Project”, launched in August of 2008, we may no longer have much chance to save ourselves.

The greenhouse effect is becoming more and more widely researched and acknowledged in the mainstream press. The simple explanation of the greenhouse effect is as follows: the burning of fossil fuels releases “greenhouse gasses” into the atmosphere. These gasses do not dissipate over time, but remained trapped in the earth’s atmosphere, absorbing heat from the sun. The effect of environmental pollution on human life through the greenhouse effect is comparable to the effect of storing vast quantities of firewood in your house during the summer. Eventually, things will just get too hot–and you have a situation on your hands.

But if you’re storing firewood in your house, you still have a reversible situation. If you remove the firewood, you may be able to prevent it from reaching its flash point in the summer heat and bursting into flames. Since you perceive the situation as reversible, you’d naturally be tempted to leave the firewood in place for as long as possible, only removing it when the situation becomes critical. However, there’s a risk involved with this complacent strategy: if you wait for too long, the summer heat may make the wood physically too hot to handle without burning your hands. The catastrophe hasn’t yet happened–but there’s no way to prevent it now, since you can’t remove the firewood. The firewood has reached its “tipping point” as far as heat goes. All you can do is wait for the inevitable combustion.

The idea behind the One Hundred Months project is to teach the public that the “tipping point” in terms of the greenhouse effect is about to be reached. As of August 2008, we have one hundred months before the greenhouse effect becomes irreversible. Even if we stop all fossil fuel production at that point, the climate won’t return to safe pre-industrial levels. The earth will continue to get hotter and deadlier until–like the firewood–it combusts, in terms of human life.

We can only hope that the One Hundred Months project is wrong, that the effect of environmental pollution on human life can still be reversed. But in case they aren’t–we now have a deadline. We’re now doomed to watch the clock.

What is environmental pollution? One thousand years ago, the question wouldn’t have even made sense. The very concept that human beings could be killing the planet by trying to make it easier for themselves to survive wouldn’t have made sense. But in our modern world, the question “What is environmental pollution?” not only makes sense–it makes too much sense. And in many ways it’s a question that doesn’t need to be answered. We all know too well what environmental pollution is and what the consequences are of ignoring it.

The first real record in the Western world of a concept of environmental pollution came in during the reign of Edward I of England, who banned the burning of sea-coal in the late thirteenth century. Medieval Arab scholars discussed issues related to environmental quality and environmental protection from the ninth century forward, which makes some sense considering the delicate balance of the ecosystem necessary to maintain a nomadic hunter/gatherer lifestyle. (Anyone who’s read “Changes In The Land” is familiar with the environmental awareness among the American Indians–one of the major reasons the arrival of the Europeans was so disastrous for that group is the fact that European development destroyed many of the native ecosystems of the Indians, making it impossible for them to maintain their non-agricultural lifestyle.) But other than these glimpses, there was no concept of contamination–no answer to the question “What is environmental pollution.”

The real concept of environmental pollution started to emerge at the same time as factories emerged in Western Europe. Suddenly the consequences of taking full advantage of the earth became real and obvious as the air around London darkened and thickened and the water in the Thames slowly changed to poison. Environmental pollution entered the legal sphere fully in the late nineteenth century when major American industrial centers like Chicago and Cincinnati passed some of the first clean air laws, with mixed results. Yet these was still a sense that environmental pollution was mythical and the concern over it alarmism. After all, humans had exploited the land for millennia with no ill effects–why should trouble start now? Never mind that for millennia humans hadn’t had the power to damage the land that they do today–without an answer for the question “What is environmental pollution?”, there was no possibility of addressing the critics.

Today, as we said, there’s almost no need to ask the question. Everyone knows the answer to the question: “What is environmental pollution?” Environmental pollution is the sting in our nose when we breathe, the years taken off of our life when we drink the water, the feeling of doom we get when we look at the rising price of dwindling oil supplies. We know what environmental pollution is–and we know that at last, we need to do something about it.

The sector of the population known in conservative circles as “alarmists” (read: anyone who considers environmental pollution to be a serious topic) have long speculated gloomily about the link between agricultural chemicals and environmental pollution. It stands to reason, they assert, that agricultural chemicals and environmental pollution be linked. The agricultural chemicals most often linked to environmental pollution include veterinary medicines, pesticides, non-organic fertilizers, and other chemicals designed to eradicate disease in crops and animals on American farms. Since these chemicals are responsible essentially for poisoning forms of life (yes, Virginia, diseases are forms of life too), it stands to reason, “alarmists” say, that we should be concerned about runoff from the application of agricultural chemicals entering our groundwater, streams, and soil.

Conservatives wouldn’t even bother to debate on some points. Even since the publication of Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring”, it’s been well known that pesticides in the environment–DDT in particular–are responsible for the massive die-offs of birds in regions of America that depend on agriculture for survival. And it’s equally well-known that veterinary hormones and other chemicals used in agriculture have harmful effects on human beings upon direct exposure.

The point of debate isn’t that there’s a link between agricultural chemicals and environmental pollution. The point of debate is that we should be troubled by that link, and by the dependence on agricultural chemicals found in many factory and smaller farms. Sure, these chemicals hurt us, say the conservatives. But they can’t be hurting us all that badly. The link between agricultural chemicals and environmental pollution is there, but it’s nothing to worry about.

What we needed in order to resolve the debate was a good method of quantifying the amount of damage agricultural chemicals were doing and the amount of environmental pollution they were creating. Now, thanks to researchers at the US Geological Survey and Colorado State University at Pueblo, we have that method: earthworms.

These researchers collected soil samples from three fields. One field had been treated with biosolid fertilizers. One had been treated with pig manure. The third, the control field, hadn’t been treated with fertilizer in seven years. The researchers extracted earthworms from the soil samples and tested them for traces of 77 known dangerous chemicals used in agriculture.

They expected to find traces of these chemicals in the biosolid and pig manure fields, and they did: some 20 dangerous chemicals in each. The surprise came when they tested the control field, the one that hadn’t been exposed to chemicals in years. Seven dangerous chemicals were found infesting the bodies of the earthworms.

There is a link between agricultural chemicals and environmental pollution–even in places where agricultural chemicals aren’t directly applied to the environment.

So we must ask: when is it proper for an alarmist to start raising an alarm?

When most of us hear an article title like “biosensors to detect environmental pollution”, we’re plagued by one question: what on earth is a biosensor? The answer is both surprising and ingenious–and as a group of students at the University of Glasgow learned, the answer is one of the most hopeful developments yet in the continuing war against environmental pollution.

Biosensors, as Latin scholars already know, are living creatures or other forms of life used to detect some chemical or physical change in the environment. The classic example of a biosensor is the canary in the mine. The canary is placed in a cage and kept in mines in order to check for the presence of natural gas. If the canary dies, there’s gas in the mine, and everybody very quickly runs somewhere else. This is, technically speaking, a good use of biosensors to detect environmental pollution–but not nearly to the degree of sophistication needed to diagnose and treat environmental problems on a grand scale.

What the students at the University of Glasgow have found is a much more practical and advanced use of biosensors to detect environmental pollution. The students developed their biosensor technology in 2007 as part of a competition among international students: the International Genetically Engineered Machine Awards, held by MIT in Boston. The winning entry was a genetically-engineered microbe, designed to detect toxic chemicals. Specifically, the microbe was meant to detect industrial runoff and natural gas–exactly like the canary, but on a much smaller scale. The microbe was then placed into a fuel cell that would receive an electric charge when the microbe detected the toxic chemicals. As a result, the electrical cell would fire, warning signals would be activated, and the presence of environmental pollution would be confirmed.

Admittedly, the scale of the students’ project in the field of biosensors to detect environmental pollution was small: a single working microbe culture and a single fuel cell, built as a proof of concept for the technology. Currently, the University of Glasgow is seeking funds for additional research along the students’ lines. According to project leader Scott Ramsay, the technology could be easily expanded to a series of warning/monitoring stations running on biosensor principles, designed to check the air and water quality levels in a given region and report any abnormal levels of pollution to authorities or to a central database. Clean air and water laws–notoriously difficult to enforce due to problems with measuring air and water pollution–could them be more effectively monitored and enforced, helping to curb the problem of pollution.

It’s a big job, especially for a modern canary in a mine. But biosensors to detect environmental pollution may be the best hope we have yet–assuming that you believe that big hopes can come in small packages.

Solid information on environmental pollution can be difficult to find. For one, good information on environmental pollution is frequently too technical to be of any use to anyone outside of the academy, or anyone not planning on devoting their life to understanding all of the technical issues and chemical factors that make up the environment and our relation to it as human beings. For another, good information on environmental pollution is also frequently too local in its focus to be of any use to anyone not from that area. Sure, it may be interesting that desert caves in Libya are experiencing accelerated erosion as a result of magnesium deposits in nearby oases. But what does that have to do with us?

Yet it’s a given that we need good information on environmental pollution in order to live in the modern world. The war to protect the environment is everyone’s war; the environment itself is everyone’s battleground. Greenpeace, despite the name, is one of the organizations that uses military metaphors as a central piece of their public relations strategy. Greenpeace positions themselves as a group of “Rainbow Warriors”, dedicated to protecting the planet from its oppressors at any costs. And through their media and public outreach wings, Greenpeace positions itself as a solid source of information on environmental pollution.

But is this really the case? Is Greenpeace solely motivated by the need to deliver solid information on environmental pollution to the public at large? Or does it have another agenda–one which would lead it to distort even the facts it has sworn to protect?

Since its inception Greenpeace has been a political entity. The organization came to prominence by protesting nuclear weapons testing in Alaska–surely a political issue if there ever was one. Once the group became seaborne with the purchase of their famous flagship, the “Rainbow Warrior”, they quickly became infamous in Japanese whaling circles for their deliberate interference in whaling options–an act that led to their branding as “eco-terrorists” by the Japanese government.

None of this in and of itself would make Greenpeace’s information suspicious: after all, many organizations have done worse and still provided reliable information to the public. But in a recent article that appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Patrick Moore, one of the co-founders of Greenpeace spoke out against increasing politicization within the Greenpeace movement, taking as his evidence their 1986 campaign against chlorine use, and their ongoing campaign against phthalate compounds used in children’s toys. According to Moore, both chemicals are perfectly safe, and are being used by Greenpeace as “hot button” issues to alarm people–and to drum up political capital for Greenpeace.

There’s no immediate reason to trust Mr. Moore over his former partners, of course–which is the problem. In the politics of environmentalism, it’s difficult to know who to trust–and the arcane scientific journals may be the only source of rock-solid information on environmental pollution we have, even if it remains a bitter and hard-to-swallow drink.

Fertilizer: common sense would indicate that it’s the last thing anyone has to worry about when considering how to farm effectively in order to avoid environmental pollution. Fertilizer is designed to grow plants, after all, to grow them more quickly, healthily, and effectively: and aren’t plants what all of these environmentalist types are clamoring for more of? But recent soil profiling of environmental pollution in some less-developed parts of the world shows the truth. In fact, according to profiling of environmental pollution, the overuse of fertilizer can be more deadly to the environment than any toxic waste spill.

Chemical fertilizers are obviously the worst offenders, since they frequently come equipped with pesticides designed to help prevent crop loss due to insects and other troublesome infestations. But even if you’re not using pesticides, fertilizers can cause serious problems to fields and by extension to the environment at large. Many fertilizers, for example, only fill the soil with the nutrients designed to make plants grow the fastest and with the highest rate of crop yield–as a rule, nitrogen compounds. Over time, however, high crop yields start to deplete the soil of other chemicals that plants need to grow. Ideally, fertilizers should replenish those chemicals, and there are several organic fertilizers designed to do just that. In many cases, however, too much fertilizer is applied, making the plants grow too quickly and too thickly–and not allowing the soil to keep up with their growth. Profiling of environmental pollution shows that the soil in these cases becomes slowly unable to generate the nutrients responsible for allowing plants to grow.

In addition, no fertilizer is one hundred percent efficient–meaning that plants never use all of the chemicals in any fertilizer when growing. There’s always some degree of waste that remains in the soil, inert, contributing nothing–except to the growing stock of pollutants and waste in the environment. Countries like Pakistan–projected to become one of the world’s biggest fertilizer users in the coming years–are starting to use fertilizer to the extent that plants can only make use of about 50% of the chemicals implanted in the soil. Thus the country faces the possibility of massive fertilizer waste deposits, the kind of thing that only shows up in profiling of environmental pollution in the soul–but the kind of thing that can quickly leave a field barren for the future.

What’s the solution? For one, a greater use of organic fertilizers. These aren’t perfect and they can sometimes be more expensive to produce and apply, but they can help to prolong the life of the soil while still permitting adequate plant growth for a growing economy. For another, the knowledge that more fertilizer doesn’t necessarily equal a better crop yield–or a better environmental balance. You don’t need to perform any sophisticated profiling of environmental pollution to realize that in all things, there’s a right measure–and we need to find it, even for something as benign as chemicals intended to help the earth grow a little bit greener.

Many of us talk about environmental pollution, and many of us have the same idea about what environmental pollution entails: orange sludge collecting in rivers, clouds of yellow smog wafting over valleys, trash littering a formerly green field. But these evocative images just aren’t sufficient if we really want to take on the task of ending or curbing environmental pollution in our local regions, and in the world at large. In order to fight environmental pollution, we need to know the major types of environmental pollution: how to recognize them, what problems they present, and what we can do against them.

Major Types Of Environmental Pollution #1: Air Pollution

Air pollution is any major source of irritating smoke, chemical residue, or other vapor released into the air that makes it a significant health risk to human life–or simply unpleasant to experience. Common sources of air pollution include smokestacks, jet engines, or other fossil fuel-burning technologies. Air pollution can even be much simpler: for example, some four million people die every year from air pollution caused by improperly ventilated cookfires in sub-Saharan Africa.

Major Types Of Environmental Pollution #2: Water Pollution

Water pollution is any type of contaminant released into the water supply. The classic image of this is the pipe outside a victory dumping waste into a river or lake, but water pollution can also happen through illegal trash dumping near a water source, or simply by pesticides seeping through the soil and into the groundwater, where they gradually pass into the rivers and the sea.

Major Types Of Environmental Pollution #3: Soil Contamination

Speaking of pesticides: soil contamination is any type of waste or poison that slowly leaches into the soil, rendering it unable to support life or growth. Many agricultural chemicals are linked to this type of environmental pollution, especially pesticides, veterinary medicines, and non-organic fertilizers.

Major Types Of Environmental Pollution #4: Noise And Visual Pollution

These types of environmental pollution are often not taken as seriously as others–after all, loud noises and aesthetically offensive advertising and industrial development won’t slowly poison your body or cause species of animals to go extinct on a massive scale. However, these aesthetic types of environmental pollution do significantly reduce people’s quality of life over time. If you don’t feel like going out to work or walking in your neighborhood because you’re surrounded by TV ads, billboards, and angry music played from a thousand radios, your quality of life goes down and your ability to thrive within your environment goes down with it.

There are of course other types of environmental pollution–as many types as there are industrial projects with unsustainable methodologies. Once you can spot them, it’s time to begin the more difficult task: ending them, cleaning them up.

Pollution, environmental or not, poisons not only the world we live in but the food we eat. We all know that smog and other air pollution issues shorten the human lifespan and promote the development of respiratory diseases and bacterial infections. And we all know that water pollution/environmental damage leads to the breeding of malaria-infested mosquitoes and the spread of lethal illness. But what we sometimes forget is that these diseases don’t only shorten the human lifespan and poison and infect humans. All life suffers from pollution and environmental damage from humans on down the food chain. One might say that the chickens are coming home to roost–except there are no more chickens, nor is there anything else safe to eat at all.

That was what was on the mind of Ron Fink, the president and CEO of RGF Food Safety Systems, when he initially patented his food processing technology in 1997. For six years, RGF was the industry leader in treating food supplies in order to remove bacterial infections and to reverse, to some extent, the damage caused by pollution and environmental issues. A court case and a non-competition agreement in 2003 forced RGF out of the market for years more–leaving the patented technology out of food warehouses and making our food supply slowly less safe.

Now, in 2008, RGF is back with a vengeance. Its legal issues are cleared and it can continue its mission of fighting pollution and environmental hazards in the nation’s food supply.

RGF’s technology works on ozone-friendly ultraviolet principles, helping not only to keep food free of disease, but to help prevent the underlying pollution/environmental related causes of food-borne disease in the first place. RGF also provides companies with technical training in order to help them learn to operate their plants according to environmentally sound principles, from non-chemical air treatments in the food processing plants to “green” wastewater recycling.

In addition to its food processing work, RGF also implements a series of “EnviroVision” plans for various businesses, offering consulting work and implementation advice for a variety of patented food, air, and water purification technologies.

RGF is big business, yes, with clients around the world. But it’s rare to see an example of big business with a conscience: a firm that doesn’t exploit its workers or its planet, but that takes upon itself the responsibility of helping to keep the food supply clean and to fight the pollution/environmental degradation issues that increasingly plague our post-industrial society. It’s hard to imagine any factory farm-style corporation doing the same.

Solid information on environmental pollution can be difficult to find. For one, good information on environmental pollution is frequently too technical to be of any use to anyone outside of the academy, or anyone not planning on devoting their life to understanding all of the technical issues and chemical factors that make up the environment and our relation to it as human beings. For another, good information on environmental pollution is also frequently too local in its focus to be of any use to anyone not from that area. Sure, it may be interesting that desert caves in Libya are experiencing accelerated erosion as a result of magnesium deposits in nearby oases. But what does that have to do with us?

Yet it’s a given that we need good information on environmental pollution in order to live in the modern world. The war to protect the environment is everyone’s war; the environment itself is everyone’s battleground. Greenpeace, despite the name, is one of the organizations that uses military metaphors as a central piece of their public relations strategy. Greenpeace positions themselves as a group of “Rainbow Warriors”, dedicated to protecting the planet from its oppressors at any costs. And through their media and public outreach wings, Greenpeace positions itself as a solid source of information on environmental pollution.

But is this really the case? Is Greenpeace solely motivated by the need to deliver solid information on environmental pollution to the public at large? Or does it have another agenda–one which would lead it to distort even the facts it has sworn to protect?

Since its inception Greenpeace has been a political entity. The organization came to prominence by protesting nuclear weapons testing in Alaska–surely a political issue if there ever was one. Once the group became seaborne with the purchase of their famous flagship, the “Rainbow Warrior”, they quickly became infamous in Japanese whaling circles for their deliberate interference in whaling options–an act that led to their branding as “eco-terrorists” by the Japanese government.

None of this in and of itself would make Greenpeace’s information suspicious: after all, many organizations have done worse and still provided reliable information to the public. But in a recent article that appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Patrick Moore, one of the co-founders of Greenpeace spoke out against increasing politicization within the Greenpeace movement, taking as his evidence their 1986 campaign against chlorine use, and their ongoing campaign against phthalate compounds used in children’s toys. According to Moore, both chemicals are perfectly safe, and are being used by Greenpeace as “hot button” issues to alarm people–and to drum up political capital for Greenpeace.

There’s no immediate reason to trust Mr. Moore over his former partners, of course–which is the problem. In the politics of environmentalism, it’s difficult to know who to trust–and the arcane scientific journals may be the only source of rock-solid information on environmental pollution we have, even if it remains a bitter and hard-to-swallow drink.

We all know about environmental pollution: pollution and its costs, pollution and its causes, and pollution and its terrible effects. We know that environmental pollution (pollution of the air, in particular) causes the death of one in five people around the world every year, according to data gathered by the World Health Organization in partnership with the World Bank. And we know that environmental pollution has slowly made our world less populated with animal species, less safe for ourselves and our children, and less enjoyable for everyone in almost every way. How could this situation get any worse?

The answer: by recognizing a new kind of environmental pollution: pollution of the mind.

Pollution of the mind isn’t just what happens when you watch too much TV or read too many comic books at a vulnerable age. Rather, pollution of the mind is a concept discovered by researchers working with the effects of advertising on the public consciousness. The idea is that by placing offensive billboards in unavoidably conspicuous locations within a city or by filling the air with exhortations to buy new products, advertisers are effectively polluting the “mental space” of people in large urban areas.

Environmental pollution–pollution of whatever form–essentially means any damaging product, industrial or otherwise, that makes the world less safe and less pleasant to be in. We can argue that both of these qualities are present in pollution of the mind. Advertising is certainly an industrial product, for the most part, and it certainly makes the world less pleasant–unless you’re the type who finds it pleasant to be manipulated by major corporations into spending money you don’t have on products you don’t even enjoy, of course. And advertising can also make the world demonstrably less safe by stunting people’s critical thinking and diminishing the capacity for understanding and for empathy. Manipulating the population into buying products and manipulating the population into, say, starting, supporting, and fighting an endless land war are not as different, in the end, as one might assume.

Because of the problems inherent in this new form of environmental pollution–pollution of the mind–several grass-roots groups are starting to advocate taxing the use of the public’s “mental space”, much as corporations are taxed (at least in theory) for misusing the public’s air and water. This may be a double-edged sword, however, as some critics–notably Joseph Hale, a commentator from the environmental battlegrounds of Texas–have pointed out. To advocate the taxation of “mental space” is to invite the government into our very minds–the one place that, historically, the government has been kept out of.

Whatever the solution, however, it’s clear that for this newest form of environmental pollution–pollution of the mind–some solution is necessary. Once we can think clearly, we can begin working diligently on finding a solution to everything else.