Pollution and Other Terrors of our times

7. Chapter - Pollution and Other Terrors of our times problems

             Something is seriously wrong with a technology that exalts ends over means. We invent poisons to eradicate mildew, relieve clogged drains, and eliminate ring around the collar. We regret the damage, but these products make housework easier. Easier housework outweighs environmental considerations. I am guiltier than most. I change crankcase oil, refinish furniture, and use oil based paints. I clean paint brushes with paint thinner and wash everything down the drain of the back hall slop sink. My individual pollutions are inconsequential, but when many do the same thing, technology turns collective and malignant.
             Few people care how many tons of detergent or gallons of bleach enter aquifers. Manufacturers of offending products see them as livelihoods which fulfill social needs. They persuade themselves the evil they do is less than the evil others do. When you deal in asbestos, chemicals are worse. We bury radioactive waste and think we solve a problem, but we know enough about garbage dumps to know barriers we build against contamination fall. To believe we can pollute indefinitely seems unrealistic to the point of psychosis, but like spoiled children, we ignore damage we do. Were we wiser, we would see that nature's boundless energies are available if we muster the patience to learn enough. We move in different directions because the prospect of cheap, plentiful, non-polluting products dismays those for whom money matters. Oil companies purportedly conceal efficient carburetor designs because efficient carburetors oppose their pecuniary interest. The rumor may be false, but oil executives will not welcome alternatives to fossil fuel anymore than Proctor and Gamble employees will endorse bans on detergents. Farmers spread chemical fertilizers, anti-biotics, and herbicides as the spirit moves. We decimate rain forests to provide cheap beef for fast food restaurants. Arable land disappears and water turns rancid.
             Environmental damage seems a small price to maintain our place in society. The list of transgressions is long, but of many stupidities, none surpasses the internal combustion engine. Automobiles epitomize everything wrong with unbridled technology, but we are hooked on automobiles like addicts on heroin. No inconvenience dampens our desire for shinier, faster machines. For some reason, I have, since my teens, longed to rebuild an automobile engine. The dream remains unfulfilled, but I attended two adult education automobile maintenance classes. At my peak, I changed distributor points and timed engines, but I forgot what I learned. For a while I was reduced to draining crankcase oil from an ancient pickup truck. Initially I put the used oil in the garbage, but conscience got the better of me. Now I pour it in the waste oil tank of a nearby gas station. I have no idea what they do with it, so quick am I to transfer responsibility to others.
             An acquaintance owned an industrial catalytic converter cleaning company. When I asked what he did with the residues, he grinned and admitted he hadn't faintest idea, just as I have no idea what happens to my waste oil. Executives who hire toxic waste removal firms feel no responsibility when their waste lands in upstate meadows, just as the managers who hire my friend do not ask what he does with their dregs. I assume pollution is destructive, but causal connections are difficult. Cigarette smokers remain unpersuaded smoking is unhealthy because increases in lung cancer coincide with increases in air pollution, food additives, cosmetics, television and other marvels. One can legitimately believe the case against cigarettes is deficient. I find it reasonable to conclude, without study, that inhaling hot toxic gas, damages delicate lung tissue. Acid rain has yet to reveal its undisputed cause. I blame it on automobiles because no exhaust system I owned lasted more than forty thousand miles. Surmising from piles of corroded pipes at muffler replacement franchises that automobile exhaust is acidic strikes me as logical, but Richard G. Bell, another Connecticut lawyer, has a different theory which, incidentally, illustrates the convoluted nature of our reality.
             He blames acid rain on the tall smokestacks of Midwestern electric power plants. Built to comply with a Clean Air Act that measures cleanliness by particulate accumulations on the ground, the smokestacks discharge exhausts high in the atmosphere to distribute their soot over a large area. According to Mr. Bell, the high altitude discharge turns water vapor acidic. We are so ignorant, our cure is deadlier than the disease. We drill deep wells to bury toxic wastes that percolate into our drinking water. Catalytic converters cleanse automobile exhaust to some extent, but we give no thought to what we do with the converters when the cars are scrapped. Probably we will junk them with the cars and learn from sad experience their concentrated poisons are bad for our health.
             We discover lead in the atmosphere, the not unexpected by-product of leaded fuel, but automobile associated problems are more profound. Automobile factories use millions of gallons of water and exorbitant amounts of natural gas. The manufacturing process, replete with solvents and milled metals, is degenerate. Each year generates millions of gallons of anti-freeze whose final resting place remains obscure. A machine loaded with who knows what flushed my car's radiator, and everything went down the drain. Leaking filling station tanks contaminate neighborhoods as do petroleum refineries, but with so many livelihoods dependent on automobiles, converting to less polluting transportation seems too painful.
             Luxury cars gratify hierarchical impulses by demonstrating how well some of us have done in this life. Having joined the onslaught (I own two cars) I spent six hundred dollars on a sophisticated water filter to purify drinking water. When I was young my family summered at Fairfield Beach where steamer clams hugged the shore and mussels were there for the picking. You saw the bottom of Long Island Sound in ten feet of water. Today clamming is prohibited, the mussels are gone, the water smells, and you cannot see bottom in ten inches of water. The sky is murkier than the sky of my youth, the air less pleasant. Losses creep up on us. The damage is so gradual, we do not notice.
             An outraged Paul Brodeur wrote a piece in The New Yorker about environmental problems caused by the asbestos industry. Indestructible asbestos fibers cause asbestosis and other fatal diseases. The article states that since the early nineteen thirties industry leaders knew asbestos posed a health hazard, but they used their considerable influence to conceal the derogatory information. They did it to enhance profits and minimize liability claims, but when juries awarded millions in compensatory and punitive damages, Johns Manville, the largest asbestos manufacturer, filed for bankruptcy. Mr. Brodeur objected to taking asbestos claims from juries because claimants receive less, but in his final analysis, he blames society.

One obvious lesson to be learned from the fifty-year asbestos disease saga is that a society that cannot summon up the sense to protect the lungs and the lives of its workers cannot hope to protect the lungs and the lives of its other citizens, including its children. Specifically, if we had been able to muster up the courage and the conviction to safeguard the health of our asbestos workers back in the nineteen-forties, when the first serious warnings about the asbestos disease hazard were issued, we would surely not have allowed asbestos to be used in thousands of school buildings that were constructed in the United States between 1959 and 1972, and would thus not be faced today with the prospect of spending billions of dollars to decontaminate these schools of asbestos, or with the anxiety of wondering what past asbestos exposure will mean for the future well-being of the millions of children who have been attending them.

             I lived during those times, and plead innocent. Having no idea what the asbestos industry was up to, I was in no position to protest their foolishness. It is inconsistent to say facts were concealed, but that society must protect the lungs and lives of its workers. Nor does preserving a right to jury trials solve the problem which is to keep things like asbestos contamination from happening. Mr. Brodeur cited the A. H. Robbins Company, producer of the Dalkon Shield as another example of suppressed derogatory information, but suppression of derogatory information is a common hierarchical phenomenon. Operators of garbage dumps conceal leaks in their dikes, and there is suspicion our government did not warn affected individuals of dangers posed by nuclear tests.
             Cover-ups are common because under present social arrangements, individual interest conflicts with collective good. The real horror of the asbestos disaster is that the psychology behind it is the rule, not the exception. Those responsible for the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island deny culpability. The only bureaucrat who left the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the wake of the disaster was the man who challenged the reactor's design and tried to do something about it.
             Most of us, some time or other, choose between personal interest and collective good. When that push comes to shove, we look out for ourselves and let society take care of itself. People who drive under the influence of alcohol retain lawyers to reduce the charge, or move to have sobriety tests suppressed as violating of constitutional rights. Lawyers see themselves as doing their job of getting drunk drivers off, just as Johns Manville's lawyers saw their job as getting Johns Manville off. That legal machinations oppose the public interest is irrelevant, nor is it important whether juries or administrative proceedings measure damage done. Administrative hearings save money for errant industries, but the real issue, contamination of the environment, has nothing to do with how much miscreants eventually pay.
             Pollution is epidemic and we are all involved. We pour caustic soda down drains to cure stoppages and salt roads. Ancient Romans salted the fields of the vanquished. We salt our own fields. We accept pollution because livelihoods depend on the way things are. Johns Manville managers who concealed the truth about asbestos send their children to schools with asbestos covered ceilings. Like the rest of us, they are trapped in the status quo.

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Book chapters

1. Chapter - Theory Overview
2. Chapter - Self Image Psychology
3. Chapter - Collective Image Psychology
4. Chapter - Sources of Collective Inferiority: Religion
5. Chapter - Sources of Collective Inferiority: Sex
6. Chapter - Sources of Collective Inferiority: Parents
7. Chapter - Pollution and Other Terrors of our Times
8. Chapter - More Problems: Representative Democracy
9. Chapter - More Problems: William Toste
10. Chapter - Embracing the Future: Television
11. Chapter - Embracing the Future: Computers
12. Chapter - Embracing the Future: Floating
13. Chapter - Embracing the Future: Scenarios
14. Chapter - Embracing the Future: Utopia