Eco-facts and Eco-fiction

Understanding the Environmental Debate

William H. Baarschers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135101275
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Environmental Science
• Index: Biological Sciences

Ozone-friendly, recyclable, zero-waste, elimination of toxic chemicals - such environmental ideals are believed to offer solutions to the environmental crisis. Where do these ideals come from? Is the environmental debate communicating the right problems?
Eco-Facts and Eco-Fiction examines serious errors in perceptions about human and environmental health. Drawing on a wealth of everyday examples of local and global concerns, the author explains basic concepts and observations relating to the environment. Removing fear of science and technology and eliminating wrong perceptions lead to a more informed understanding of the environment as a science, a philosophy, and a lifestyle.
By revealing the flaws in today's environmental vocabulary, this book stresses the urgent need for a common language in the environmental debate. Such a common language encourages the effective communication between environmental science and environmental decision-making that is essential for finding solutions to environmental problems.

Chapter 1
Introduction

As soon as I had gotten out of the heavy air of Rome and from the stink of the smoky chimneys thereof, which, being stirred, poured forth whatever pestilentious vapours and soot they had enclosed in them, I felt an alteration of my disposition.

Seneca, ad 61

How it started

In 1798 Thomas Malthus published his famous Essay on the Principle of Population. Around the 1930s several biologists started to voice their concerns with population growth, pollution, deforestation, and soil erosion. The names of Julian Huxley, William Vogt, Karl Sax, and Edward A. Ross come to mind with respect to the literature of that time. Malthus, one of the first to raise the issue, was out of phase with the trends in agriculture and technology and he did not find much of an audience. We will encounter Malthus again in a later part of our discussions. Also the more recent voices from the 1930s did not receive much attention from the scientific community.

Then by the late 1950s, a change became noticeable. Garrett Hardin, a biologist we will also meet again later, showed how that change became evident from the number of press clippings recorded on the topic of population growth.¹ It was not just population growth alone that concerned these early writers. They were deeply disturbed by the associated problems of pollution, waste, and the living conditions of humans, plants, and animals.

It was not until the 1960s that the general state of the planet reached the attention of larger numbers of people. The wake-up call came from biologist Rachel Carson when she published Silent Spring in 1962. Environmental concerns became common property and a number of buzzwords started to permeate our language.

An "environmental chronology" starts with the ordinances passed by the Plymouth Colony in 1626, regulating the cutting and sale of timber. It ends with the oil spill in Prince William Sound, Alaska, in 1989. Early entries in this sequence are spaced years apart; by the late 1800s several events were recorded each year.² Although this historical record is almost exclusively concerned with events in the USA, the message does take us beyond the borders of that one country. Although the awareness of environmental degradation mainly related to a major industrialized country like the USA, the international entries in the record illustrate the global significance of these events.

The publication of Silent Spring signalled the point at which an active environmental movement began to gather speed. The literary masterpiece, written by a biologist, made it clear to industrialized societies around the world that we could not go on doing what we did at that time. The subsequent appearance of Ehrlich's The Population Bomb set the scene for the organization of environmental groups like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth in 1969. Barry Commoner's The Closing Circle was another leading influence on the direction of environmental thinking of the late 1960s and 1970s. These books were the beginning of a long literature list for the environmentally interested reader. This literature is an important starting point for examining the environmental language of today.

Literary background

There are several similarities among these three authors. All three were biologists, scientists-turned-authors, who addressed not their fellow scientists, but the public. That was unusual because at the time scientists were generally content to talk to each other as if the public at large did not exist. With respect to their environmental concerns, all three authors were becoming impatient with the conservative scientific community. Their message was urgent and they wrote with the missionary zeal necessary to convince.

All three were practicing scientists who knew where to find the scientific information they needed. They also knew how to use their literary skills to write a compelling story. From their own observations as biologists all three were acutely aware of the environment. The urgency of their message provided them with the justification to step outside their fields of specialization from time to time. Over the years all three have been ruthlessly criticized by some, and valiantly defended by others.

Although Carson was a biologist, the problems on which she focussed contained much chemistry. In 1962 the environmental impact of some synthetic chemicals, particularly the chlorinated pesticides like DDT, had in her opinion reached a crisis point. When she referred to these chemicals as "the synthetic creations of man's inventive mind, brewed in his laboratories, and having no counterparts in nature," she appealed to the emotions of her readers. She knew that chemists don't "brew chemicals" and she must have been aware of the occurrence of many natural chemicals that are at least as toxic as many synthetics. But references to "extenuating evidence" would have weakened the urgency of her message.

Commoner, also a biologist, was the inventor of the term "the technological flaw." He used this expression to describe the fixing of one environmental problem with a "solution" that then became a problem in its own right. He also formulated what he called "the laws of ecology." The third biologist, Paul Ehrlich, focussed more indirectly on environmental problems by addressing, at least in his earlier books, what he saw as the problem of overpopulation. His message was that there are too many people and not enough resources, especially food. He warned us that "If the optimists are correct, today's level of misery will be perpetuated for perhaps two decades into the future. If the pessimists are correct, massive famines will occur soon, possibly in the early 1970s, certainly by the early 1980s."³ Ehrlich's predictions were wrong, considering that present local famines in Northern Africa are largely due to tribal wars and the misguided "help" of Western countries.⁴ However, concerns about a world food shortage are being raised again today.⁵

Beyond the scientific arguments of these writer-scientists, there was the voice of another crusader, heard in the late 1960s. Ralph Nader and his consumer advocacy group entered the literary field in the early 1970s. Nader managed to focus public environmental thinking on the "behaviour of corporate North America," and away from individual responsibility. In doing so he made it quite clear that the environmental debate is, to a large extent, a political debate. He introduced the idea of "the Polluters," the large corporations that are willing to sacrifice the entire planet for the sake of profit.⁶ Nader approached the environmental debate from the political angle and paid little attention to environmental science.

Also on that side of the political spectrum we find the views of Rudolf Bahro, a founding member of Germany's Green Party. Bahro is quoted as saying that "people should live in socialist communities of no more than 3,000, consuming what they produce and not trading outside the community."⁷ Vance Packard, author of The Waste Makers, also addressed the political aspects when he contrasted the "business-Republican-conservative coloration" with the "liberal-Democratic-labour coloration" of the players in this field.⁸

On the other side of the political fence there were initially few counterweights. The best known are probably the books by philosopher Ayn Rand, in defense of capitalism and individuality.^9,10 However, after the Carson, Commoner, and Ehrlich sequence, the late 1970s and early 1980s saw the appearance of a different kind of literature that quickly resulted in a reaction, both from the political right and from the scientific community.

A public concerned with the environmental issues raised by the early biologists now faced the fear spilling out of books like Regenstein's America the Poisoned, Grossman's The Poison Conspiracy, and Samuel Epstein's The Politics of Cancer, and many more with similar titles. Although these books probably had a limited readership, their message spread in many directions. Abstracts appeared in the popular press, and the authors became regular guests on radio and television talk shows. An issue of Time, devoted to the Regenstein book, illustrates the general tone of this literature. The author of the cover story, writing about chemicals, uses a collection of words like "concoctions, alchemists, brew, festering, fouling, oozing."¹¹ The use of this language was presumably intended to capture the public's attention. It also created fear.

Reactions came from economists and scientists. Already in 1977 Claus and Bolander published their Ecological Sanity. Julian Simon, an economist, defended the view that the resources of the planet, including energy, are truly unlimited in his book The Ultimate Resource. Elizabeth Whelan, an epidemiologist, criticized the fear-raising literature in her book Toxic Terror and Edith Efron examined the cancer issue in her book The Apocalyptics. The Isaacs examined the political aspect of the environmental debate in The Coercive Utopians. More recently, Dixy Lee Ray, a marine biologist, added her voice to the science side of the debate. In the concluding chapter of her book Trashing the Planet she described the large majority that lives between these two political extremes. As part of her views of the environmentalist movement she wrote: "This is not to suggest that everyone who supports more responsible policies for cleaner air and water... is a wild-eyed extremist,... they are honest, honourable supporters of a good, clean environment and responsible human actions." She then distinguished "the political environmentalists" from "the rest of us."¹²

In the meantime, yet another kind of writing became part of the environmental mosaic. To the observations of the biologists, the emotions of the catastrophists, and the rebuttals by the cornucopians was added the environmental ethic of the philosophers. It was not just the question of whether the observations and the interpretations were right or wrong, the basics of right and wrong of the human relationship with nature needed to be examined. An early entry in this category was Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac, published in 1949, which is now a classic in its field. It is still a cornerstone of modern environmental ethics.¹³ Leopold's thinking can best be summarized in his own, often quoted words:

A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.¹⁴

The result of Leopold's writing was the evolution of what became the land ethic. The land ethic teaches respect for nature based on ethical arguments. Quotes from Leopold's writings are found in many essays on environmental ethics. The late 1970s saw the founding of a professional journal Environmental Ethics. The collection People, Penguins, and Plastic Trees, edited by VanDeVeer and Pierce, introduces some important names in environmental ethics such as Tom Regan, Peter Singer, and others.

The earlier Malthusian issues on population control also found a place in the ethics literature. In 1969 Garrett Hardin, a biologist, edited Population, Evolution and Birth Control, A Collage of Controversial Ideas. Hardin's own articles, "The Tragedy of the Commons" and "Living on a Lifeboat," also date from those years. They appeared again later in Managing the Commons, a collection of essays on population and resources.¹⁵

This then is the tapestry of literature that forms a background for today's environmental debate. Clearly, a wide spectrum of opinions and convictions comes to the debating table with a varied company of debaters. If this varied group wants to reach a consensus, there is little doubt that a common language among them is extremely important. A casual perusal of the relevant literature shows that the evolution of this common language has not made much progress.

Facts, factoids and chemophobia

Along the wide political spectrum of environmental interests, the catastrophist activists occupy the left, the cornucopian optimists are on the right. A bewildered public and beleaguered governments huddle in the middle. Many organizations, groups, and establishments have an interest of one kind or another in environmental matters. Post secondary educational institutions offer hundreds of courses dealing with the environment. An entire industrial sector, "the environmental industries," is making a handsome living in many industrialized countries. Yet, much of the environmental language and thinking is still stuck in the 1960s and 1970s, albeit expanded with the terrifying details provided by the popular literature and the media.

These earlier ideas are often inconsistent with more recent developments. Much of the environmental thinking of the 1960s is now hindering our attempts to bring consensus to the debating table. Some progress has been made on the political scene. There are international agreements such as the Montreal Protocol that addressed the potential problems with stratospheric ozone. The warnings of Ehrlich did find an echo in the 1994 international conference on human population in Cairo. However, the perception that pesticides are always persistent and that synthetic detergents are not biodegradable have a firm hold on the public mind. That corporations, the "polluters," cause the environmental problems is a common perception for many people. Scientists who work for these corporations have little credibility with the public.¹⁶ The fear of radiation and radioactivity inhibits the use of nuclear energy while the environmental impact of coal-fired power plants is ignored. On the cornucopian side the rhetoric also remains much the same: "there is an unlimited supply of resources and technology will fix all our problems."

This book is not concerned with the moral judgements of whether these beliefs and attitud...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Three Es: earth, ecology, and environment
• 3 Science and the scientists
• 4 Chemistry, chemicals, and the chemists
• 5 How toxic is toxic?
• 6 Cancer everywhere?
• 7 Energy and the laws of nature
• 8 Air for breathing
• 9 Water for drinking
• 10 Food for eating
• 11 Waste not, want not
• 12 Organochlorines - killer chemicals?
• 13 Conclusion
• Notes
• Name index
• Subject index