1969 Cuyahoga River Fire
Our ancestors have been very much like modern-day humans in terms of intellectual activity and curiosity for centuries. The way you and I look into the night sky and contemplate our existence has been done perpetually by our ancestors for the past 200,000 years or so (the field of human paleontology is undergoing a revolution thanks to new fossils and new DNA technology so this estimate is in flux). Even with all of our brain power humans didn’t understand the idea of resources being available in finite amounts, only increased scarcity.
For humans the idea of any resource being finite is a relatively new concept, especially water. We often think of water as something we can get from the sink at anytime rather than something that can vanish quickly and result in famine or war. As smart as humans are, we take a long time to come around to new ideas, especially when the impacts aren't immediately perceptible. The concept of extinction wasn’t widely accepted until the 1800s; well after scientific inquiry and industrialization had developed and even well after humans had a direct hand in the extinction of several species. Our ancestors built civilizations near water out of necessity for survival. When water wasn’t available in an other-wise ideal living environment we became increasingly skilled at routing water there. Humans had been constructing irrigation systems in China as early as 3rd century BCE. Following generations of industrialized and modernized societies increasingly took for granted that freshwater was a given.
Water has many properties that make it ideal for industrial needs. The covalent bond between two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom creates the polarized molecule we call water, the universal solvent. Water’s polar bond allows it to easily dissolve more substances than any other liquid. It’s also perfect for transporting molecules and cooling heated elements. When modern industrial and agricultural methods were being developed heavy water use was incorporated into both. Water usage in factories systems was as practical as it was convenient. We had never had to consider that our activities could deplete a water source faster than nature can replenish it, or that the amount of effluent pumped into water would affect anything at all. As recently as 1959, the Cuyahoga River in Ohio was described by Time magazine as “Chocolate-brown, oily, bubbling with subsurface gases, it oozes rather than flows.” Yet this didn’t even grab Time’s attention until the river actually caught fire.
Industrial clean up costs weren't a concern because environmental cleanup or integrity wasn’t a concern amongst communities. Eventually public concerns and scientific research began to highlight the dangers of water mismanagement by industry and agriculture. Costs, in the forms of environmental clean up, health concerns, ecosystem damage and more, were finally able to be applied to water pollution. If a pollutant made town residents sick then those workers wouldn’t be able to work and production would suffer. The costs were determined by the government agencies or industry professionals that were responsible for the clean up and the damages caused to the public. These cleanup and health costs were the first monetary incentives for industry not to damage freshwater supplies or other areas of the environment. Even so many companies find it more lucrative to spend money lobbying and providing misinformation to the public than to clean up environmental damage and retool their factories. In 2002, The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) ruled that General Electric must create a plan to remove its toxic mess from the Hudson River (the company had casually dumped up to 1.3 million pounds of carcinogenic PCBs into the river). This victory is now tangled in uncertainty, as the EPA and GE have reached a settlement that allows the company to back out after removing only 10 percent of the contaminated sediment, leaving the remainder of the cleanup in doubt.
As countries modernized and globalization increased, labor and production began to come from poorer regions that are increasingly farther away from the more prosperous nations, pushing environmental degradation out of the minds of modern societies (Christoff & Eckersley). A saddening example of this process in action can be found in Guiyu, China.
Plastic toy parts. China, Guiyu, Guangdong Province
Crowned “the e-waste capital of the world”, Guiyu is where developed countries' electronics are imported so they may sit in decompositional purgatory. Locals (many of whom are children) cut cables, pull chips from circuit boards, grind plastic computer cases into particles, dissolve circuit boards in acid baths to dissolve the lead, cadmium, and other toxic metals and strip insulation from wiring in an attempt to salvage small amounts of copper. Plastics are harvested and processed by hand in toxic chemicals. Those plastics are then
purchased by the company Foxconn, which manufactures parts for Apple’s iPhone and other accessories. The air reeks of burning plastic and noxious metals and the water is not safe to drink. Greenpeace sent crews to
measure ground samples and test the water supply. More than ten heavy and poisonous metals such as lead, mercury, tin, aluminum, and cadmium were found. Drinking water has to be trucked in as the local river and underground water table are poisonous. It is estimated that 88 percent of workers suffer from neurological, respiratory, digestive abnormalities, and other illnesses that are indicative of lead poisoning.
A 2006 report published in the Journal of Material Cycles and Waste Management showed that water samples taken near locations where e-waste had been processed and burned in the past had lead levels that were 2,400 times the safe consumption level stipulated in the World Health Organization Drinking Water Guidelines.
Humans have progressed technologically more than our not so distant relatives could have ever imagined, but we still possess many of the mental barriers as our most distant ancestors. We rarely concern ourselves with things that we can't directly observe, we accept harmful longstanding policies as inevitable, and we have a weakness for superstitions and blind assumptions. Today, though fully aware of the many threats that our activities pose to our own species' survival, we cite the lack of money as a reason for inaction.
Work Cited:
Christoff, P., Eckersley, R. 2013 “Globalization and the Environment” USA: Rowman & Littlefield.