We really can’t win in this game with the environment. We acquiesced, saying, “Okay, we’ll do everything we can to eliminate acid rain by reducing sulfur emissions from coal-fired power plants.” And now, we find out that agriculture has become the biggest anthropogenic source of sulfur. So says Eve-Lyn Hinckley, whose research identified a large quantity of sulfur released into soils, water, and air through agricultural practices.*
It appears to be another doomsday scenario. Remember the terrible affliction known as Minamata disease associated with fishing villagers and wastewater released from the Chisso Corporation’s chemical factory? No? Terrible disease that affected fetuses in the womb, causing gross deformities. Well, there’s a potential for the same kind of neurotoxicity of water polluted by mercury sulfate. That compound can be altered to methylmercury by bacteria and then passed on to those who consume food that contains the organometallic cation.
We just can’t win. We need both energy and food. And we need shelter. We need power plants and farms and houses. Solving one problem simply shifts our attention to another, sometimes one arising from a solution, sometimes one we were never aware of. Just when we think we solved that troubling acid rain problem associated with power plants, we find out that our farms are also leaking sulfur compounds into our environment.
For almost every human action, there’s an unintended consequence. For almost every human discovery, there’s another unknown. Life’s just that complex.
You might look to your own relationship with the environment. Think you’re doing your part by driving an electric car? Do some research, and you’ll find that the rare earth materials in electric vehicles require mining and disruption of some environment. And they require transport to a factory via ships that spew enormous amounts of carbon dioxide and pollutants into the air and water through which they sail. It is only this year that the International Maritime Organization (sp.: Organisation) has imposed a low-sulfur requirement for ship fuel. They will still emit sulfur, and, as you can guess, there will be many shipowners seeking to skirt the “law” by burning the cheaper bunker crude until they are forced to change their fuel to one that will increase their costs by a third. But let’s say that the shipping cleanly gets the rare earth metals to the factory. There, the manufacturing process for most electric vehicles produces a larger “carbon footprint” than the manufacture of gasoline-powered cars,** and the waste from a single year’s production of a million electric vehicles could amount to a quarter million tons of toxic substances with no recycling process on the immediate horizon when those batteries die.
Here’s the dilemma. When we take stuff out of the ground, eventually we have to put stuff back in the ground. Fertilizers into depleted soils, for example. There’s no free ride. Whatever we do disrupts something big or small. We’ve been changing environments for millennia, and we will continue to do so, even as we applaud ourselves for “saving environments” by living so-called sustainable lives.
Sure, I want to minimize my effect on the planet, but no matter what I do to meet some environmentalist’s ideal, I’m going to affect Earth somehow—just as the well-meaning environmentalist can’t avoid altering the planet. But as I have noted elsewhere, life does that, and that’s natural. There were no burrows until there were burrowers, no nests until there were nest-builders, no decimated forests until there were blights and insects. We fall into that large category of organisms that change the planet, a category that includes all organisms. I say we stop using the word artificial. If other organisms could do what we do, they would. What rabbit wouldn’t want a field of carrots instead of an occasional wild tuber?
Selling our souls to the environmental devil? Maybe a statement by Pennsylvania Justice Musmano in Versailles Borough v. McKeesport Coal and Coke Co. is germane here. The judge wrote about living with the hazards of pollutants that was the center of the complaint:
The plaintiffs are subject to an annoyance. This we accept, but it is an annoyance they have freely assumed [by choosing to work for the coke plant and to live next to it] Because they desired and needed a residential proximity to their places of employment, they chose to found their abode here. It is not for them to repine; and it is probable that upon reflection they will, in spite of the annoyance which they suffer, still conclude that, after all, one’s bread is more important than landscape or clear skies. Without smoke, Pittsburgh would have remained a very pretty village.***
I guess we all would like to live in pretty little villages—or on a farm in the middle of a city, giving us the best of worlds. Simple living, right? But we are where we are in the evolution of civilization. Villages are great in the ideal, but very difficult to maintain in the real. Do you want to grow your own food in ample supply? Manufacture all the objects you need? Get your energy from the local waterfall? Turn the local trees into paper? Make your own textiles? Turn sandstone into computer chips? Are you tired of electricity because it requires the destructive mining of copper and aluminum for wiring?
In living civilized lives, we find ourselves having to solve problems of our own making, many of them byproducts of all that fills our needs. One of those byproducts is methylmercury, a danger to us and to our offspring. Going to do something about it? Going to change the world? No? Maybe Musmano was insightful when he wrote that “one’s bread is more important than landscape or clear skies.”
* https://phys.org/news/2020-08-agriculture-fossil-fuels-largest-human.html
Accessed August 10, 2020.
** https://www.autoweek.com/news/green-cars/a1709966/will-some-gas-and-diesel-cars-still-produce-less-pollution-evs/
Accessed August 10, 2020.
***Versailles Borough v. McKeesport Coal and Coke Co., 83 Pittsb. Leg. J. 379. By the way, for those not familiar with Versailles, the locals pronounce it “ver- sales.”
It appears to be another doomsday scenario. Remember the terrible affliction known as Minamata disease associated with fishing villagers and wastewater released from the Chisso Corporation’s chemical factory? No? Terrible disease that affected fetuses in the womb, causing gross deformities. Well, there’s a potential for the same kind of neurotoxicity of water polluted by mercury sulfate. That compound can be altered to methylmercury by bacteria and then passed on to those who consume food that contains the organometallic cation.
We just can’t win. We need both energy and food. And we need shelter. We need power plants and farms and houses. Solving one problem simply shifts our attention to another, sometimes one arising from a solution, sometimes one we were never aware of. Just when we think we solved that troubling acid rain problem associated with power plants, we find out that our farms are also leaking sulfur compounds into our environment.
For almost every human action, there’s an unintended consequence. For almost every human discovery, there’s another unknown. Life’s just that complex.
You might look to your own relationship with the environment. Think you’re doing your part by driving an electric car? Do some research, and you’ll find that the rare earth materials in electric vehicles require mining and disruption of some environment. And they require transport to a factory via ships that spew enormous amounts of carbon dioxide and pollutants into the air and water through which they sail. It is only this year that the International Maritime Organization (sp.: Organisation) has imposed a low-sulfur requirement for ship fuel. They will still emit sulfur, and, as you can guess, there will be many shipowners seeking to skirt the “law” by burning the cheaper bunker crude until they are forced to change their fuel to one that will increase their costs by a third. But let’s say that the shipping cleanly gets the rare earth metals to the factory. There, the manufacturing process for most electric vehicles produces a larger “carbon footprint” than the manufacture of gasoline-powered cars,** and the waste from a single year’s production of a million electric vehicles could amount to a quarter million tons of toxic substances with no recycling process on the immediate horizon when those batteries die.
Here’s the dilemma. When we take stuff out of the ground, eventually we have to put stuff back in the ground. Fertilizers into depleted soils, for example. There’s no free ride. Whatever we do disrupts something big or small. We’ve been changing environments for millennia, and we will continue to do so, even as we applaud ourselves for “saving environments” by living so-called sustainable lives.
Sure, I want to minimize my effect on the planet, but no matter what I do to meet some environmentalist’s ideal, I’m going to affect Earth somehow—just as the well-meaning environmentalist can’t avoid altering the planet. But as I have noted elsewhere, life does that, and that’s natural. There were no burrows until there were burrowers, no nests until there were nest-builders, no decimated forests until there were blights and insects. We fall into that large category of organisms that change the planet, a category that includes all organisms. I say we stop using the word artificial. If other organisms could do what we do, they would. What rabbit wouldn’t want a field of carrots instead of an occasional wild tuber?
Selling our souls to the environmental devil? Maybe a statement by Pennsylvania Justice Musmano in Versailles Borough v. McKeesport Coal and Coke Co. is germane here. The judge wrote about living with the hazards of pollutants that was the center of the complaint:
The plaintiffs are subject to an annoyance. This we accept, but it is an annoyance they have freely assumed [by choosing to work for the coke plant and to live next to it] Because they desired and needed a residential proximity to their places of employment, they chose to found their abode here. It is not for them to repine; and it is probable that upon reflection they will, in spite of the annoyance which they suffer, still conclude that, after all, one’s bread is more important than landscape or clear skies. Without smoke, Pittsburgh would have remained a very pretty village.***
I guess we all would like to live in pretty little villages—or on a farm in the middle of a city, giving us the best of worlds. Simple living, right? But we are where we are in the evolution of civilization. Villages are great in the ideal, but very difficult to maintain in the real. Do you want to grow your own food in ample supply? Manufacture all the objects you need? Get your energy from the local waterfall? Turn the local trees into paper? Make your own textiles? Turn sandstone into computer chips? Are you tired of electricity because it requires the destructive mining of copper and aluminum for wiring?
In living civilized lives, we find ourselves having to solve problems of our own making, many of them byproducts of all that fills our needs. One of those byproducts is methylmercury, a danger to us and to our offspring. Going to do something about it? Going to change the world? No? Maybe Musmano was insightful when he wrote that “one’s bread is more important than landscape or clear skies.”
* https://phys.org/news/2020-08-agriculture-fossil-fuels-largest-human.html
Accessed August 10, 2020.
** https://www.autoweek.com/news/green-cars/a1709966/will-some-gas-and-diesel-cars-still-produce-less-pollution-evs/
Accessed August 10, 2020.
***Versailles Borough v. McKeesport Coal and Coke Co., 83 Pittsb. Leg. J. 379. By the way, for those not familiar with Versailles, the locals pronounce it “ver- sales.”
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