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Polluted Reportage
The advent of a Labour government brought the usually autopsies on the Tory years. One caught the eye of Real World. It was an entry in The Observer listing of the ups and downs of that sorry period of British life. It purported to show that pollution levels actually had fallen. Since the Conservatives singularly failed to show any interest in conservation, the statistic, which measured a fall in tonnes of pollutant released, seemed surprising. Did the Tories take us up the road to sustainability? Were the Tories, widely reviled as Earth enemies, its friends after all? Was it all a big misunderstanding?
In fact, such figures reflect a widespread confusion about the ecological crisis, one which the media generally make worse. To be sure, the volume of pollution is a very real component of the problem. Let us assume that each and every harmful substance, solid, liquid or gas, was accurately added to the totals and that there was a fall, in toto, in pollution between 1979-1997. Should we celebrate? Unfortunately, celebrations would be somewhat premature. For a start, some pollutants might be mere nuisances and irritants while others are really hazardous. The total volume of pollution might have decreased but its risks, nonetheless, still could have risen if the latter had increased as a proportion of an otherwise lower total. More seriously, the interaction between all these different pollutants, the phenomenon of synergy, might mean that destructive impacts form pollution might be increasing while the total quantity of pollution had gone. A simple example comes from foodstuffs where we might be using fewer food additives but the ones in use are combining to create new health hazards.
However, the real fallacy behind this simple statistic is the equation of environmental disruption with pollution, i.e. with what human activities add to environmental systems. That is part of the story. Long-term sustainability is threatened as well by what we take out of the environment as we tear up the fabric of life. The direct killing of wildlife, the planting of monocultures, the clear-cutting of forests, the emptying of aquifers, the draining of wetlands, the damming of rivers, and the paving of land with tarmac and concrete are, in themselves, all perfectly 'clean', non-polluting activities. Yet such activities, many of them directly linked to basic human needs and therefore to the sheer volume of human numbers, work against, not with, the patterns and rhythms of the Earth's life-sustaining ecosystems. To focus one-sidedly on pollution is, for example, to see global overwarming only in terms of greenhouse gas sources, ignoring the loss of compensatory 'sinks' (forests etc..). The simple truth is that under the Tories, environmental degradation continued apace, most visibly in the monstrous motorway programme but also in all kinds of other ways.
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