We hear it every day. Today's world is fraught with dangers - terrorists, epidemics and guns. We have triple locks on our doors, alarms on our cars and medicines to prevent the normal symptoms of aging. Yet the most immediate threat to our health is continually overlooked: environmental degradation.
The academic debate over the cause of global warming eclipses other valid reasons for curbing human impact - indeed, there are more pressing environmental hazards. Perhaps carbon emissions aren't causing atmospheric heat retention, but they are causing asthma, lung cancer, acid rain and smog. One could choose to argue that deforestation does not lead to global warming, but cannot dispute that it leads to erosion, landslides, non-arable lands and human property damage. Regardless of your environmental stance, it is impossible to deny that the proposed responses to climate change are beneficial to human health in the present.
Forget about terrorism and forget about the polar ice caps melting. There are immediate threats to our health everywhere: in our backyards, on campus at Brown, in your Providence drinking water. The Environmental Defense Fund ranks Providence County among the dirtiest 10 percent of all U.S. counties in terms of noncancer risk score (air and water releases). The county also ranks among the dirtest 10 percent of all U.S. counties in terms of pm-2.5 emissions (smog and soot). As a Rhode Island resident, I grew up alongside the Blackstone River, the nation's first industrialized river, which runs from Worcester, Mass., to Providence. When my parents were children, the river ran the color of whatever fabric was being dyed in the factories that day. The Blackstone is the largest polluter of Narragansett Bay, the not-so-pristine body of water you see as you walk down Wickenden Street. This pollution affects local fishing and tourism, damaging Rhode Island's economy.
Whose fault is it? President Bush? The United States? The first world? The third world? The problem is that it's everybody's fault. Environmental issues have been out of vogue in the West Wing since the 1970s. In 1995, President Clinton suddenly reversed his opposition to a rider that allowed for clear-cutting of public forests - a turn-around that outraged the environmental community. After the 1997 Kyoto conference, a coal industry newsletter ran the headline: "Clinton Saves Place in History, Does Nothing." We're unlikely to do any better in the 2008 election.
U.S. consumption is staggering. Alan Durning states, "The average resident of an industrial country consumes three times as much fresh water, 10 times as much energy, and 19 times as much aluminum as someone in a developing country. The U.S. alone contains 5 percent of the world's population but accounts for 22 percent of fossil fuel consumption, 24 percent of CO2 emissions, and 33 percent of paper and plastic use."
However, many blame the unregulated use of coal and huge population booms in third world countries for increasing pollution. The World Health Organization sets the limit on air sulfur dioxide levels at 40-60 micrograms per cubic meter annually. In Chonqing, China, the level climbs as high as 600 micrograms. Lung cancer in China has increased 18.5 percent since 1988. Deforestation in Latin America is rampant.
The argument of "who is worse" is a waste of time. We are all evolutionarily programmed to hoard resources, and evolution has no foresight; we evolve in response to the past, and our genome is blind to the challenges of the future. That is where I hope our consciences will intervene, to preserve resources for future generations.
Average U.S. citizens are not as hard-pressed for potable water, building resources or living space as citizens of other countries. We believe ourselves to be distanced from nature. Why care about things like extinction? E.O. Wilson estimates extinction at three species per hour, 1,000 to 10,000 times faster than the fossil background extinction rate. The survival of an individual species may not worry you, but the preservation of biodiversity is crucial to the human race. We depend upon living organisms to nourish ourselves. Non-diverse populations of crops are more susceptible to disease and failure. Genetic diversity of our resources stands to determine the fate of humanity.
Environmentalism does not have to be a lofty, romantic cause - instead, it is an economic reality that must be addressed by policy-makers. We cannot deny our utter dependence upon the environment. With failed crop lands comes failed stock prices, with depleted oil supplies comes economic failure, with increases in pollutant-caused diseases comes a huge burden on our health care system. If for no other reasons than these, U.S. citizens should all be environmentalists.
Laura Martin '06 spent last semester studying abroad in Costa Rica.
