I've always had some environmentalist proclivities, but they were pretty staid and ordinary. Preferring to recycle, valuing fuel efficiency, saving electricity, etc. But since my trip to China my concern for the state of the environment seems to have drastically deepened, particularly with respect to air and water pollution. We aren't talking about simple littering, or even the problems manifest in creating a gigantic pile of garbage in a landfill somewhere. We are talking about the destruction of the fundamental pillars of life on earth. Without clean air and clean water, we cannot survive, and yet mankind is blithely forging full-steam ahead to pollute both.
My time in China made me realize how a little bit of pollution in one place can so heavily impact another. And it's insidious, because it's very hard to see the impact a particular bit of pollution has. With littering you can see the garbage. You know it's your trash, and you know it's your mess you created. And for the most part it's confined within one place. With air pollution, though, it's hard to imagine that your little car could be making a difference. Or even your little smokestack, especially if the gas it belches into the sky is clear. Anyway, it's a big sky up there. So what if a little pollution gets into it?
The same thing happens with water. Your sink is small. Your bathtub is small. The glass of water that you pour is small, and if there's dirt in any of it you'll know. But the river is big, and the ocean it runs into even bigger. The filth you would never think to drink surely will just get lost in the vastness of the world's waters, so why not pour it in? Who's going to notice?
Until you go to someplace like China, an increasingly modern place with fancy modern buildings with fancy modern plumbing and kitchens, and you start to realize all the things you can't eat unless you cook them in a certain way or rinse them in special and expensive water that doesn't come through the taps. Or maybe not eat at all, given the time your food has spent in filthy waters, absorbing into its cells the poison you would never have poured into your glass.
The biggest problem with pollution is the mindset of polluters - out-of-sight, out-of-mind. Because it is too easy for that to happen. Maybe less so in a place like China where the consequences of pollution are so overt - the choking air, the putrid, black rivers... In the U.S. things are a little better, but that may just raise the risk of them becoming much worse. Why not dump the oil you change into the storm sewer? So what if it flows to the Bay. It's a big bay - who's going to notice?
Well, how about the people with the water right outside their window?
(I also noticed the kitchen sink that washed up behind the house too.)
