Yesterday I found an old book that I picked up in college, called “Problems of an Industrial Society.”
As you can imagine, it’s a fun read.
Written in the 60s and updated in 1981, the book recalls a kinder, happier time when humankind as a whole did not yet fully grasp how truly f*cked we were as far as the whole global warming/pollution thing.
It also highlighted a classification system for environmental problems (proposed by T. C. Sinclair). The system is as follows:
Class 1 in which the amenities and aesthetic qualities of life are violated.
Class 2 in which there is injury or death to individuals from environmental contamination.
Class 3 in which whole species are threatened with extinction from disturbances of ecological inter-relationships.
Class 4 in which fundamental cycles in the biologic pyramid and its natural environment are distorted or destroyed to such a degree that life for whole series of living forms becomes impossible over wide areas and possibly over the globe as a whole.
This brings up an important point that is often overlooked in the debate about global warming, pollution, and the rhetoric surrounding environmental protection: It's not just about the polar bears. What we do to the environment has an impact on our whole quality of life. What's more, many of these changes are long-term to the extent which they're almost permanent ("irreversible in my lifetime" = "permanent" to me).
I’ve wanted for some time to talk about the “hidden costs of global warming and pollution,” so here it is:
THE HIDDEN COSTS OF GLOBAL WARMING AND POLLUTION (arranged in order of the Sinclair classification system)
Class 1
Ugliness – Think about it.. LA smog isn’t as lethal as the smoke in London from the 1950s, but it isn’t pretty. Glacier National Park may soon be sans-glaciers. I don’t even want to talk about the aesthetic qualities of having 58,000 gallons of fuel oil spilled only a couple of miles away from my house.
Smell – Higher temperatures for longer period of time means more bacteria hanging around. More bacteria = more bad smells. All you have to do is walk down Mission Street between 16th and 19th to know get a whiff of what we’re all in for. I have smelled the future, and it is stinky.
Class 2
Crime – What, you don’t believe there’s a relationship between global warming and crime? There is. It may not be provable as a cause-and-effect relationship (yet), but just read this (and while you’re thinking about it, do you really think Iraq would be so violent if it had the ambient temperature of Hammerfest, Norway?).
MRSA. Fast facts: Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus kills more people each year than AIDS, emphysema, or homicide. West Nile Virus, which can lead to encephalitis and death, is expanding ever northward in the face of warmer temperatures. The threat of encephalitis – it's enough to make your head hurt.
Drought – Not a problem... unless you're in Georgia.
Class 3
Extinctions – There’s still time… for some.
Class 4
In the 1980 printing of Problems of an Industrial Society, the authors state that there have had been no instances of places where biological systems had been fundamentally disrupted. They mention that there was no data on how much pollution the ocean could sustain until this point was reached. Sadly, in some areas, the line has already been crossed. Only time will tell whether we’ll be able to reverse the damage to the environmental systems that we still depend on for our very existence.
That was depressing. Next time, I’m going to write about something fun.
