must save himself by Ritchie Calder Former Professor of International Relations, University of Edinburgh In the excavations of the Indus civili- zation of 5,000 years ago, the ruins of Mohenjo-Daro revealed the existence of booths where drinking-water was sold. Alongside were huge spoil-heaps of broken cups, far in excess of the ravages of the most careless dishwashers and evidence of a sanitary code: when some- one bought a drink of water, the crock was broken. That is what we call "hy- giene". Today, and every day, hundreds of millions of plastic containers, cans and non-returnable bottles are discarded. In the cities we call this "refuse"; in the countryside we call it "litter" ; and, in general, we call it "solid pollution". The largest kitchen-middens of neo- lithic man, accumulated over centuries, measure no more than a few thousand cubic metres. Any town big enough to have a mayor will produce that much refuse in a week. Four thousand years ago, the Minoan civilization was advanced in sanitation. Clean water was brought to the capital, Knossos, in pressure pipes; stone drains sealed with cement provided the sewer- age system; and dry refuse was deposi- ted in large pits outside the city, earth silos in which the wastes fermented into compost for manuring the fields. The Romans adopted the Minoan system. In A.D.lOO, nine great aqueducts, with a total length of 424 kilometres, brought water to Rome, and lead pipes carried it to one thousand public baths and to houses. The Aedile (the nearest approach to the borough engineer) could ride his state-barge along the main drain, the Cloaca Maxima, under the city to the Tiber. His scavengers, slaves and con- victs, shovelled the city's refuse, domes- tic and animal, through manholes to be flushed into the river and thence to the sea. Today, grave concern is expressed, with justification, about the pollution of the Mediterranean by untreated domes- <lA London boy wears a gas mask as protection against the stench of burning rubbish . The photograph was taken during the four-week refuse collectors' strike of 1971. tic and industrial sewage. In 1239, Henry Ill granted the first charter to the town of Newcastle-upon- Tyne to dig coal for the comfort and warmth of its citizens. By the time of Elizabeth I, "sea-coal" (from Newcastle) was already blackening London with soot. By the nineteenth century, fog, the notorious "pea-souper", was a charac- teristic of Dickens's London. In 1952, as many as 4,000 people died in one London smog and the best beef cattle in the country, paraded for the Smithfield Show, were killed off as if they had been attacked with poison gas. Something had to be done, and a Clean Air Act imposing smokeless zones (where only smokeless fuels could be used) enabled the public buildings of London to be scoured back to their pristine state. Meanwhile, Drake's Well had been drilled at Titusville, Pennsylvania, and the age of the internal combustion engine was on its way to unleash ill-corn- 3 busted hydrocarbons from automobile exhausts. Today, 6,000 million tons of carbon dioxide, ransacked from the geological vaults of coal and oil locked up tens of millions of years ago, are being vented into the atmosphere each year by chimney-stacks and automobile exhausts and jet-engines, to add an annual increment to the 360,000 million tons of carbon already released in the industrialization processes of the past century. This, in excess of natural amounts of carbon, is of something more than public health concern; it can materially affect the climate and the con- ditions in the biosphere on which all living things, inc:uding humans, depend for survival. When, however, we deplore man's interference with his environment, it has to be remembered that the survival of the species has depended on just that. The ancient cities that cradled the social evolution of Homo sapiens which we call "civilization" depended on irri- gation. In Egypt, in Mesopotamia, in the Indus valley, in Aral and in China, the management of water enabled the tillers to extend and intensify their pro- duction of surpluses to feed the artisans, the priests, the merchants, the scholars and the soldiers. When water manage- ment was neglected or abandoned, irri- gation systems collapsed into malarial swamps, as at Babylon, where Alexander the Great died of the fever in 320 B.C. in his thirty-third year. It was not until 2,260 years later that Homo sapiens found the means to con- trol malaria. He discovered DDT insec- ticide to destroy the vector mosquitos and saved hundreds of millions of his species from premature death. Today, in a world still beset by vector-borne disea- ses- malaria, Chagas' disease, plague, typhus, yellow fever, dengue, encepha- litis, filariasis, trypanosomiasis, oncho- cerciasis, etc.-DDT has been denoun- ced as a pollutant. Hundreds and thou- sands of miles away from sprayed houses and sprayed fields, it has been found in the flesh of antarctic penguins and in the food-chain of marine life. It has been blamed for ravaging wildlife. Severe restrictions have been put upon its use in advanced countries, which also supply insecticides to developing countries where the human population is still ravaged by the diseases that insecticides can check. These "cautionary tales" are histori- cal reminders that "environmental pol- lution" of which we are very properly, <J The Ergrikemer Aqueduct near Ankara was built in the 12th century . The supply line belo w runs between Istanbul's main water reservoir and the Kagithane treatment plant.
but perhaps belatedly, aware is a ques- tion of definition, dimension and deci- sion . Pollution is that which contributes to the deterioration of the environment. A propos of what? It can be planetary, continental, national,1local or a choked watercloset in a city tenement. It can be geophysical, for instance the "glasshouse effect" of carbon dioxide excess which could, it is asserted, melt the ice-caps, raise the levels of the seas and so change the fretwork of countries and continents, and radically alter our climate. It can interfere with the ecosystem of the biosphere and the oceans by introducing man-made factors which interrupt pho- tosynthesis, the biological process by which land and marine plants use the sun's rays to convert elements, in the soil or in suspension, into the carbohydrates and proteins indispensable to the food- chain of higher organisms including man. It can provide alien substitutes, analogues, which enter into the molecu- lar system of organisms and change their character, either directly so that they become deleterious to dependent orga- nisms including man, or genetically to produce mutations in the organisms themselves. These effects are part of our present (and emotive) awareness but are still imperfectly understood and call for much more research and evaluation. When we speak of" continental" pol- lution we are really talking about "transnational" pollution or saying that "pollution knows no boundaries", whe- ther it is airborne or waterborne. Pollu- tion from sulfur dioxide has been redu- ced at ground level in Britain but is airborne from high chimney-stacks to despoil the forests of Norway. Rivers common to several nations carry unwan- ted residues downstream, like rubbish thrown into the neighbour's backyard. When we speak of "national" pollution, we mean "What's the government going to do about it?" The present political response is to institutionalize the pro- blem in a Ministry, or Department, of the Environment. "Local" pollution is still considered the business of the public health department, whether or not it has powers to deal with air pollution and with that modern more-than-a-nuisance, noise pollution. And finally it is the business of the individual who contri- butes to pollution and suffers from it. Mount Etna (right) went on the rampage in 1971, pouring its deadly lava on the villages below and fouling the Sicilian air. A Texas oil well ( left) sprays 200 feet into the air and soaks the surrounding farmland. Man is not altogether helpless against nature, but can he control his own excesses?
I recall a conservation conference called (and quite rightly) to save the wild life of Africa. We had enthusiastically discussed the measures to protect the lions, the elephants, the hippopotami, the wildebeeste, the rhinos, etc. and their habitat until Sir Julian Huxley, that dedicated conservationist, was constrai- ned to remind us, "Gentlemen, gentle- men! Remember that human beings are also part of the ecology." The human species, with all its faults, needed con- serving too! Which brings us to the question of dimensions. Throughout the millenia, volcanoes and seismic vents have erupted contaminants into our atmosphere. Earthquakes have rifted oil-domes and released oil and natural gas into the environment. The rivers, with their effec- tive method of hydraulic mining, have scoured out mercury, lead, tin, copper and sulfur into the living waters on which biological systems depend. Nature has produced a tolerance in excess of which such metallic elements are toxic or lethal. What we are worrying about today are the man-made excesses which are a function of our ingenuity and survival rate. The copper miners of ancient Cyprus, whose wastes are found in the sediments of the eastern Mediterranean, did no great harm to the ecosystem. Nor (apart from the effects on themselves) did the Roman and Iberian producers of quick- silver. Italy and Spain today produce about half of the 9,000 tons of mercury which the world (outside China and the Soviet Union) uses each year. But it is not their workings, nor broken ther- mometers, that have produced the pre- sent concern about high concentrations of mercury in fish for human consump- tion. Particular blame for this is attribu- ted to papermaking. Mercury was intro- duced as a fungicide to destroy the slimes which interfere with the paper manufacturing process. It also enters into the making of caustic soda, which is used in pulping and bleaching newsprint. Furthermore, wood pulp is an avid absor- ber and concentrator of mercury from the vast quantities of water which are used in papermaking. Mercury gets into the effluent of papermills and is also released in the smoke from burning paper. In addition, it is used in pestici- des for agriculture. According to FAO, the world use of mercury-containing pesticide in the period 1948-1967 was 52,946 tons. Because technology con- trived to meet the needs of thousands of millions of people for newsprint and for food, there is more mercury in certain species of fish that people eat. If multiplying people want multiplying cars, then you have 250,000-ton oil- tankers and the risks of collisions and oil-pollution. If hundreds of millions of people want more lather in their laundry, then drains and rivers and sewage works will froth with mineral detergents that natural biological processes cannot de- grade. If they want plastics, then they are likely to have fumes and effluents and end-products that will persist becau- se they bamboozle nature, and so on , and so on. If firms want quick profits and people are greedy for products they 3 never knew they needed, then industry will take short-cuts and jettison as waste what they do not want. They vent that waste to the leeward or push it down- stream or disfigure the countryside with slag heaps and cesspits. Prevention of pollution is a matter of money. If the price does not go on the product, the tab has to be picked up as a social cost. This has been the bone of contention in all attempts to regulate pollution . Industrial concerns say "If you impose those precautionary charges on us, you will price us out of the market because our competitors abroad are not under such restrictions." Indeed there should be internationally enfor- ceable standards. We have built inter- national safeguards into industrial ato- mic energy so that they are the first cost that every operator has to meet and one that is common to his competitors everywhere in the world. People have grasped the idea of "Spaceship Earth", an encapsulated planet within whose confines man and his fellow lodgers- the beasts and even the bugs- have to live together. If we foul up that living space, vitiate the atmos- phere, poison the waters, restrict our food-rations, tamper with the heating system and wallow in the excrement, domestic and industrial, our tenancy will be limited. We can irreversibly damage the biosphere on which all life depends. This awareness has still to be quanti- fied. We do not know enough about the geophysical effects, nor the geobiological effects, nor the global ecological effects. The problems have been sensitized by 4 popular reaction, now highly emotive, but we need monitoring and evaluation to give us the facts and guidelines for decision making. Many scientific disciplines and many international organizations are involved in finding answers and defining safe- guards. The role of the World Health Organization is obvious. It is concerned with the human environment. Millenia before WHO existe.d, what we now call "pollution" was recognized in the sani- tary ordinances of the earliest cities. Thousands of years ago there were the consequences of overpopulation (con- gestion within the city walls) , slum conditions, infections and contagions, water and sewage problems and, how- ever inadequate by our better-informed standards, measures to moderate them. The Old Testament is full of sanitary by- laws. The whole history of public health is an account, at local , national <;~.nd eventually international levels, of efforts to prevent or correct the effects of degradation of the environment and the resulting health hazards. With the creation of the World Health Organization, these efforts acquired a global dimension. From its inception, environmental health was put on an equal footing with the eye-catching cam- paigns to control infections, contagions and vector-borne diseases for which medical science and the pharmaceutical industry had provided the means. But sanitation and public health engineering directed at environmental factors res- ponsible for massive mortality (e .g. gas- tro-intestinal diseases) did not ring bells until pollution became a tocsin-word. Sanitation in urban and rural areas is still in the front line of WHO's action because that is where pollution is a life or death issue for today's people. But WHO is also concerned with posterity, with the quality of life and with the conditions of living of which morbidity and mortality rates are a reproachful reminder. This concern with the well- being of the human race extends beyond environmental sanitation to the whole human environment which is threatened by degradation. That degradation involves the air we breathe ; the water we drink or bathe in ; the soil when its contamination consti- tutes a health hazard ; the impairment of recreational facilities, which are the es- cape hatches from the stresses of modern ,life; the defiling of shores and estuaries; the possible insidious effects of radiation and chemical mutants which , on the scale of modern industry, are likely to be present in the environment however conscientious the safeguards. 10 Tens of thousands of new chemical compounds, artefacts, are produced ev- ery year for one purpose or another. If they are pharmaceuticals or food addi- tives or substances such as pesticides, herbicides or fertilizers about which the public is sensitive, they may be subject to careful scrutiny before being released on the market. But they may not come within that range. They may be indus- trial products which in their commercial use present no apparent hazards to health but in their preparation for dispo- sal or final break-up as refuse, or through their fumes or effluents, may release unnatural molecules into the environment. This has been true of many types of plastics and there is an unholy alliance between oil and DDT which can produce a tough toxic film on water. The trouble is that until some- thing serious happens to produce an outcry such hazards go unidentified and their pathways untraced. There is a need for identification and control - an early warning system. Increasingly, noise is becoming a ma- jor pollutant. It may be just a distraction and a nuisance but under modern con- ditions of road and air transport it is becoming an assault upon the senses. The stresses which it imposes upon the hearing and the nervous system are as much a health concern as smoke from chimneys or bad drains or contaminated water. Noise abatement is always a matter of compromise between technical progress and human reactions- permis- sible levels are a matter of monitoring and evaluation , and must be established before noise can be curtailed by legisla- tion. The effects of environmental pollution and environmental degradation are al- ways heightened by urbanization and particularly by the confluence of one city with another in a vast urban sprawl. There the degradation of the environ- ment manifests itself in the degradation of the individual. Human dignity, let alone health, is hard to sustain in slum conditions, where streets are congested and noisy and where amenities are lacking. In the absence of escape- hatches, people are liable to take to drink, drugs and violence. Despair is also a "pollutant". When pollution affronts the senses as smog, stinking drains, rotting garbage, fouled-up water and screaming jet planes; when rivers foam and lakes die and no birds sing; when oil-slicks lap the beaches and when the country-side is disfigured by the litter of millions or the dumping of city garbage, then it is pretty obvious that something must be done. But there are more insidious, more pervading pollutants from more elusive sources. They have to be identified, measured and understood before action , local or international, can be taken. The what, the whence, and what-to-do-about- it can only be determined by monitoring, surveillance and codes of practice. That, like the epidemiology which made it possible to understand and control pesti- lences, can only be realized at interna- tional level. Pollution too, is epidemic and epidemiological methods are appli- cable. Pollution is a crime compounded of avarice and ignorance. It stems from the greed not only of the industrialist seek- ing the quick buck but of the customer who wants lots of things on the cheap, regardless of the social costs. He then becomes the "public" protesting about pollution. Ignorance is no excuse. We cannot pretend nowadays not to under- stand that our total environment and, within it, our human environment are in peril. But ignorance is relative. There is so much to learn about how the pollu- tants are transported by air , water, etc., about their nature and their harmful effects, and about ways of controlling them. That means monitoring on a world scale, evaluating the findings, identifying the pollutants and studying their physical, chemical and biological behaviour, establishing international standards about what is permissible and what is not, providing guidelines for those who have to act and enforceable codes of conduct for those who have to be constrained. This is a world problem, affecting all mankind. Only by inter-disciplinary and international means can the answers be found and the measures applied. Homo sapiens, Thinking Man, must come to the rescue of Homo insipiens, Unthinking Man. •