…An Environmental Blog

By Bart B. Sokolow barts@techstuff.com   If we are to survive, we must make compromises–but I don’t mean compromises with the environment.  It has proven to be flexible and will adjust to our continuing assaults.   I read environment to mean jobs.  Jobs can be created by reliance on new techniques to utilize the latest breakthroughs or, jobs can be lost as streams die and waterfowl land elsewhere and irrigation water becomes useless I also read environment to mean money.  Lots of money. For everyone.  Where’s my crystal ball?  Apparently, safely hidden away in the future. The clarity that allows us to identify, touch and smell environmental ills has given us the unrealistic expectation that we can also purge them–permanently.   While the dilemmas may seem clear—blatant black hats versus white hats—the pathway to correcting environmental issues is perplexing.  It is both a road less traveled and simultaneously, deeply rutted by remnants of our past transgressions.  The environmental soup we eat, breathe and drink has left its mark over many years. This soup combines our exposure from various industrial, commercial and combustion processes.   The impacts from these processes have never been easy to define, delineate or describe.   Recent efforts to identify environmental issues have clearly overrun our ability to resolve and correct environmental problems.  Our understanding is developed through experience and basic research into implications of natural phenomena. Brute force alone will not take win the day.  There is no short cut in science.  Society’s reaction to our increasing knowledge takes place in an arena that could never be characterized as a level playing field. At one extreme, we have simple reflexive responses, like weekly garbage sorting of recyclables for garbage collection, community recycling centers for aluminum, and paper drives to save trees.  These efforts are important and pragmatic but must be perceived as treating symptoms of a larger problem.  These are environmental band-aids — not everlasting cures.   One another front, we still are not sure how to clean up the photochemical air pollution in major cities.  Oh yes, we could prevent every car’s internal combustion engine from operating.  Yet, we’re still not really sure how to affect the complex chemical interactions that encourage the production of photochemical smog. We haven’t adequately applied model cleanup scenarios, and short of closing everything down, how to economically eliminate smog.   The time may be right for a reassessment of another 1970’s dicta:  Envi­ronmental awareness means close scrutiny that begets legislative initiatives. Water quality and air quality experts are, for example, slowly coming to terms with the ongoing barriers to clean air and water;  but you thought that’s what they were always doing?  These efforts at basic research should not be underestimated, nor should their substantial accomplishments.  It should be realized, that it is the application of these results that we—that is, society—considers to be the litmus test of progress. Yet a review of where we came from pales in the glare of where we could be going.  Given the rolling inertia of current events, idealism has given way to the conservative wisdom of lawsuits, town meetings, and corporate public relations. Then there is the simple realization that we are running out of some very precious commodities, necessary to any life, not just our way of life, or lifestyle. The environmental aspects of everything have infiltrated our lives.  Its not something just talked about in academic circles or in rare quotes from the New England Journal of Medicine.  Dock workers are concerned about the nature of cargo; next day delivery services fret over “what is that package with the yucky smell over there” …and computer users are concerned about the effects from viewing their video screens for long periods of time. While these issues may have been caused by our technology driven world, other more global issues have finally surfaced.  The technology continues to allow us to see deeper and more selectively than ever before.   With the instantaneous spread of news, peer reviewed scientific journals, once the time tried conduit for discussion of scientific discoveries among professionals, have become the court of last resort for newsworthy advances.  A breaking story on AIDS treatment is now more apt to open the 11 pm news, than be featured or simply noted in Nature or the AMA Journal.   Yet, the data is not always the right salve appropriately applied to the wound. Oil drilling off the coast of California is a case in point.  The Santa Bar­bara oil spill of the 1970’s precipitated early warning systems to contain water borne oil spills.  Greater caution and care have been exercised, with mixed re­sults.  Oil drilling in coastal waters now raised everyone’s awareness of potential disaster. However, this awareness could not stop the natural oil seeps that occur off the California coast of Summerland, Montecito and Santa Barbara.  These oil seeps have been occurring for decades; they were not manmade. Environmental issues are pervasive, hard to pin down, and affect us all.  They cannot be separated from life, living or business. Environmental problems are amorphous in scope.  Yet, looming public health disasters from airborne diseases, or, natural events like hurricane shake up the collective corporate and civilian mentality.  The wagon is now broken and in need of fixing. The original regulatory fix that would assign corporate responsibility for American business was the federal Superfund law, CERCLA, or, The Comprehensive Environmental Respon­se Compensation Liability Act.  The initial cost for cleaning up America was put at $6 bil­lion dollars in 1985.  The current estimate for CERCLA is $100 billion+ in current dollars and still growing. We ain’t done yet. …questions or comments? we’d love to hear from you.