Today, a whole menagerie of harmful chemicals—toxic metals, gases and PCBs among them—form and are displaced as a result of daily human processes of production and consumption. Without proper care, these chemicals could slip into critical parts of the systems that sustain human life—air, water and food—in dangerous amounts. They could cause severe illness, disability or death. To prevent this, somebody needs to acknowledge the need for action and take up the burden themselves. It would make sense for whomever takes care of these by-products to be one of the entities with some role in creating them—either the producers or the consumers.
Unfortunately, humans don’t seem to be in consensus about whose responsibility this issue should be. And anybody familiar with human nature knows that in order for anything to get done, responsibility needs to be relegated. Until firm expectations are established—for corporations, or for the environmental lookout of local communities, or both—things are unlikely to change. Corporations will dump as much waste as they like wherever they like—if they are caught, they’ll pay their fines and be free to continue as before. The EPA will file lawsuits that drag on for years, jail none of the perpetrators and do nothing to prevent the same crimes from being committed over again.
So whose job is it to protect people from environmental abuses that could harm them? Corporations and most of the public continue to back away from the problem and point at each other. In some cases, the former doesn’t even acknowledge the damage and the danger—even, as Exxon Mobile did, taking steps to conceal it—to avoid legal repercussions. The latter lacks information, and cannot legally demand or allow anything except through the power vested in its elected authorities. This is why, unless corporations begin to take on the responsibilities of human beings as well as their rights, the task of protecting the people must fall to the government.
The government’s first duty is to serve the general welfare—to ensure, within its abilities and without unduly restricting freedom, that its people are safe and have what they need to live. Corporations tend to view their first responsibility as to their stockholders, hence their loyalty is to whatever practice maximizes profits. When the government fails to restrict the freedom of corporations, letting them fall into violations and cause disasters repeatedly, it fails at its duty. The public is too large and scattered to act as one body, for itself—it has no powers, and no information; it needs the government, and the government needs to acknowledge its duty and act decisively to carry it out. And the first thing it must do is legally outline and grant itself its full powers to protect the environment—and thus, its people. It could legitimize its jurisdiction by pointing out that air and water are common resources—they don’t obey state boundaries.
It’s natural for people to feel that they have a sort of duty to the groups they belong to. Everybody on this planet is a part of the greater community of mankind—but people tend to focus more on their duties towards their smaller, more exclusive groups. This is why corporations fail to change their way of thinking, year after year. Since their beginning, they have existed to maximize profits—all of their constituents take up roles and attitudes to this end. This is why we must turn to the government, until the day when people change their way of thinking—until all humans wake up to the fact that taking care of their home planet and their fellow human beings is synonymous to taking care of themselves.
