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Response 3: Reva McAulay

Posted on September 24, 2012 by Reva

Reva McAulay

MHC 200 Weekly Write-up #3

9.24.12

The EPA is apparently a bunch of spineless wimps. Now admittedly they have huge corporations and even lots of politicians against them on the grounds that their policies interfere with economic growth but still.  I’m not even saying that they need to create more stringent regulations, although I think they should.  But when a government organization imposes such lax punishments on people who blatantly flaunt the rules and outright forge lab tests, that qualifies them as a bunch of spineless wimps.  It seemed bad enough last week that Gen Electric got to avoid cleaning up the river for decades, but at least that could charitably be considered some sort of due process.  Exxon Mobil did it one further by not only ignoring the law but by getting caught ignoring it several times and then forging test data to get around it.  The punishment for which was a relatively small fine that meant nothing to a corporation the size of Exxon Mobil and was probably less than the profits that came from the illegal act in the first place.

The EPA’s reaction to the first time they saw Exxon Mobil cleaning barges in Arthur Kill was reasonable: inform the company that they would have to stop.  The next time they caught them doing it should have resulted in a significant fine on top of having all the profits from the barge cleaning taken away.  The third time should have resulted in much larger fines, ideally in addition to fines and citations for the individuals responsible for running that operation. And the fraudulant lab tests should have gotten criminal charges for the people who ordered them and actually changed them and fines for everyone else who knew about it.

Yeah, its taking a hard line on it, but the EPA has so little power and authority that they have to take a hard line if anyone is to be reasonably expected to follow regulations.   There are dozens of laws out there that people don’t follow because they are so unenforced as to seem that it is almost encouraged to break them.  Say, for example, jaywalking (at least in New York City).  There’s no risk to jaywalking, and even if you do it in front of a police officer they won’t so much as tell you not to do it.  All of this makes it so that there’s nothing wrong with jaywalking on either a practical level or a moral level.  If the EPA does not enforce its own regulations, it almost seems like it is encouraging people to ignore them.  What moral imperative is there to follow the law if the law makers think it is so unimportant as to not even be worth taking action against?

One question remaining is where such barge cleaning operations should happen.  There hardly seems a safe place for these chemicals to be released.  The one ongoing point of uncertainty in this class is what exactly should be done with hazardous wastes, since we’ve seen so many examples of what should not be done.

The study of lead in Central Park lake was more interesting but less ire-inducing, so it goes last.  Although having to wait to find out the cause of the lead levels is about as annoying as finding the last chapter of a mystery ripped out and having to go back to the library to track down another copy.  The example of leaded/unleaded gasoline is I think a good example of why it is better to err on the side of caution when it comes to environmental policies.  Scientists discovered that lead in the air had a negative effect on health, so policy-makes decided to eliminate what seemed like a large source of lead: leaded gasoline.  That unleaded gasoline did not actually improve air quality is not so important when seen from the future perspective that the economy recovered quite well from switching to unleaded gasoline.  Although it probably hurt the US auto industry, they would have run into other troubles anyway, probably sooner rather than later.  That is a much better outcome than would have happened if leaded gasoline did turn out to be dangerous but continued to be used anyway.  If the government decides to wait for incontrovertible truth on every public health or environmental issue, there will be even less progress than there is now (which is very little).  At some point they just have to decide that the risks of doing nothing outweigh the consequences of action.  Otherwise you end up with results like the one we learned about last week, with General Electric spending years arguing that the high levels of dangerous chemicals weren’t their fault, and that even if it was it wouldn’t be their responsibility to fix it, and even if it was there wasn’t anything they could do so the best course of action would to do nothing and allow the environment to fix itself.

 

Weekly Writeup 2: Reva McAulay

Posted on September 20, 2012 by Reva

Lots of water pollution.  Slightly terrifying when you think about how nice and important it is to have clean and good-tasting tap water for free.  Also not to have to be scared of swimming in any body of water you come across.  Guanabera Bay is horrid and its hard to believe any government, national or city, could let it get that bad (then again, my mother has said that to me, so I know it happens).  Unfortunately, it seems to be a decision entirely motivated by money, because what else is new? In a way, this case is slightly more understandable, due to the extremely large amount of money and effort it would take to clean up the bay.  I’m assuming using the bay as a dump for everything dates back to the days when Rio’s population was small enough for the bay to dilute and wash away everything.

Now the problem has become paralyzing, with too many issues for any one change to seem relevant.  They would need a new sewage treatment plant.  Factories would need to come up either with ways to treat their hazardous wastes, ways to produce without them, or other places to dump them.  Somebody would get the headache of trying to come up with a way of regulating boating without impeding anyone’s life or business.  Underground storage tanks and landfills would need to be re-done or at least fixed.  And then there would be a long wait for the bay to clean itself, unless someone was willing to do the heavy lifting.  On the one hand, its sad that the only hope for the government to be motivated to clean the bay is the World Cup and Olympics.  On the other hand: shhhhh, don’t say anything.  As long as they do it.

The problems in New York State are a bit closer to home and therefore even scarier, even though they are luckily less overwhelming.  The EPA set awesome goals for the bodies of water surrounding New York City, and I have to admit they’ve done a relatively decent job.  At the very least, the water is cleaner than its been in a very long time.  It’s still not great, but hey, I swam in the East River as a kid and I’ve never turned any funny colors.  RCRA (1976!) was a good plan for the time, and the Hazardous Waste Management Program (1984!) was an improvement provided they kept up with the RCRA policies.

In regards to ecosystem approach versus chemical-specific approach, I don’t see why both shouldn’t be used concurrently for all substances.  Kind of a whichever-comes-first approach.

Now for PCBs, I take the view that the original incident was just an unfortunate but relatively blameless accident.  We still dump things into bodies of water thinking they are harmless, and we certainly couldn’t expect the company to know the harms of PCB’s in the 1940’s (unless they did know).  The serious problem was the delay between discovering the problems of PCB’s and cleaning them out.  It took not only an EPA injunction but several decades and trials to accomplish anything, and GE is still dragging their feet.  There needs to be some kind of mechanism to prevent this.  For instance, the company could have a limited amount of time to complete one appeal before beginning cleanup on a mutually arbitrated schedule, during which they could continue to appeal.  Or better yet: if the EPA is confident enough that they are right, they could begin cleanup immediately, and pay for it themselves if the company wins the appeal.

I have no opinion on the small Texas toxic waste town.  That is obviously a work of fiction.

Week 1 Response: Reva McAulay

Posted on September 9, 2012 by Reva

Before I start my actual essay, I’d like to say one non-essay like thing to the class.  Namely: Y’all need to stop hating on bats.  Seriously.  Mosquitos I get, but bats are entirely harmless and hugely beneficial both to basically every ecosystem they live in and directly to humans.  There are basically three types of bats: the nectar drinking ones (that pollinate plants), the fruit eating ones (that spread seeds), and the carnivorous ones (that consume enormous numbers of insects, including pests that destroy crops.

In any case, essay time.

The difference between deep and shallow ecology, and whether one should value nature for its intrinsic or extrinsic properties is very interesting, but at this point it really does not matter.  Deep ecology might well be better for the environment in the long run, but right now I’d settle for any type of ecology.  Especially if you consider some of the less obvious utilities of nature, the difference between the two is not necessarily so distinct.  Rainforests should be left all but untouched due to the immense number of possible very useful species living there.  In effect its an unmanned chemistry lab, where if we leave it alone to do its own thing it can come up with the solution to so many of our problems.  It will even go a long way to regulating the environment for us, as huge wooded areas tend to do—filtering air and water, absorbing heat and sunlight, and regulating climate.  The best thing we can do is protect it and occasionally send in scientists to explore and find useful organisms.  If you consider the aesthetic and recreational properties of nature to be useful you get an imperative to preserve large areas of various environments, as in the National Parks system.

Beyond preservation, shallow ecology and extrinsic interests encourage the use of alternative, renewable energy sources, the reduction of all types of pollution, and the reduction of and sensible disposal of waste as much as deep ecology does.  Once all those things are accomplished, maybe then it will be the time to sit down and think about whether we need to take a deep ecology approach, but until then it’s a purely philosophical debate.

The question of whether deep ecology should be subscribed to, or whether it even exists, is complicated by large fuzzy animals.  Most people might not think insects or plants have their own rights to life, but they might think that dogs or pandas do.  And while dogs bring us companionship and fun, the vast majority of people will never see a panda in the wild.  From a shallow ecological standpoint, wild pandas are really not that important, making this a case where there is an actual difference between deep and shallow ecology.

The discussion about whether mosquitos should be wiped off the face of the Earth was also very interesting.  Nobody in the class seemed to take a deep ecological approach on that one—nobody voiced the opinion that mosquitos should be allowed to live for their own sake.  A number of people, on the other hand, suggested that maybe we would be better off without mosquitos.  Get rid of the annoyance; stop the disease, and whatnot.  That seems like a far too risky move to me, because while scientists may believe the ecosystems could survive without mosquitos they have no proof.  It’s just conjecture, and eliminating a species is too big an action to take without evidence.  Whether it’s a machine or a living thing, if you don’t fully understand it it’s best not to take pieces out.  Especially as in this case where it is impossible to put a piece back in once it’s been removed.  As with the cloud-inducing plankton, things can have uses we have no idea about.  When looking at an entire ecosystem, that is amplified even further.  Mosquitos might have no direct impact on the environment, but they could have unknown, possibly unnoticeable effects on other organisms, and so on until the effects of effects affect something we do notice.

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