POLLUTION

Most often used in regard to the natural environment, the term pollute means to make foul or unclean, degrade ecological and/or human health, contaminate or defile, and, in a religious sense, render ceremonially impure or desecrate. The verb pollute derives from the Middle English polute, and this from the Latin poll?t(us), the past participle of polluere, which meant to soil, defile. Pollution generally denotes an undesirable condition, where there is too much of something (the pollutant or contaminant) in a natural or other beneficial system. It is, then, not an objectively determined state of affairs. Rather decisions about pollution require both science (for example, identification, monitoring, and classification) and ethics and politics (such as debate about what is undesirable, what is acceptable, who should monitor pollutants, and who should be held accountable). Although pollution is, in a sense, an unavoidable byproduct of human (and nonhuman) activity, it was not until the Industrial Revolution that it regularly occurred on a large-scale and became a public policy issue.

Measures have been taken to curb pollution, especially the public health activities in the 1800s and then again with the rise of the contemporary environmental movement in the 1960s. Largely due to political and economic incentives and advances in technology, many pollutants are declining. In several regions, however, pollution remains a serious problem threatening both human and environmental health. Pollution has long been seen as the most visible and costly reminder of a downside to the technological mastery of nature. The use of technologies to prevent and diminish pollution, however, may eventually eliminate this particular cause for technological pessimism.

Classifying and Describing Pollution

Environmental pollution can be either point source (such as emissions from factory smokestacks) or non-point source (for example, fertilizers and oil washed from lawns and parking lots into streams). It can occur suddenly, as in the massive radioactive plume released from a nuclear power plant in Chernobyl in 1986 or the 1.26 million barrels of oil spilled into Prince William Sound, Alaska, by the Exxon Valdez in 1989. However pollution usually stems from long-term emissions, as in the accumulation of carbon dioxide (CO₂) in the atmosphere resulting from fossil fuel combustion. Although most pollution is anthropogenic (human caused), some forms are naturally occurring. One example is radon gas that leaks from rocks into buildings and accounts for roughly 55 percent of the total radiation dose received by an average person in the United States. Anthropogenic and nonanthropogenic sources of pollution can also combine to produce deleterious environmental and health effects. One example is the combination of human-produced chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and naturally occurring ultraviolet radiation in the stratosphere, which initiates a reaction that depletes ozone. The methane gas produced by cows (and other farm animals) accounts for roughly 20 percent of all such global emissions. Although this is a natural source of pollution, the vast quantity of these animals would not exist without humans.

Any compound can be considered a pollutant if it is judged to exist either in excessive quantities or in the wrong place. For example, ozone in the stratosphere is regarded as beneficial, whereas ozone in the troposphere (the lowest layer of the atmosphere) is regarded as a pollutant because it contributes to smog, which causes harmful ecological, human health, and aesthetic effects. This is akin to exotic species, which can be considered pollutants, because they are located outside the boundaries of the area in which they evolved.

Pollution can be classified by economic sector (such as residential, industry, agriculture, transportation, and others), which can be helpful for regional governments implementing pollution reduction policies, but the relative contribution of each source varies markedly depending on the composition of regional economies. A more universalizable classificatory scheme groups pollutants according to the reservoir in which they are found: water, soil, air, and space. More detailed cataloging can then be carried out. Water pollution, for example, is typically sorted by type, including biological/pathogens, sedimentation, nutrients, toxic synthetic chemicals, and heat/cold. Water quality indicators include hardness (a measure of dissolved minerals), pH, temperature, dissolved oxygen, turbidity, and smell. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has set national air quality standards based on six common (referred to as criteria) air pollutants: ozone, nitrogen dioxide, sulfur dioxide, particulate matter, carbon monoxide, and lead. Pollution in space (scraps from old satellites, rockets, or other spacecraft) is generally classified by size. The vast majority of the hundreds of thousands of human-produced particles in space are between one and ten centimeters in diameter, but even these small pieces have caused massive damage to satellites. Not included in the above list, but worthy of mention, is indoor air pollution (especially caused by smoking and the use of wood or coal-burning stoves), which poses grave health risks. Noise and even drugs can be considered pollutants insofar as they can have deleterious effects on the well-being of humans and other animals.

The severity of a pollutant depends upon its chemical nature, concentration, and persistence. One important equation used by environmental scientists to understand pollution derives from biogeochemical cycling: Residence time = Reservoir size/Sum of all fluxes (in or out of the reservoir). A reservoir is simply any "compartment" that can serve as a storage place for pollutants. Examples include the ocean, atmosphere, and biosphere. Reservoirs can be defined more precisely depending on the pollutant or other compound of interest. For example, scientists interested in particulate organic carbon may choose to focus only on the upper ocean (where the majority of carbon is located). Flux refers to the rate at which the pollutant (or other compound of interest) moves in and out of the reservoir. Residence time is how long the pollutant stays in the reservoir of interest. CO₂, for instance, has a long residence time in the atmosphere, such that even if all emissions were immediately stopped, CO₂ levels would drop only very slowly. Sulfur dioxide (SO₂), by contrast, is water soluble, and because water has a relatively short residence time in the atmosphere (less than five days), SO₂ will quickly precipitate out.

This explains why CO₂ emissions pose problems on a global scale (because it stays in the atmosphere long enough to thoroughly mix around the globe), whereas SO₂ emissions pose problems on a regional scale (because it will precipitate out of the atmosphere somewhere within five days downwind of the source). The equation also helps explain why groundwater pollution is so much more difficult to clean up than surface water pollution. Groundwater aquifers have very low fluxes, meaning residence times for pollutants are quite high. Surface water systems, for the most part, have high fluxes, meaning that pollutants can be quickly flushed through the system.

Ethics and Deciding How Much is Too Much

Classifying and describing the behavior of pollutants in natural systems still leaves many questions unanswered, including: How much pollution should be allowed? What should count as pollution? How should societies determine the relative values of risks to people's health and other matters of concern (for example, ecosystem integrity and aesthetics), or, how should they determine when there is too much of something, thus turning simple presence into pollution?

Pollution may result in injustice, because its effects can be disproportionately suffered by the poor. For example, poor people can often only afford to live in neighborhoods that are crowded with polluting industries, yet they seldom have the resources to challenge polluters in the court system (the Erin Brockovich case is an exception to this rule). Similarly global climate change resulting from CO₂ emissions (significantly produced by wealthy nations) may have the most devastating impacts on poor nations unable to adapt to rising sea levels and other effects. Welfare economists conceptualize pollution as a problem of establishing the proper costs so that its effects are fairly distributed.

Despite these injustices and the more general detrimental effects of pollution, several economic theorists and philosophers have made a strong case that the proper reaction is not to eliminate pollution, but rather find the optimal amount of pollution. Julian Simon (1981) and his successor Bjørn Lomborg (1998) argue that economics correctly views pollution as a trade-off between cost and cleanliness. This has two main implications. First, the goal is not pristine, pollution-free environments, but rather an environment that is optimally clean in the sense that, at this point, citizens would rather pay for some other service or good than more pollution abatement (this is the willingness-to-pay criterion for determining optimal pollution). Second, measuring the goal of optimal pollution would best be accomplished by some metric of human welfare such as life expectancy.

Both Lomborg and Simon argue that pollution does not undermine human well-being in the long run. Although air pollution continues to worsen in developing nations, they are just making the same trade-offs that developed nations did during the Industrial Revolution. Indeed, as Lomborg (1998) states, "the environment and economic prosperity are not opposing entities: without adequate environmental protection, growth is undermined, but environmental protection is unaffordable without growth" (p. 210). Thus following the path of developed nations, as the developing world achieves higher levels of income, it will choose and be able to afford an ever cleaner environment.

William Baxter (1974) echoes Simon and Lomborg by contending that only humans should count in the calculus of determining optimal pollution. This does not mean that other species will be wantonly destroyed, he maintains, because humans both depend on them and enjoy them for aesthetic and recreational reasons. It does mean, however, that the claim "DDT use is damaging penguin populations" does not automatically mean that people must stop the use of DDT. In order for this result to follow, Baxter claims that it must be shown that the well-being of people would be less impaired by discontinuing the use of DDT than by harming penguins. This conclusion is rejected by theorists such as Aldo Leopold (1949), who argued that humans must take the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community directly into account when making decisions that impact the environment. Indeed perspectives and values play an enormous role in how one perceives pollution and the state of the planet. For example, the controversies aroused by the works of Simon and Lomborg show that measuring pollution is as much a political as a technical endeavor.

From a traditional economic standpoint, pollution can be classified as an externality, that is, an unintended and unaccounted for spillover effect on an unconsenting third party. A good example is industrial activities in the Midwestern United States leading to acid rain in the Northeastern United States and Canada. This definition logically leads to attempts to fix market failures (instances where not all costs are appropriately taken into account). Thus environmental economists attempt to quantify the costs of pollution and integrate them into market transactions. Many models use the willingness-to-pay criterion or cost-benefit analyses to establish these costs. The philosopher Mark Sagoff (1988) argued this form of economics and its narrow notion of physical spillover would not rule out many projects or policies that might seem appalling, for example, the attempted conversion of Mineral King Valley in California into a Disney resort. Such a narrow notion leaves no room for many aesthetic and ethical values.

This led economists, especially since the 1970s, to replace the notion of physical spillover with that of transaction or bargaining cost in evaluating the efficiency of a project or a policy concerning pollution. The focus was thereby widened to cover any unpriced benefit or cost (that is, anything a person might be willing to pay for) even if markets do not typically price it correctly. However, as Sagoff also argues, if the wider, more recent notion of transaction or bargaining cost is used, then economic calculations establish policy goals, in the process reducing factual, moral, and aesthetic judgments to mere preferences. But economists have replied that these economic analyses are assessment tools, not decision-making mechanisms. Whatever method of analysis, policymakers need information and tools that will allow them to examine more explicitly and precisely, whether quantitatively or qualitatively, what those affected value about their programs, and how the value of these programs can be assessed. Even if cost-benefit analysis and willingness-to-pay are inadequate, the question remains: How to value?

Sagoff argues that traditional economic methods for determining optimal pollution are insufficient because they place individuals in the role of mere consumers or bidders. Instead he claims each individual should play the role of citizen or trustee of one's own and others' health and well-being. On this view, questions should aim to determine not what individuals would be willing to pay for their health and well-being, but what they would exchange these things for. That is, a willingness-to-sell criterion should be used. This implies that citizens have property rights to an unpolluted environment, thus assigning them the role of sellers and not mere bidders. As such, they may be unwilling to sell those rights or willing to sell them only at a much higher price than they would have been willing to pay for them. One question is whether this leaves room for consent and respect of property rights.

Solving Pollution Problems

The natural reaction to pollution problems by polities has been to use command-and-control style regulations and legislation. Indeed, around 300 c.e. local Roman magistrates passed laws regulating certain sources of air pollution in York, England, and in 1272 Edward I banned the use of sea coal, while parliament ordered punishment by torture and hanging of people who sold and burned the outlawed coal. The rise in environmental consciousness in the United States in the early 1970s saw the continuation of this trend as government legislation and agencies multiplied to prevent and decrease pollution. Some examples include the National Environmental Policy Act, 1969; the creation of the EPA, 1970; Clean Air Act Amendments, 1970 and 1977; the Clean Water Act, 1972 and amended in 1977; the Endangered Species Act, 1973; and the Toxic Substances Control Act, 1976.

Pollution does not respect political borders, however, and transboundary issues have increasingly required international cooperation in the development of pollution regulations. One notable example is the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (Framework Convention), formally established in March 1994, which is a constitutive body specifying rules for making decisions about global climate change. Its major outcome is the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which attempted to prescribe legally binding targets and timetables for emissions reductions. The most successful example of international cooperation to control pollution is the 1987 Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer.

Although government approaches to pollution problems often result in important successes, they also betray the fact that there are governmental failures just as there are market failures. Several reasons for these failures exist. On the international level, bodies such as the Framework Convention often lack political power. Bureaucrats, like all people, are self-interested, and when governmental structures are not designed to link authority with responsibility for program outcomes, "decision makers have few incentives to consider the full social costs of their actions" (Baden and Stroup 1981, p. v). Furthermore decision makers have only a limited capacity to comprehend complex social and environmental interactions, which can constrain their ability to make wise regulatory decisions.

One response has been to improve the structure of government, but another reaction has been to improve the structure of markets by implementing what Terry Anderson and Donald Leal term Free Market Environmentalism (1991). The underlying philosophy of this regulatory approach is that markets and environmental concerns can be made compatible by internalizing costs and establishing the proper incentives. They write, "Instead of intentions, good resource stewardship depends on how well social institutions harness self-interest through individual incentives" (p. 4). Examples of utilizing market mechanisms for pollution abatement include green taxes, marketable emissions permits (for example, cap-and-trade systems), and the elimination of harmful government subsidies. Command-and-control and free market regulatory strategies can often be used in conjunction to achieve desired outcomes. One example is cost-effectiveness analysis, where courts or legislatures establish goals, but economists utilize cost-benefit analyses to establish the cheapest ways of attaining those independently set goals within the market.

Technological innovations have been a major force in pollution prevention and abatement as industry has been either forced to comply with regulations or more subtly incentivized to increase efficiencies and reduce pollution outputs. For example, smokestack scrubbers and catalytic converters in automobiles mitigate pollution problems originally caused by the technologies of electricity generation and automobile transportation. Although instances of technological fixes to pollution problems abound (as well as technological devices to monitor pollution), it is also true that technologies continually present novel pollution problems. This holds for the thousands of novel synthetic chemicals produced every year (of which very little is known about possible long-range health impacts) as well as potential future scenarios such as the emergence of grey goo, unrestrained nanobot replication, that could potentially wreak havoc on human and environmental health (see Joy 2000). Such devastating possibilities (not to mention the realities of disasters such as the deadly poison leaked from the Union Carbide insecticide plant in Bhopal, India in 1984) cause some to argue for the relinquishment of potentially harmful technologies or even the abandonment of industrial capitalism and the modern way of life (see for instance Bradford 2001). Others claim that society must develop defensive technologies in an arms race to stay ahead of destructive technologies. For example, Ray Kurzweil (2003) envisions blue goo, police nanobots that combat the bad nanobots, as the solution to potential unrestrained nanotechnology self-replication.

For the most part, society has come a long way from the 1952 killer smog in London, which caused an estimated 4,000 deaths in a three-day period. As Lomborg (1998) asserts, London has not been as clean as it is now since 1585. Systems thinking is also catching on in the form of industrial ecology, material flows assessments, and product life-cycle analyses. Yet all is not well. Developing nations are at least temporarily experiencing high levels of pollution as they begin to industrialize. Poor peoples, even in developed nations, continue to suffer disproportionate hazards from pollution. Radioactive waste and CO₂ emissions remain long-term issues with potentially disastrous outcomes. In both of these cases, it has become apparent that the political challenges of altering behavior, making trade-offs between competing goods, and finding common ground in contexts marked by a plurality of values is even more daunting than the technical challenges presented by pollution. Work is needed in crafting flexible, democratic mechanisms for deciding optimal levels of pollution.

A. PABLO IANNONE

SEE ALSO Automobiles;Aviation Regulatory Agencies;Conservation and Preservation;Dams;Ecology;Environmental Ethics;Environmental Regulatory Agencies;Global Climate Change;Three Gorges Dam;United Nations Environmental Program;Waste;Water.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anderson, Terry, and Donald Leal. (1991). Free Market Environmentalism. San Francisco: Westview Press. The first comprehensive treatment of the idea that free markets can achieve environmental goals.

Baden, John, and Richard Stroup. (1981). Bureaucracy vs. Environment: The Environmental Costs of Bureaucratic Governance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Outlines the failures of bureaucratic solutions to environmental problems and offers suggestions for reforms based on aligning incentives with valued outcomes.

Baxter, William F. (1974). People or Penguins: The Case for Optimal Pollution. New York: Columbia University Press. Argues that a pollution-free society cannot exist without harming people.

Bradford, George. (2001). "We All Live in Bhopal." In Environmental Ethics: Readings in Theory and Application, 3rd edition, ed. Louis P. Pojman. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.

Joy, Bill. (2000). "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us." Wired 8(4): 238–262. Also available from http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html. A pessimistic outlook on the impending loss of human control as genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics develop the ability to self-replicate.

Kurzweil, Ray. (2003). "Promise and Peril." In Living with the Genie: Essays on Technology and the Quest for Human Mastery, ed. Alan Lightman, Daniel Sarewitz, and Christina Desser. London: Island Press. Examines mid- and long-term hopes and dangers presented by technologies in the field of genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics.

Leopold, Aldo. (1949). A Sand County Almanac: And Sketches Here and There. London: Oxford University Press. Articulates the Land Ethic, which has inspired much thinking in nonanthropocentric or biocentric and systems-thinking in environmental ethics.

Lomborg, Bjørn. (1998). The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real Sate of the World. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. A well-documented account of the positive trends in human welfare, including a section devoted to the decline in pollution problems.

Sagoff, Mark. (1988). The Economy of the Earth. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Simon, Julian. (1981). The Ultimate Resource. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Attacks the neo-Malthusians by arguing that human ingenuity effectively makes resources unlimited in the long run.