Everyday Pollution

We live in a world that is laced with toxic chemicals in a way that we have never seen in human history. “In 1940, the world output of chemicals was 1 billion lb; by the 1980s, this had risen to 500 billion pounds. There are now about 60,000-70,000 synthetic chemicals in regular use [in] building materials, cleaning products, self-care products, gardening products, pesticide residues on foods, etc.” (1) On an evolutionary time-scale, that’s like going down to your hardware store and drinking a gallon of paint thinner.

Americans use as much as 60 million pounds of pesticides and 280 million pounds of antimicrobial disinfectants each year just in their homes. In the mid 1990s, it was estimated that in pesticides killed about 10,400 people per year in the US alone.

But its not just consumer products. Industrial waste and agricultural runoff poisons rivers and lakes. Toxic smoke from factories and exhaust from cars and trucks poisons the air. Urban sprawl driven by real estate profiteers makes the problem worse by increasing the time we spend in traffic.

In the 1990s, the air in Mexico City was so bad that Heberto Castillo Martinez, president of Mexico’s Senate Commission on Science and Technology, endorsed a plan to tunnel holes in the mountains that surround the city, and then use huge fans to blow smog out of the valley.

Agribusiness corporations like Monsanto, Syngenta, and DuPont have invented a whole new form of pollution in the last couple of decades: genetically-modified crops whose purpose is not to increase the world’s food supply or be more nutritious, but to increase their market control.

Their favorite strategy is to produced seed varieties that are genetically modified to resist extremely toxic herbicides that they just happen to also sell. The problem with GMO organisms is that nobody knows what they will do outside the context of an agricultural research station.

Mad cow disease is a kind of pollution too. Cattle companies feed cow parts, especially spinal cord tissue, to cows, spreading a disease-causing protein that works like a virus. Then they feed the sick cows to us and make us sick.

Likewise, most American milk is toxic. Bovine growth hormone makes cows give about 20% more milk. It also stimulates their livers to release a huge amounts of a substance called Insulin-like Growth Factor that promotes breast cancer in women and may affect children’s growth. (2)

Business as usual under capitalism is an environmental catastrophe. If there’s one thing capitalism does really well, its pumping us full of pollution everyday.

(1) Martin J Walker, Home Sickness, Ecologist, 22 April 2001.
(2) Cancer Prevention Coalition, “Milk: America’s Health Problem.”