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The polluted price of progress |
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Written by Brian Williams
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Sunday, 05 April 2009 |
 The price of pollution. Image courtesy of Flickr's Salim Virji.
“But that’s the smell of jobs,” he said.
He was right.
The coal miner in West Virginia provided the coke plant with its raw material. The coke plant gave the blast furnace its fuel. The blast furnace gave the steel mill its metal. And the steel mill gave many industries a necessary refined, if unworked, product. Every step of every step along the way to a finished product provides real jobs – not just those “employment” opportunities serving lattes at Starbucks or filing TPS reports.
Without the dirty work, nothing else is possible.
But on the flip side, those jobs have a lot of negative impacts on the environment. They are the reason why every time I visit Ashland for an extended period of time my sinuses get irritated.
Elsewhere, it is much worse. (To learn more about byproducts of our culture, you should watch the “60 Minutes’” story on e-waste here.)
The process of making steel is just one example. Steel is necessary to make more complicated products like cars and trains. To make your laptop, a similarly complex string of processes must be conducted. Copper, silicon, gold, germanium, plastics and everything else used in modern electronics are mined, refined and repackaged before a consumable can be produced.
I would like you to walk with me down a trail of thought that is in every sense politically untenable, but let’s do it anyway — just for kicks. In an odd way, a global slowdown in industry may be just what Mother Nature needs. Whether or not she'll get it is another issue. If that seems odd at first take, just think about the amount of pollution that we end up with from our vast habits of consumption and how that may play into things like climate change and carcinogenic food and water. Then, imagine if it all stopped and the earth was given time to heal, given time to break down the chemicals it’s choking on.
[A] global slowdown in industry may be just what Mother Nature needs.Okay, forget I said that. The prospects of that sound horrible – way too many people to employ.
Clearly, we need balance. We’ve always had consumption and waste, but it seems to have been amplified in this age of high-tech gadgetry and easy credit. Buying on credit means buying with the work deferred, and the American consumer has not shown much foresight in the past decade. What would happen if consumer credit for discretionary items were harder to come by, as it naturally is? Could it be possible that the consumer would save for higher-quality products that may last longer, and since his or her own hard work went into the product, take better care of the purchases? That would mean less waste in landfills and less mining and refining needed to replace junked products. All of this comes back to reshaping an economy that has been 70 percent consumer spending to something much more balanced, and I think we can do it without poisoning our world.
[CBS, Front page image by Flickr's "Salim Virji"]
Brian Williams, a TheSequitur.com senior editor and systems director, studies sociology at Morehead State University.
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