CHAPTER 16 WHITHER THE HISTORY OF POLLUTION? CHAPTER SIXTEEN: TABLE OF CONTENTS Pollution and History Life Expectancy and Pollution Summary Sound thinking requires that we consider separately the many forms of pollution rather than just a single, general "pollution." It is useful to classify pollutions as (a) health- related, or (b) aesthetic. We shall concentrate on the health- related pollutions largely because it is easier to talk objectively about them. One person's aesthetic pollution can be another's aesthetic delight - for example, the noise of children at play nearby - which makes such issues complex and difficult. POLLUTION AND HISTORY In thinking about pollution, as with so many other topics, a key issue is: what is the appropriate comparison? It is common to compare the present to a hypothetical pristine past. When they hear that pollution has been declining, many people ask: From the beginning of history? From perhaps the most important point of view - pollution as measured by life expectancy - pollution has been declining since the beginning of the species. The image of the Garden of Eden does not correspond to the available physical evidence. If, however, one does not consider as pollution human and animal excrement, or the bones cast aside after meals, and instead takes a more restricted point of view and considers as pollutions only the modern pollutions - such as smog from industry, and litter from pop-top soda cans and junked cars - then there certainly is an increase in pollution as societies move from subsistence agriculture toward modernization. But when the society becomes rich enough to put cleanliness high on its list of priorities - as the rich societies do - there is every likelihood that it, too, will move toward less of even the pollutions which come with modernization. The combination of affluence and improved technology tends toward greater cleanliness. Contrast a major Western metropolis today with London of 1890: The Strand of those days...was the throbbing heart of the people's essential London...But the mud! [a euphemism] And the noise! And the smell! All these blemishes were [the] mark of [the] horse.... The whole of London's crowded wheeled traffic - which in parts of the City was at times dense beyond movement - was dependent on the horse lorry: wagon, bus, hansom and `growler', and coaches and carriages and private vehicles of all kinds, were appendages to horses...the characteristic aroma - for the nose recognized London with gay excitement - was of stables, which were commonly of three or four storeys with inclined ways zigzagging up the faces of them; [their] middens kept the cast-iron filigree chandeliers that glorified the reception rooms of upper- and lower- middle-class homes throughout London encrusted with dead flies, and, in late summer, veiled with living clouds of them. A more assertive mark of the horse was the mud that, despite the activities of a numberous corps of red- jacketed boys who dodged among wheels and hooves with pan and brush in service to iron bins at the pavement-edge, either flooded the streets with churnings of `pea soup' that at times collected in pools over-brimming the kerbs, and at others covered the road-surface as with axle grease or bran-laden dust to the distraction of the wayfarer. In the first case, the swift-moving hansom or gig would fling sheets of such soup - where not intercepted by trousers or skirts - completely across the pavement, so that the frontages of the Strand throughout its length had an eighteen-inch plinth of mud-parge thus imposed upon it. The pea-soup condition was met by wheeled `mud-carts' each attended by two ladlers clothed as for Icelandic seas in thigh boots, oilskins collared to the chin, and sou'westers sealing in the back of the neck. Splash Ho! The foot passenger now gets the mud in his eye! The axle- grease condition was met by horse-mechanized brushes and travellers in the small hours found fire-hoses washing away residues.... And after the mud the noise, which, again endowed by the horse, surged like a mighty heart-beat....and the hammering of a multitude, of iron-shod hairy heels..., the deafening, side-drum tatoo of tyred wheels jarring from the apex of one set to the next like sticks dragging along a fence; the creaking and groaning and chirping and rattling of vehicles, light and heavy, thus maltreated; the jangling of chain harness and the clanging or jingling of every other conceivable thing else, augmented by the shrieking and bellowings called for from those of God's creatures who desired to impart information or proffer a request vocally - raised a din that...is beyond conception. It was not any such paltry thing as noise. It was an immensity of sound.... Compare that picture with the results of England's cleanup campaign: British rivers...have been polluted for a century while in America they began to grow foul only a couple of decades ago.... The Thames has been without fish for a century. But by 1968 some 40 different varieties had come back to the river. Now to be seen [in London in 1968] are birds and plants long unsighted here....The appearance of long-absent birds is measured by one claim that 138 species are currently identified in London, compared with less than half that number 10 years ago....Gone are the killer smogs.... Londoners...are breathing air cleaner than it has been for a century...effect of air pollution on bronchial patients is diminishing...visibility is better, too...on an average winter day...about 4 miles, compared with 1.4 miles in 1958. My aim is to show that if one lifts one's eyes from one's own yard to others', one may see that things are not necessarily better over there. Life Expectancy and Pollution What about more recent trends? Is our environment getting dirtier or cleaner? Shifts in the pollutions that attract people's attention complicate the discussion of trends in the cleanliness of our environment. As we have conquered the microorganism pollutions that were most dangerous to life and health - plague, smallpox, malaria, tuberculosis, cholera, typhoid, typhus, and the like - lesser pollutions have come to the fore, along with improvements in technical capacity to discern the pollutants. And some new pollutions have arisen. Here is an example of dramatically increased pollution: The danger of an airplane falling on your house is infinitely greater now than it was a century ago. And the danger from artificial food additives is now many times greater than it was 1,000 years ago (though it seems to be a very tiny danger today). You may or may not worry about falling airplanes or food additives, but an alarmist can always find some new man-made danger that is now increasing. We must, however, resist the tendency to conclude from such evidence that our world is more polluted now than it was before the existence of airplanes or food additives. How may we reasonably assess the overall trend of health-related pollutions? It would seem reasonable to go directly to health itself to measure how we are doing. The simplest and most accurate measure of health is length of life, summed up as the average life expectancy. To buttress that general measure, which includes the effects of curative medicine as well as preventive (pollution-fighting) efforts, we may look at the trends in the mortality rate. After thousands of years of almost no improvement, in the past two hundred years in the rich countries there has been a long upward climb in life expectancy. And in the poor countries, life expectancy has increased extraordinarily sharply during the latter half of this century. The data concerning these all-important facts are shown in Chapter 22. Surely this historical view gives no ground for increased alarm about pollution; if anything, it supports the general assessment that pollution has been decreasing. (This view of pollution caused some amusement among critics of the first edition of this book, perhaps because those critics simply put aside the history of environmental disease conquest.) Of course, the trend could change tomorrow, and we might plunge directly into a cataclysm. But no existing data give reason to believe that this will happen. And despite popular notions to the contrary, life expectancy is still increasing in the U.S., especially at the older ages, and even faster than before. Factors other than reduction in pollutions, such as improved nutrition, also have contributed to the increase in life expectancy. But the decline of the old pollution- caused diseases certainly accounts for much of the increase in length of life. A century ago, most people in the U.S. died of environmental pollution - that is, from infectious diseases such as pneumonia, tuberculosis, and gastroenteritis. (The extraordinary decline in the great killer tuberculosis may be seen in figure 16-1. The recent upturn is only a blip due to lax public-health policies.) Humanity's success in reducing these pollutions has been so great that young people today do not even know the names of the great killer pollutions of history - such as typhoid fever, bubonic plague, and cholera. FIGURE 16-1. [**new: perhaps McKeon's tb diagram or Lehigh TRS] Nowadays, people die mostly of the diseases of old age, which the environment does not force upon the individual - such as heart disease, cancer, and strokes (see figure 16-2). And there seems to be no evidence that the increase in cancer is due to environmental carcinogens; rather, it is an inevitable consequence of people living to older, more cancer-prone ages. The sharp decline in accident deaths, despite increased auto use, may also be seen as an improvement in the health environment. In sum: Life expectancy is the best single index of the state of health-related pollution, though it has the conceptual flaw of being affected by other health- improving forces as well. And by this measure, pollution has been declining very fast for a long time. Hence it is reasonable to say that, taken together, the health- affecting "pollutions" (using that term in its widest and best sense) have been diminishing. FIGURE 16-2. [Changing diseases] As a comparison to conditions nowadays in rich countries such as the United States, here is a description of environmental conditions in Great Britain a century and a half ago, derived from a social survey: At Inverness, the local observer reports, "There are very few houses in town which can boast of either water-closet or privy, and only two or three public privies in the better part of the place exist for the great bulk of the inhabitants." At Gateshead, "The want of convenient offices in the neighborhood is attended with many very unpleasant circumstances, as it induces the lazy inmates to make use of chamber utensils, which are suffered to remain in the most offensive state for several days, and are then emptied out of the windows." A surveyor reported on two houses in London, "I found the whole area of the cellars of both houses were full of night-soil, to the depth of three feet, which had been permitted for years to accumulate from the overflow of the cesspools; upon being moved, the stench was intolerable, and no doubt the neighborhood must have been more or less infected by it." In Manchester, "many of the streets in which cases of fever are common are so deep in mire, or so full of hollows and heaps of refuse that the vehicle used for conveying the patients to the House of Recovery often cannot be driven along them, and the patients are obliged to be carried to it from considerable distances." In Glasgow, the observer says, "We entered a dirty low passage like a house door, which led from the street through the first house to a square court immediately behind, which court, with the exception of a narrow path around it leading to another long passage through a second house, was occupied entirely as a dung receptacle of the most disgusting kind. Beyond this court the second passage led to a second square court, occupied in the same way by its dunghill; and from this court there was yet a third passage leading to a third court and third dungheap. There were no privies or drains there, and the dungheaps received all filth which the swarm of wretched inhabitants could give; and we learned that a considerable part of the rent of the houses was paid by the produce of the dungheaps." At Greenock, a dunghill in one street is described as containing "a hundred cubic yards of impure filth, collected from all parts of the town. It is never removed; it is the stock-in- trade of a person who deals in dung; he retails it by cart-fuls. To please his customers, he always keeps a nucleus, as the older the filth is the higher is the price. The proprietor has an extensive privy attached to the concern. This collection is fronting the public street; it is enclosed in front by a wall; the height of the wall is about 12 feet, and the dung overtops it; the malarious moisture oozes through the wall, and runs over the pavement. The effluvia all round about this place is horrible. There is a land of houses adjoining, four stories in height, and in the summer each house swarms with myriads of flies; every article of food and drink must be covered, otherwise, if left exposed for a minute, the flies immediately attack it, and it is rendered unfit for use, from the strong taste of the dunghill left by the flies." And for comparison with the industrial environment today, consider this description of what the oil industry wrought a century or so ago: We had lived on the edge of an active oil farm and oil town [in Pennsylvania]. No industry of man in its early days has ever been more destructive of beauty, order, decency, than the production of petroleum. All about us rose derricks, squatted enginehouses and tanks; the earth about them was streaked and damp with the dumpings of the pumps, which brought up regularly the sand and clay and rock through which the drill had made its way. If oil was found, if the well flowed, every tree, every shrub, every bit of grass in the vicinity was coated with black grease and left to die. Tar and oil stained everything. If the well was dry a rickety derrick, piles of debris, oily holes were left, for nobody ever cleaned up in those days. The growth of knowledge has been crucial in reducing the pollutions of communicable disease, of course. But the wealth generated by successful economies has been all- important, too; increased affluence and good government enabled the United States to afford effective sanitation and safe drinking-water systems, infrastructure which is still far beyond the reach of poor Indian villages where dysentery often spreads because the simple preventive measure of installing a concrete rim around the communal drinking well is made impossible by a combination of poverty and communal strife. The good nutrition that wealth brings also increases resistance against catching diseases and builds greater strength to recover from them. The extraordinary improvement in the cleanliness of the environment may be discerned from the types of pollutants that Americans now worry about - substances of so little harm that it is not even known whether they are harmful at all. Alar was a notorious false alarm, as was DDT (discussed in chapter 18 on false environmental scares). In 1992 alarm was raised over crabmeat from Canada, and anchovies from California, which supposedly contain an acid that might cause Alzheimer's disease. The substance in question is a natural one, and has always been there. We are only aware of it because, as the New England District Director of the Food and Drug Administration said when commenting on this issue, "There is equipment today that allows you to find a whole lot of nasty things in the food we eat". This does not imply that these substances hurt us. "The U.S. has a zero pathogen tolerance." The pattern in the poor countries has begun to show the same characteristics as in the rich countries. Smallpox, for example, once a common killer everywhere, now has been wiped out. And cholera, purely a pollution disease, is no longer an important factor in the world. The only major exception to world trends is Eastern Europe, where mortality has increased and life expectancy has diminished in recent years (see figure 22-12). And the extent of industrial pollution in Eastern Europe under communism was horrifying, as we will see in chapter 17. Again, there are other contributing causes to the decline in length of life in Eastern Europe. But the concatenation in Eastern Europe of high and increasing pollution, and decline in life expectancy, strengthens the argument for considering life expectancy as the best general index of the state of a country's pollution. In brief, there has been an extraordinary diminution in the severity of the environmental pollutions we face. But because people are unaware of this history, they react to each new alarm with undiminished fear. In the next two chapters, we turn to trends in particular pollutions which are the by-products of civilization and progress. SUMMARY The public believes that the world is less healthful than decades ago, and that the trend is toward a more polluted environment. This widespread belief is entirely contradicted by the facts. There are many sorts of pollution. Some have lessened over the years - for example, filth in the streets of our cities, and the pollutants that cause contagious diseases. Others have worsened - for example, gasoline fumes in the air, noise in many places, and atomic wastes. The long-run course of yet others, such as crime in the streets, is unknown. To summarize the direction of such a varied collection of trends is difficult, and can easily be misleading. If one has to choose a single measure of the extent of pollution, the most plausible one - because it is most inclusive - is life expectancy. The expected length of a newborn's life has increased greatly in past centuries, and is still increasing. After decades of trying unsuccessfully to persuade people by showing them serious analyses and data that our environment is getting cleaner rather than dirtier, I have decided that the only way to deal adequately with the subject of this chapter - and perhaps of the entire book - may be with the sort of satire that P.J. O'Rourke brings to bear. (See headnote to the next chapter.) ENDNOTES page# \ultres\ tchar16 February 3, 1994