Renkl, Margaret (2019, September 30). Three Billion Canaries in the Coal Mine: What does it mean for us that birds are dying? And what can we do about it? The New York Times. Available https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/29/opinion/three-billion-canaries-in-the-coal-mine.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_190930?campaign_id=2&instance_id=12639&segment_id=17452&user_id=96df00a4a9c822b03be11b8b3c7df254®i_id=329620000930
A new study in the journal Science reports that nearly 3 billion North American birds have disappeared since 1970. That’s 29 percent of all birds on this continent.
Renkl's list of citizen actions includes pressure on legislators, rejecting pesticides, herbicides, and single-use plastics, among other helpful technologies of the self aimed at saving the eco-system upon which we all depend.
I believe these individualized solutions can help mitigate eco-collapse by providing refuges of last resort.
However, they are not in themselves enough to forestall collapse when there exist hazards whose risks are so catastrophic that they outweigh the sum total of effects from individualized technologies of the self.
The world's biggest polluters are increasingly being defined exclusively in terms of CO2.
There is something very strange about that when you consider how many billions of tons of pesticide, herbicides, and other toxic chemicals that are released into the eco-system globally.
For example, a scientific article published in 2009 estimated annual pesticide use alone at that time to be over one billion pounds annually (link):
I'm not saying chemical pollution is a larger or more pressing problem than climate change. I'm saying that chemical pollution is a well-established hazard to biological life and it is no longer recognized as one of the world's biggest pollution problems according to search results using a Google search.
Some pollutants are more visible than others.
And some polluters are more visible than others.
In the past, governments were often cast as the biggest polluters because of their toxic radioactive and chemical wastes, followed by corporations.
In climate change, everyone seems equally complicit, although, in fact, we are not if we measure complicity in terms of actual CO2 emissions.
Despite the centralization of the levers of pollution, we rarely read at all about some of the most toxic pollutants, especially radionuclides, resulting from weapons, medical waste, nuclear power and processing of rare earths.
Why is it that CO2 has become the only pollutant that matters?
I am not saying CO2 doesn't matter. Our built infrastructures and emissions are empirically impacting in dangerous and unpredicatable ways the eco-systems upon which we depend.
I am getting at is that there are sets of relationships, such as climate change and eco-collapse, that are more visible in search results and political discourse and other sets of relationships that are, in comparison, relatively marginalized, such as the deliberate and incidental contamination of life with toxic chemicals, radionuclides, and electro-magnetic radiation.
This set of observations lends itself to further interrogations about how hazardous material phenomena are selectively perceived and represented in mass mediated, political and cultural representations, thereby shaping policy priorities and social preferences.
Alavanja M. C. (2009). Introduction: pesticides use and exposure extensive worldwide. Reviews on environmental health, 24(4), 303–309.Chemical pollution is deliberate and it is toxic. Yet, it has disappeared from the search results of the world's biggest pollutors.
I'm not saying chemical pollution is a larger or more pressing problem than climate change. I'm saying that chemical pollution is a well-established hazard to biological life and it is no longer recognized as one of the world's biggest pollution problems according to search results using a Google search.
Some pollutants are more visible than others.
And some polluters are more visible than others.
In the past, governments were often cast as the biggest polluters because of their toxic radioactive and chemical wastes, followed by corporations.
In climate change, everyone seems equally complicit, although, in fact, we are not if we measure complicity in terms of actual CO2 emissions.
Despite the centralization of the levers of pollution, we rarely read at all about some of the most toxic pollutants, especially radionuclides, resulting from weapons, medical waste, nuclear power and processing of rare earths.
Why is it that CO2 has become the only pollutant that matters?
I am not saying CO2 doesn't matter. Our built infrastructures and emissions are empirically impacting in dangerous and unpredicatable ways the eco-systems upon which we depend.
I am getting at is that there are sets of relationships, such as climate change and eco-collapse, that are more visible in search results and political discourse and other sets of relationships that are, in comparison, relatively marginalized, such as the deliberate and incidental contamination of life with toxic chemicals, radionuclides, and electro-magnetic radiation.
This set of observations lends itself to further interrogations about how hazardous material phenomena are selectively perceived and represented in mass mediated, political and cultural representations, thereby shaping policy priorities and social preferences.