Cleaner air is enviromentalists’ crisiso

By HAROLD BROWN

It must be discouraging for environmental activists to see their cause shrinking.

Pollution across the nation has been decreasing for at least a half century, and still is. Air and water pollution are now a small fraction of their former extent. Particles in Atlanta’s air have decreased 80 percent since the 1950s.

Environmental success, however, removes the zealots’ incentive for getting out of bed. In the crusade for saving lives or alleviating sickness, victims are necessary.

When the human victims disappear, they have to be re-created, and so we find the substitution of computer projections for real folks.

It’s hard to raise sympathy, or money, with computer-generated casualties. Death certificates don’t list air pollution as a cause; any connection between listed causes of death and air pollution is speculative.

Warnings to pregnant mothers of danger to their unborn children from mercury in fish are issued in nearly every state, but not a single case of such damage to unborn children has been documented in our country.

The mantra that people are dying from pollution is based on phantom or statistical cases with no names.

Some people believe in these ghosts, but it’s hard to maintain interest or belief if they don’t see an identifiable specter now and then.

The erratic, faltering nature of one such phantom, air particles and health, is shown in recent reviews by the independent Health Effects Institute.

A summary of U.S. and Canadian studies in 1997 reported that a 10 microgram-per-cubic-meter increase in breathable particles was associated with a 1 percent increase in daily mortality.

A study of the 90 largest U.S. cities, published in 2000, found the increase in mortality only half as great (0.5 percent); a study of the 20 largest U.S. cities (2004) estimated the increase was only 0.28 percent.

It takes several years of study and gigabytes of computer programs to make this small ghost appear real.

In the 90-cities study, Atlanta was 15th from the top in particle pollution, but 80th in cardiovascular-respiratory deaths.

In the 20-cities study, the change in cardiovascular-respiratory deaths for a 10 microgram-per-cubic-meter rise in particles was not an increase for Atlanta, but a 1.31 percent decrease.

That’s right: periods of high particle pollution caused a decrease in deaths.

Surely you’ve heard about it? Don’t try to figure it out. The error in the estimate for Atlanta was so great that statistical significance was lost; the effect of particle pollution was only zero.

But uncertainties in scientific results and decreasing pollution don’t stop the efforts to bind pollution to death and sickness with increasingly frayed twine. You can find evidence of these weaker bonds and desperate binding in many unexpected places:

• The 2001 Annual Report of the Connecticut Council on Environmental Quality, which noted that “most aspects of our air, water, and wildlife have improved measurably in the last 10 years” (repeated in the 2003 report), then proposed the addition of breast cancer to the permanent set of indicators of that state’s environment.

Breast cancer is bound to the environment by imagination; Connecticut CEQ gave no other ties.

• Urban sprawl is widely cursed as an environmental ill. In fact, it is a developmental and lifestyle issue. Spread-out development is no more polluting than any other type in which humans live. Pollution depends on how it is managed.

These examples reflect the trend to broaden the environmental definition to include non-environmental issues, all for political and social purposes.

While almost everything in life can be considered environmental, including social, political and spiritual influence, the broadening of traditional environmental issues dilutes both support for and effectiveness of solutions to the problems that used to be considered environmental.

Some of the expansion of environmental boundaries is deliberate and strategic: creating crises to absorb the resources assigned to problems of the past.

Movements large and small look for reasons to live after their reasons for living are gone. Remember what the “March of Dimes” was for?

The Soil and Water Conservation District of Allendale, S.C., has roadside signs that exhort county citizens, not to save the soil, but to “Don’t Be a Litterbug.”

This country took drastic measures to solve severe environmental problems and has come a long way.

Protection of the environment must be perpetual, but it must also be sensible. How is it that national spending on environmental protection has soared about tenfold since the 1960s, even as the environment has improved in similar proportion?

We can’t afford to continue to spend more and more to fix smaller and smaller problems.

For despairing activists, creating anxiety about the environment today must be like campaigning against hunger in a nation where overeating is the problem.

Committed advocates for the environment are necessary, but when problems diminish, the people and resources hyping them should, too. Both should be reallocated to the causes and crises that need them more.