Peace and Environment News* June 1995
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Peace and Environment News * June 1995 |
by Mike Kaulbars
I recently received a catalogue from a company that is offering sun protection clothing as an option for people who do not want to become one of the estimated 60,000 Canadians who will develop skin cancer this summer. The epidemic of skin cancer is due to increased UV levels resulting from ozone depletion. I was immediately reminded of an article I read some time ago about how we need air conditioning, particularly because of global climate change. The article suggested that the need for air conditioning was not negotiable because high temperatures could be debilitating for the elderly, young children, and the infirm.
Both are examples of technological solutions to environmental problems which we have created. Examples abound of other such attempts: water filters in every home, respirators, you name it, all kinds of technologies to protect us from the toxins and garbage that we have polluted our air, water, and soil with. I suppose that it is understandable that people would want to protect themselves from the horrifying effects of cancers and the other industrial diseases that have become epidemic in the past few decades, but I must confess that these "technological solutions" get me very worked up and angry.
If we look at a simplified history of the modern industrialized state, we see that it was by conquest, empire, and exploitation that we were able to have access to the resources that allowed us to create the material excesses that we did. In most cases those resources were the "property" of Native Americans and the people of the Third World, or marginal rural groups in our own cultural milieu. We appropriated those resources by military or economic might and used them to satisfy indulgences and created needs for idiotic conveniences and luxuries.
But now we are discovering that we have devastated our environment and that we face a host of threats: an eight-fold increase in skin cancers, a tripling in rates of breast cancers, a 70 percent increase in cancers of all kinds. Cancer rates are such that one in three will develop cancer, and cancer is now a major cause of death in children—and the rates are still rising.
Faced with these harsh realities, we naturally decide to behave in a responsible and adult manner and i) immediately cease the production of those unnecessary and frivolous things that cause this pollution and ii) take action to try to ameliorate the damage and facilitate the earth's natural healing.
Right?
Of course not. What we do is accelerate the industrial process to produce goods that will "protect" us from the consequences of our own folly, thereby making the problems worse. (For example, the coolants in air conditioning systems are a major contributor to global climate change.)
But of course 80 percent of the world's population will not be able to afford these additional goods. The catalogue I received advertised an $80 sun protector "golf shirt." Asian farmers do not spend a couple of hours a week playing golf. They spend twelve hours a day in the sun, working to try to feed themselves, and $80 is more than they earn in a month.
African mothers who are denied access to minimal food for their children cannot afford sunscreen or water filters for their home. In many cases, getting water at all is an insurmountable challenge. Air conditioning? for a cardboard shanty in a Sao Paulo garbage dump that has neither electricity nor running water? Not likely. If the premise of air conditioning is to protect the young, the elderly ad the infirm from suffering, what about the hundreds of millions of elderly, young, and infirm in the Third World?
These people never enjoyed the benefits, such as they are, of the toys and spurious junk that our consumer society has created, but they are certainly being made to suffer the consequences of our shortsightedness. Particularly harsh is the fact that in many cases it was their resources, which they needed to meet their basic needs, which were diverted to this purpose.
Some people would suggest that we will share these technologies with the Third World, but that is more nonsense. We were unwilling to let these people keep their own resources in the first place, preferring instead to divert them to produce Mighty Morphins and other basic necessities of life for ourselves, so how likely are we to address their plight now? In the fullness of our economic "prosperity" of two and three decades ago, we were unwilling to respond to their very real needs. We got 24-inch colour TVs and disco heels instead. How likely are we to respond now to those same basic needs, and the additional need to be protected from the effects of our earlier decisions? Now, when we do not have the prosperity that we had then?
These are the sorts of issues that I reflected on as I watched all the hoopla over VE Day. We celebrate the victory over Naziism and the Third Reich and portray it as having been a struggle between good and bad, but the truth is a lot more banal. Most of those who fought on both sides did so out of a sense of nationalism, and would have fought as hard and well for any other country had they been a citizen of that country. The horror of the Holocaust was perpetrated by the few, permitted by the indifference and apathy of the many. For the billions of poor and oppressed whom we are murdering every day, where is the freedom, democracy, and basic human rights that were allegedly won? For them, do we imagine it has mattered one bit that the Axis lost?
Maybe I'm dense, but I have trouble distinguishing genocide by indifference from genocide by indifference, or understanding what triumphed in '45. If it is to have meant anything, we must continue to strive for the betterment of all, not indulging in self-gratification and congratulating ourselves that we never hurt or exploited anyone, as we slather on the sunscreen and turn up the air conditioner.
It is never too late to triumph, or too early to begin the struggle.
Converted July 7, 2000 - Lg
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