Health vs. the Environment

...Does the proposed action threaten an entire plant or animal species, or merely individual plants and animals...

...the existence of methods to mitigate dangers to humans, and the absence of them to protect the environment...

...There are situations where wildlife conservationists can mount strong arguments: the unlikelihood of a health threat versus the certainty of damage to the environment...

...The human chauvinists tend to forget our dependence on other forms of existence, and that subtle changes in the ecosystem can eventually cripple our supply of food, water and many necessary raw materials...

...The ban on detergents containing polluting phosphates has resulted in the introduction of deadlier no-phosphate cleaners...

...Strip mining raises similar issues...

...the second is its internal division into a group concerned primarily with human life and another preoccupied with wildlife and esthetics...

...And, indeed, few would deny that millions of people have been endangered by the industrial advances of the last century and a half...

...Additional instances of conflict between health and the environment abound: ?When DDT and other chlorinated hydrocarbon pesticides were outlawed, more toxic albeit less persistent organophosphates such as Michael Gerrard, a new NL contributor, works for the Council on the Environment of New York City...

...Some of its members appear to have forgotten, though, that the failure to trace the effects of a policy is unecological thinking...

...Naturally, conservationists cannot be held responsible for, say, agribusinesses choosing a dangerous substitute for DDT...

...Blaming these tragedies on corporate avaricious-ness or lax enforcement of the Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act will not console the wives and children of the dead...

...To state that health outweighs the sanctity of animal or plant life is admittedly a value judgment, but a necessary and reasonable one if en-vironmentalism is to achieve wider acceptance...

...Stricter proposals are being urged, however, which would banish strip mining altogether from selected areas...

...In theory, fuel thus lost would be offset by saving energy and using such clean sources as solar power...

...Besides damaging millions of dollars worth of crops, their droppings caused several cases of histoplasmosis, a serious lung infection...

...Nevertheless, this negligence was so predictable that to replace DDT with parathion was in effect to judge ecological repercussions more sinister than the death of workers...

...parathion took their place, producing sharp increases in the poisoning of farmworkers...

...Esthetic interests, on the other hand, are unlikely to ever be important enough to challenge health considerations...

...those that are not should, like other social programs, be weighed against such interests as jobs, freedom and pleasure...

...Litter, ugly landscapes, or fewer trees lining the streets cannot...

...One is its belief in a technologically induced doomsday...

...Catalytic converters have been known to malfunction, overheat and start fires in cars whose emissions they are intended to control...

...A presumption (best incorporated into the environmental impact statement) that when health and the environment conflict, health considerations should prevail provides a useful guideline for any decision...

...In reality, most of the gap would have to be filled by deep-mined coal, a more dangerous—if less egregious —method of extraction...

...Giving health first priority would be more in keeping with the original spirit of the environmental movement, too...

...Choosing between the life of one identifiable person and the survival of a tree is easy...

...Atmospheric change and the dissipation of nuclear waste in the earth or air or sea can lead to planetary apocalypse...

...True, a significant percentage of the fatalities are attributable to farmowner carelessness when labeling cannisters, or to not keeping laborers off the fields long enough after spraying...

...Those favoring total human unobtrusiveness see nothing distinctively precious about man, a position that violates all common sense...

...The Airline Pilots Association has charged that landing regulations, initiated to reduce noise, force perilously steep descents into airports...

...Curiously, this group does not raise much of a fuss when some forms of life are killed wholesale—most insects, all vegetables, and sundry bacteria...

...A number of small children have suffered poisoning after eating the powder...

...Several environmental groups opposed the killing—not merely on the valid ground that there had been no environmental impact statement, but also because the procedure was "a form of mass euthenasia...

...the irreversibility of the ecological destruction...

...And do we value them for economic, esthetic, medical or agricultural reasons...

...Since it pollutes the water and permanently ravages the land, the procedure is on its face environmentally unconscionable...

...In New York, the installation of high-intensity street lights to discourage muggers—certainly a threat to both physical and mental health —has been loudly protested because the lamps are bad for trees...

...Unfortunately, most choices are much fuzzier, involving a welter of competing values...

...How seriously...

...In the Netherlands, proposals for closing an inlet of the Ooster-schelde, a large bay south of Rotterdam, to guard against murderous North Sea floods, have been opposed by environmentalists and fishermen because the dam would leave the bay brackish and polluted...

...In their view, apparently, the lives of the birds outweighed the danger to the residents of the surrounding counties...

...This is not to suggest that environmental concerns should be disregarded...

...Wiser choices would then be made, and wiser policies pursued...

...they have suggested an alternate scheme that would preserve the area while providing less safety...

...Several times as many people are killed or disabled digging for a ton of coal underground as on the surface...

...Between these extremes lies the uncertain ground where the rest of us have to make tricky tradeoffs between human health and preserving the environment...

...There are two reasons why the ecology movement, ordinarily so dedicated to people's welfare, sometimes finds itself on the antihuman side of an issue...

...The Army responded to the health hazard by spraying detergent to wash the natural oil from the invaders' feathers...

...How many people might be hurt...

...How important is their ecological role...

...Although saving the globe is ample reason to disregard economics and convenience in favor of austerity and sacrifice, the specter of doomsday has been invoked unreasonably to justify measures having only the slimmest connections to it...

...For example, in 1975 swarms of birds roosted at the Army's Fort Campbell, in Kentucky, as well as elsewhere throughout the state and in neighboring Tennessee...

...Yet it should not be difficult to eliminate a major part of the present confusion and moral disarray...

...But such intervening events also require their attention...

...For it began by espousing the notion of interdependent systems, of an alteration in one damaging the whole...

...Balancing unquantifiable factors —a difficult task to begin with—is complicated by the split in the environmental movement on the value of human life vis a vis other species...

...Were this standard to be adopted, advocates of sacrificing people's immediate welfare for the ecology would have to produce compelling reasons for violating it...

...lacking that protection against the cold, the birds would freeze to death...

...Pending legislation would require painstaking reclamation, thereby lowering coal company profits (no tragedy) and raising coal prices (lamentable yet probably necessary...

...But it is now becoming clear that a number of environmental measures may impair rather than promote man's well-being, and that the priorities of some conservationists are askew...

...Environmental policies that are central to survival clearly should be pursued at all costs...

...THE ENVIRONMENT BY MICHAEL GERRARD The modern ecology movement arose largely to combat technological threats to human health and safety: air pollution, nuclear power, the proliferation of toxic substances, to name only the more prominent...

...And by keeping human health uppermost in their minds, they would contribute to preserving the ecological chain that exists in society as much as it does in nature...

...A total ban on strip-mining, in other words, would condemn at least some miners to death...