What makes it the Anthropocene?

 As I’ve collected materials cut from magazines or printed from internet documents having to do with environmental issues, I’ve wanted to believe that lessons learned from mistakes will be taken to heart, that humans will find ways to avoid despoiling the natural world. But experience has left me philosophically hard-bitten, for want of a better expression. 

Our evolutionary development has endowed humans with curiosity, ambition, imagination, and competitive predilections, with the capacity to dream of and build the modern world in all its complexity. But though we possess brains with amazing powers, it has become frighteningly clear that we’re chronically unwilling to focus on all the consequences of each and every upward turn of the “progress” ratchet. Those nasty vices such as avarice and lust for power have too often had the upper hand.  It’s becoming commonplace now to speak of the Anthropocene, an unofficial recognition that human-kind is creating a new epoch by causing mass extinctions of plant and animal species, pollution of land and waters, and significantly increasing the planet’s surface temperature, among other lasting impacts.

 Whether it's neoliberalism, unregulated capitalism, Chinese authoritarianism, benevolent socialism, or whatever else might be ginned up in the way of a governance system, nearly all of us now live in a globally competitive world in which production and consumption of goods and services is the driving force. Nations make resolutions to reform their practices with respect to environmental pollution, sometimes own up to past failures, and vow to fix things.  Simultaneously, the global economy continues to invent new ways to make money and raise standards of living while continuing and even enlarging upon destructive practices of the past.

Missteps taken in pursuit of short-term goals can have long-lasting consequences. Here are two examples of human invention, initiated in good faith and with optimism about the benefits to humanity that would accrue from their use.  

PFAS.  These letters stand for per- and polyflouroalkyl substances. Invented over the past several decades, for the most part in corporate research laboratories, they collectively possess several desirable properties. They are quite stable, meaning that they don’t break down easily if heated or subjected to radiation.  This makes them useful in such diverse applications as coated cookware and fire-extinguishing foams.  As they’ve increased in numbers and the varieties of use to which they’ve been put, PFAS’s have become ubiquitous. They’ve seemed to be real winners in making the world better. They of course would never have become universally dispersed if they had failed to pass tests for toxicity before being put to widespread use.  This brings us face to face with a moral issue, encapsulated in the precautionary principle, which has four central components:

1. taking preventive action in the face of uncertainty; 

2. shifting the burden of proof to the proponents of an activity; 

3. exploring a wide range of alternatives to possibly harmful actions; and 

4. increasing public participation in decision-making.

Not everyone is in favor of applying these principles. For one thing, it’s not possible to quantitatively delineate boundaries. How would these principles be applied to the PFAS family of substances?  Some substances are acutely poisonous, others act more slowly or accumulate over time before manifesting toxicity. In the case of the PFAS, it took some time for their toxicity to show up. It became a big issue when the DuPont Chemical Company was careless about disposing of waste materials.  The movie “Dark Waters'' tells the story of a suit brought against DuPont Chemical by residents of Parkersburg, WVA. The company was accused of dumping toxic wastes containing PFAS, with deadly consequences for those living in the area. Many people sickened and died, children's’ development was stunted. The suit went on for years.   In the end, DuPont, while denying any wrongdoing, agreed to pay $335 million to settle the dispute. 

An internet search reveals multiple suits against 3M, Dupont, and other actors, including the U.S. Government, for poisoning water systems with PFAS, causing many health problems in adults and developmental problems in children. The EPA has not set enforceable drinking water standards for perfluorinated chemicals, although they have a 70-parts-per-trillion advisory. It is difficult to find water anywhere (including bottled water, by the way) that doesn’t contain traces of PFAS. The US government continues to use these substances in firefighting foams, and they find their way into water sources on which people depend.  Meanwhile, new PFASs are being invented in research labs. Recent studies have shown that PFAS pollution easily rides the wind; they have been found in soil and groundwater at locations up to 30 miles downwind of a factory in West Virginia in which they were used. 

PFAS technology is employed in COVID-19 testing equipment, and in medical garments, hospital gowns, drapes, and divider curtains. We can be pretty sure that eventually, all of the materials containing PFAS will end up as trash or consigned to an incinerator.  A team of professors from Bennington College recently collected soil and surface water samples from near an incinerator in New York state that had a contract to burn firefighting foam containing PFAS. The study revealed that the incineration conditions didn’t effectively destroy the PFAS.  Instead, it merely spread them into the surroundings.  The New York Department of Environmental Conservation has directed that incineration of PFAS cease until conditions can be established that actually destroy these very stable substances.  They’re termed “forever compounds'' for good reason.

Roadway products  A few years ago, when a research team from the San Francisco Estuary Institute measured the contents of stormwater collecting from a parking lot near the Oakland Coliseum after a rain event, they found an extraordinary amount of rubbery black fragments in the samples.  These results triggered a three-year-long study of water collected at many sites around the bay.  The team was able to estimate that more than 7 trillion synthetic particles are washing into San Francisco Bay annually. About half of them were the rubbery fragments associated with tires. Tire rubber is a complex mixture of natural rubber, 20 to 60 percent synthetic rubber formed from plastic polymers, and a great many other ingredients such as carbon black, sulfur, oils, steel wires, and fabrics. Other additives, mostly proprietary, are added to extend lifetime, improve flexibility, and serve as antioxidants. Contact with the road in driving causes wear on the exterior surface of the tire, producing particles of complex composition. It’s been estimated that a car in the US could lose up to ten pounds annually in tire wear. Much more will be lost from a huge semi-trailer truck continually on the road. 

For several decades it's been observed that coho salmon in US Pacific Northwest streams have been subject to sudden massive die-offs. Despite strenuous efforts to improve the habitat for salmon in the 1990s, large fractions of adults migrating up certain streams were suddenly dying. Researchers suspected that something was washing off nearby roadways to cause these deaths, which correlated with rainfalls. Just recently environmental scientists at the University of Washington discovered that the primary culprit comes from a chemical widely used to protect tires from ozone. After working their way through several thousand potential candidates the researchers found the culprit. The compound in question is proprietary, so the researchers had to go out of their way to synthesize their own supply. They were able to establish that the compound, labeled 6PPD, is quite poisonous for Coho salmon. 6PPD is of course washing off roadways around San Francisco Bay and all over the world.  The waterways that collect the runoff from the roads may or may not contain life-forms that are poisoned by it. Southwest Florida where I live is very heavily trafficked. The runoff from roadways almost entirely runs into creeks and rivers that empty into the Gulf of Mexico. What is the long term damage to the multiple ecosystems that live in those waters? We don’t know. 

Were precautionary principles applied before 6PPD and its cousins were approved for use? It’s hard to imagine how that could even be done. Thousands of novel chemical substances are discovered in research laboratories every year, and many of them find commercial applications.  Whether it be water plants, bumblebees, coho salmon or human beings, nature suffers at the hands of human creativity. Organisms or ecosystems have mechanisms for coping with novel substances or with environmental changes. In the course of evolution, complex biological systems evolved resiliency, capacities to eliminate or reduce the effectiveness of toxins. When our early ancestors learned to use fire, they huddled around campfires, in hutches or lodges, breathing in smoke rich with carcinogens and other toxins. It wasn’t good for them, but they survived. Similarly, we survive the toxic effects of synthetic materials that find their way through industry into our lives. But is surviving our vision for the future?  Sometimes, as with some industrial dumps, toxic waste materials move into the larger environment at concentrations that override the limited capacity of living systems to cope with them. We read about and see movies about a few notorious examples. But a great many substances pass regulatory requirements set at a certain level, and are distributed globally. Only later does it turn out that, like campfire smoke, they’re not good for us. 

I do not see a way to significantly change the script of our present scenario.  Human society is becoming increasingly global through the agency of shared technologies, which exercise powerful influences on people’s values and aspirations.  Much has been written on the consequences of our having been enthralled by our successes as a species.  Paul Hawken writes, 

It is an understandable vanity for humans to believe that their cells are privileged or unique, but the distinction between human cells and those of a sunflower is shockingly narrow, while between primates and humans the difference is slender as a thread….We live in community, not alone, and any sense of separateness that we harbor is illusion. Humans are animals, albeit extraordinary ones, and have no special immunity conferred upon them. Given the present rate of planetary pollution and destruction, we need to negotiate a dѐtente with nature and ourselves.

Ah, but how do we enter into that negotiation, when most of the human race is unaware that it’s needed, and is disinclined to deal with what promises to be a demanding, even painful, experience?  The illustrious scientist Edward O. Wilson has written extensively on the urgency of acting now to preserve the biodiversity of the planet. In his book, Half-Earth, he’s quite clear: We have entered into a new epoch.  The biosphere is disappearing, species-by-species, at a sickening pace. Many have termed this epoch the Anthropocene, because it's clear that humans are the major causative agents.  Only an enormous commitment to preservation could save most of what is left.  In a final chapter, Wilson suggests ways in which we might employ our intelligence and imaginative capacities to put aside half of planet Earth for the preservation of biodiversity and to reclaim some of what has been lost. He argues that we can still do this by reshaping society. Check out the Half-Earth Project website. 

I’m heartened by Wilson’s readiness to embrace new technologies.  Futurists have been talking of the inevitability of massive shifts in how and where people will live, of producing food from cellular bases, thus freeing land for a return to a biodiverse natural state, of dramatic reductions in per capita energy consumptions, and more.  But even if society can learn to think differently about planet Earth, reforms won’t go as they should unless our species adopts an ethic that overrides all other claims on our fealty: we are nature ourselves and must live in it.  Darwin argued that, in keeping with other species, humans evolved to have a moral sense.  How can we evince it with respect to nature? Among other things, we think ahead, envisioning a holistic, soil-supporting agricultural system, weaning ourselves away from animal-focused diets, supporting community-based education and practice. When we’re able, we get our hands in the dirt. We become devoted stewards of the planet’s freshwater. We constantly urge elected officials and those in government to pay attention to the ecology of the bioregion they represent. Just maybe, we’ll succeed in preserving a good bit of Gaia for our progeny. 

There is no going back to nature as it was. People think of the Anthropocene in terms of warming oceans, rising sea levels, and other climate-related changes.  But if we could somehow forestall or reverse many of those changes, there will still be PFAS, 6PPD, countless other man-made chemical substances, and mind-boggling quantities of plastic and other waste.  These may prove to be the greatest drivers of change in the Anthropocene Epoch.

Earth Day, meet Covid-19

This year we celebrated the 50th anniversary of Earth Day. In 1970 the environment was a mess: big cities were beset with pollution and industrial environments were creating literally unliveable surroundings; Los Angeles was thick with a choking smog; wastes in the Cuyahoga River near Cleveland were burning; the natural world was suffering from the effects of pesticide use; chemical dumps seemed to be everywhere.

That first Earth Day was a huge success. Millions of people participated in parades, teach-ins, tree plantings, and other activities in a show of support for a cleaner, healthier world. In 1990 Earth Day became an international observance. It’s the most widely observed secular holiday on the planet. But have we made progress in those 50 years?

In some areas, we’ve done pretty well. Air pollution, for example, is less prevalent in urban environments than in past times. But air pollution is a comparatively easy target for mitigation--just turn down the source! Catalytic mufflers and limits on emissions from smokestacks have made a big difference, but we still have a long way to go.

Solid and liquid waste dumpsites scattered across the nation are not so conveniently dispensed with. The federal law officially known as the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980, termed the federal Superfund program, mandates the identification and cleanup of contaminated sites. The parties responsible for the contamination are required to pay for the cleanup or reimburse the Environmental Protection Agency for doing the job. About 40,000 federal Superfund sites, large and small, across the country have been targeted for cleanup. Approximately 1,600 of those sites considered the most highly contaminated have been listed on a National Priorities List (NPL).

As a cynic would have predicted, the government has found it difficult or inconvenient to dun the polluters for cleaning up their messes. Corporations come and go, right? It’s not clear who should receive the cleanup bill. The result has been that lately, taxpayers are paying for most of the cleanup. Whatever initial enthusiasm there was for this work has declined. During 2000-2015, Congress allocated about $1.26 billion of general revenue to the Superfund program each year. That’s chump change in comparison with the magnitude of the problem, and it’s been reduced still further under the Trump administration. After all these years, cleanup is proceeding on a mere handful of the more than 1200 sites on the NPL list that await cleaning. By the way, the US government may be the largest polluter, with the most intractable sites.

It will come as no surprise that low income and minority populations have suffered most from the adverse effects of toxic waste dumping. Back in the day, local authorities found it easy to grant permits for waste disposal on lands in proximity to low-income neighborhoods. In 1994, President Bill Clinton proposed a new Superfund reform bill, Executive Order (E.O) 12898, which called for federal agencies to make achieving environmental justice a requirement by addressing low-income populations and minority populations that have experienced disproportionate adverse health and environmental effects. The work goes on--at a snail’s pace.


While slow progress is being made in cleaning up past environmental messes, new ones appear. They don’t look like most of the old ones, those piles of full barrels, ground sites soaked with toxic materials, poisonous ponds. Consider the aftereffects of the frenzied drilling for gas and oil in the Marcellus shale formation in Pennsylvania. This is not old stuff; it’s a 21st-century story. It would take more space and patience than I have to recite the litany of environmental misdeeds done in the exploitation of this formation. What remains are thousands of played-out or abandoned wells, signified to the passerby by a mere stub of iron piping or an abandoned pumping station. But those thousands of wells, with their networks of horizontal drilling holes, will continue to leak oil, gas, and brines contaminated with a host of chemicals, spoiling the water in aquifers that people have depended on as their primary water source. Potential problems were evident from the very beginnings of the Marcellus development, but in the rush to make a financial killing, residents’ concerns were ignored by regulators and politicians. Now, people are often unknowingly living virtually on top of abandoned, plugged wells that leak inflammable methane. Who is responsible for cleaning up these messes? We seem not to have learned how to head off environmental disasters in the rush to make money.

Here’s another example: The covid-19 coronavirus pandemic has produced upheavals in global markets for petroleum products. Overcapacity has driven the price of oil to near zero. Not only is the market saturated with available stocks, but there is also a lack of storage capacity. Texas, the nation’s largest oil and gas producer, has seen thousands of layoffs and there will be more to come.
The flaring of excess methane gas at the wellheads is wasting billions of cubic feet of methane because it’s uneconomical to ship to market. Uneconomical? The message clearly is that if it isn’t economical, we’re just going to flare away, and in the process increase greenhouse gas concentrations. They could stop these affronts to the environment with strong regulation, but we’re talking Texas politics. "Environment" doesn’t seem to be in their vocabulary.

Yet another one: What do we do when chemicals widely used in various applications come to be regarded as profoundly toxic? The family of chemicals known as perfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) developed largely at 3M and DuPont chemical companies seemed like miracle substances because of their ability to repel water, protect surfaces, resist heat, and many other useful properties. They were soon found everywhere: nonstick cooking ware, repellents in fabric, firefighting foams, shaving cream, the list goes on. These compounds are useful largely because they’re chemically quite inert. But the downside of that useful characteristic is that when they enter a living system they take something like 5 years to excrete. Early studies of toxicity in animals did not reveal toxic effects in chemical workers exposed to low concentrations in manufacturing facilities. But prolonged exposure to perfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), one of them in particular, known as C8, was eventually seen as harming health: developmental damage to fetuses during pregnancy, low birth weight, accelerated puberty and distorted bones. The EPA website links PFASs to kidney and testicular cancer, liver tissue damage, impaired production of antibodies, and cholesterol changes. This presents a tough challenge; a family of chemicals that persist in the environment for long times, and are everywhere. They’re not very toxic, but enough so that over time they cause medical issues. Getting the genie back in the bottle looks like an intractable problem. We can’t undo what has been done, much of it without an understanding of how these substances could prove to be toxic. But we can be aggressive about not allowing the problem to get worse. While we’re at it, we might want to ask whether such problems can be anticipated. It’s strange: a search of the web turns up a lot of hits for the prudential rule as it applies to financial decision- and rule-making, but none found a prudential rule for environmental rule-making. Maybe I’m just not searching assiduously enough.

The global profit-oriented capitalist system that has called the shots for decades has brought the world to a bad place. Neoliberal capitalists want to run their shows with minimal regulation, and in the US they’ve pretty much had their way. But corporations’ frequent disregard for the larger social welfare as they focus on profits has begun to arouse palpable resentment. The covid-19 pandemic has exposed the indifference of corporations and many of the ultra-rich to the economic stresses many people face. People have begun to ask why society should run as it does. When people are being forced out of the labor market and pressed into homelessness and hunger, who comes to rescue them? When the environment teeters on the brink of runaway global warming, who will call a halt to continued pumping out of greenhouse warming gases? 

Some people have the notion that the new generation of really big business is comparatively innocent in terms of producing adverse environmental effects. What environmental harm could Google, Facebook, or Amazon produce? Aren’t some of them actively at work in addressing environmental problems? We know for sure that they are all enormous consumers of energy. The “absurdly quick delivery” madness among large sellers, particularly Amazon, but including copycat services from Target, eBay and Walmart, is sure to have negative impacts in terms of global warming. Google presents itself as embracing sustainability and environmental stewardship, but it is a massive consumer of energy.

The company is no doubt running its data centers as efficiently as possible, but the sheer enormity of their energy consumption requires millions of gallons of water per day. Water is becoming a critically stressed resource; some Google’s facilities are located in locales in Texas and South Carolina where water is already scarce. Legal battles over water rights have ensued. What will take priority, water for a data center, or water for peoples’ homes? Facebook seems to have a strong vision of how to minimize its environmental footprint, though, like Google's, it’s data centers are large consumers of energy. I’m making these points about the new giants simply to point out that they, like all large commercial enterprises, entail strong impacts on the environment. It would be too bad if they become the images of the bad guys in the poster for Earth Day 2030.

In many respects, it’s a scary time for ordinary people--financially, in terms of health, and the prospects of young people coming up through the school systems. We’re being prompted to ask questions about our personal lives and the society we’ve been living in. This viral disruption will require more than a patchwork response. We’re in the early days for the covid-19 pandemic. Epidemiologist Michael Osterholm points out that in the US only about 3% of the population has shown itself to be infected. Before the infection plays itself out probably 60% or so will have been infected. As he says, “we’re only in the second inning of a nine-inning game”. A long way to go and a lot we will have to learn. 

Back to the title of this blog: What would Earth Day have looked like environmentally on its 50th anniversary if the Covid-19 pandemic had not occurred? The almost magical effects of the virus have been remarked upon everywhere. My local paper, The Fort Myers News-Press, rhapsodizes on the clarity of the urban skies; wild animals allowing themselves to be seen; the eerie quiet. As the paper writes: “When people stay home, Earth becomes cleaner and wilder.”

Will humans get the message?