Unfortunately, this week we return to Miller’s Living in the Environment focusing on Chapters 17 and 21. The focus of this blog post will be on the hazards and wastes present in our environments and their impact on human health. If there is one thing I will never forget from my childhood, it is the obscenely loud alarm that would ring out periodically each month. That alarm was blasted from approximately 30 miles from where I lived, that alarm came from the nuclear power plant, Indian Point. Many people consider Indian point itself to be a threat to the local communities, however, Indian point has already impacted our community. Indian point is very close to the Hudson river and many people where I live believe that its proximity has contaminated the river and made it not safe to swim in. I do not see this as hard to believe as its known that Indian Point used to deposit its nuclear waste such as expended fuel rods into the Hudson River (it wouldn’t surprise me if they still do), health departments put up warning signs stating that pregnant women and children under fifteen shouldn’t eat fish from the Hudson and other should only do so sparingly, and with those alarms blaring periodically it makes sense that even the presence of the power plant has such a strong psychological impact on the local communities.
This is the main focus of chapter 17 and 21, Miller explicitly details the role of hazards in the environment and how they threaten our surroundings, our livelihoods, and our lives. One of the big transitions in this chapter, is its shift from telling us how the consequences of our actions such as pollution and environmental abuse affect ecosystems and resources to how they impact human life. These chapters focus on the bacteria and viruses that rampage our societies, how chemicals we’ve used persist in the food we eat and the water we drink, and the impacts that our solid waste such as the nuclear fuel rods I mentioned earlier can have impacts that can influence communities for centuries. Probably the greatest enemy of humanity throughout history has been vectors of disease. Whether bacterial or viral diseases have killed the most people throughout history, from cholera to tuberculosis and the Black Death to Covid-19. These microscopic biological invaders have pestered us long before the advent of modern medicine. Miller begins chapter 17 by introducing one of the more recent diseases that has been a headache for modern medicine since its discovery, HIV and aids. Miller explains how viruses “work by invading a cell and taking over its genetic machinery to copy themselves in order to spread throughout the body” (1) and after repeatedly copying themselves they “cause diseases such as flu and AIDS” (1). It is also believed that “throughout history, more than half of all infectious diseases were originally transmitted to humans from wild or domesticated animals” (1) and historically plagues and diseases rose in areas where animals and humans had frequent interaction such as pre-modern cities. This video by a you-tuber called CGP Grey explains why there wasn’t a reverse epidemic on the old world during the Colombian exchange, and by doing this it explicitly explains how the majority of plagues and pandemics have come about.
However, going back to HIV and Aids these are diseases that are heavily associated with the economic disparity of certain parts of the world, “we live in a world where 1 billion people have health problems because they do not get enough to eat and another 1.6 billion face health problems from eating too much” (2 Chapter 12). And this also applies to HIV and Aids, the countries where these are considered epidemics tend to be countries that either do not have or cannot afford to have women’s education, sexual education, the medical infrastructure to provide methods of safe sex and birth control, or they still have high infant mortality death-rates. Infrastructure and the economic ability of countries are two important factors for people looking to go into environmental policy making, environmental infrastructure, or environmental research and the following video explains some of the strains that population demographics represent in terms of hazards to human health and how sometimes culture can be an opponent to what may seem like a reasonable solution.
These chapters are quite topical as what’s mainly on people’s minds and in the news is the coronavirus, a pandemic that has spread rapidly throughout the world. The disease originated in, Wuhan, China and despite what some people believe it did not start from a man eating bat soup, that was a rumor originated on a website called 4chan (infact bats don’t carry this strain of coronavirus, but instead carry strain-14 which did not mutate into Covid-19). Currently, scientists believe the disease may have been transferred from a Pangolin (pictured below), however this is not confirmed.
Our garbage is another major threat to the health of humanity, and many of us in the first world don’t have the slightest idea of how impactful it can be. We are blessed with not having to visibly deal with our waste in our daily lives beyond throwing it out unless we litter, and we do not always realize that our waste can be hazardous and toxic on its own, and may only be dealt with in hazardous ways as well. In particular, electronic waste or e-waste is a waste almost solely produced in mass by the first world and this waste still obtains many of the valuable metals and minerals used to create things such as computer chips. When we throw these products out, it wouldn’t be profitable or reasonable to not extract those minerals.”The e-waste” that we produce “that is not buried in or incarcerated is shipped to China, India, and other Asian and African countries for processing” and the reason that we export this work is because the “labor is cheap and environmental regulations are weak in those countries. Workers-many of them children-dismantle, burn and treat e-waste with acids to recover valuable metals and reusable parts” (1). Many of our products present a threat to us in almost every step of their existence. The extractions of the materials needed to make them can rapidly deplete resources needed to sustain life, the synthesis of the products can release greenhouse gases and noxious fumes or waste as byproducts, and their disposal can leave toxic waste where its not meant to be, microplastic contamination, and now as shown in this chapter the methods of disposal can expose people to toxic waste as well.
Question: There is always a waste product, are there any methods that could potential make use of these hazardous wastes? If we could use them rather than dispose of them we may be able to mitigate their impact on human health.
Word Count: 1102
Bibliography:
- Miller, G. Tyler, and Scott E. Spoolman. 2016. Living in the Environment: Nineteenth Edition, 323-568. Canada: Cengage Learning.
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEYh5WACqEk&t=320s
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMo3nZHVrZ4&t=9s
Environmental Studies and Science 