Why Mother Earth Needs Head and Shoulders
By Marni Soupcoff
This month saw the emergence of yet another study about the environment. When these things come out, it is tempting to tune out. Inevitably, a hard core of environmentalists will rush forward to declare the planet doomed and the human race responsible, while a hard core of naysay-happy scientists will meet the claims with an abundance of evidence that...well, that the environmentalists haven't got any evidence themselves. By the time they're done, some of us have turned into environmental paranoids, some of us have purposely started chucking Styrofoam and old computers into landfills as an expression of defiance, and the rest of us have quickly moved on to more manageable topics that evoke less moral passion, such as abortion or the death penalty. The interesting thing, though, is that this latest study seems to have surprised everyone without particularly serving as perfect ammunition for either side of the pollution debate.
It turns out, according to research published in the April issue of
Science magazine, that more than 50 percent of the fine dust in the earth's atmosphere comes, not from sinister man-made creations, but from natural sources including dandruff, animal hair, dead skin, and decaying leaves. These are not products of the industrial age. They are perfectly, well,
organic substances that are doing nasty things like blocking light from the sun, causing climate change and perhaps even spreading disease. So the darling songbird flying across a clear blue sky may be contributing as much to the level of dust pollution through the particles left behind by its feathers as any man-made soot or pollution.
Not surprisingly, some critics of traditional environmentalism have had a field day with this information. If the answer to all our pollution problems is to get Paris Hilton's chiuaua using Selsun Blue and to encourage those selfish trees to stop she dropping their leaves so damn much, then obviously the whole thing must be a big joke! This is clearly a gross exaggeration. As interesting and counterintuitive as the findings are, they do not negate the existence of actual human contributions to pollution.
What is informative about them, though, is that they are a good reminder that the man vs. nature dichotomy that it is so often posited and accepted without question--and particularly the popular notion that anything natural must be less harmful than anything unnatural--is not so clear-cut as it might seem.
Yes, spewing loads of nitrogen and sulfur into the air (as happens when coal is burned without adequate scrubbers) is going to affect the atmosphere and cause a form of nasty pollution (in this case, acid rain). But the soft white hair of a little cotton tailed rabbit going about its business in a field of clover and the feathers of a soaring eagle are not blameless either.
Which is not to say that we should give up and dump our coal scrubbers because "nature" is no better behaved than we are, or that we should start handing furry animals emissions permits and requesting that they sign on to the Kyoto Protocol.
It simply means there is no good way to divide the world neatly into categories of what is "of the earth" and what is artificial, what is wholesome and what is polluting. The truth is that most things are both, and the best thing we can do as humans is use our power of reason to study the effects of all actions, as the
Science study has done, and then come to a greater understanding of the causation of problematic environmental conditions, such as acid rain or smog or atmospheric dust clouds. Goodness knows if we don't do it, there is very little chance that the bunnies and birdies will, so we might as well take ownership of what we can, while being reminded that doing so does not have to entail a blame-it-all-on-human-industrialzation approach.
The
Science study is not going to end the climate change debate, nor will it satisfy extremists on either side of the environmental divide that their intellectual opponents have a point. It is helpful, though, for keeping those of us who are somewhere in between from taking too extreme a step to either side. Realizing that even dog dandruff can qualify as an environmental nasty may not be good for the soul, exactly, but it sure is helpful in maintaining a balanced sense of perspective about good old mother Earth.
Marni Soupcoff's column appears on Monday at TAEmag.com.
