Factory Pollution Quotes

We know, at least, that this decision (ending factory farming) will help prevent deforestation, curb global warming, reduce pollution, save oil reserves, lessen the burden on rural America, decrease human rights abuses, improve publish health, and help eliminate the most systematic animal abuse in history.

One hundred and fifty years ago, the monster began, this country had become a place of industry. Factories grew on the landscape like weeds. Trees fell, fields were up-ended, rivers blackened. The sky choked on smoke and ash, and the people did, too, spending their days coughing and itching, their eyes turned forever toward the ground. Villages grew into town, towns into cities. And people began to live on the earth rather than within it.

This was a normal town once, and we were normal people. Most of us worked at the plastics factory on the outskirts of town. Then one day there was an accident... something escaped from the factory, a yellow gas. It floated over the town so fast that we didn't see it, didn't realize... and then it was too late, and Dark Falls wasn't a normal town anymore.

To look at people in capitalist society and conclude that human nature is egoism, is like looking at people in a factory where pollution is destroying their lungs and saying that it is human nature to cough

You never think it's gonna happen to you, but all that pollution and dirty fumes and flights and factories and shit we don't need and suddenly there you are, a stupid girl sitting alone on some steps, waiting to see if your family is ever coming back.

I asked the feedlot manager why they didn't just spray the liquefied manure on neighboring farms. The farmers don't want it, he explained. The nitrogen and phosphorus levels are so high that spraying the crops would kill them. He didn't say that feedlot wastes also contain heavy metals and hormone residues, persistent chemicals that end up in waterways downstream, where scientists have found fish and amphibians exhibiting abnormal sex characteristics.

It's quite simple, they poisoned it with smoke, chemicals and pollution from factories and cars, and power stations. Silly humans knew what they were doing, but carried on poisoning the planet anyway.

And one clouded stream that never ran dry was that choked with the scum of humanism, the poison spewed out by the factory at its headwaters. There it was: its lights burning brilliantly as it worked even through the night - the factory of Western European ideals. The pollution from that factory degraded the exalted fervor to kill; it withered the green of the sakaki's leaves.

Just as a factory pumping out pollutants degrades that air for everyone, so a TV blasting cable news into an airport lounge degrades the attentional capacities of everyone nearby.

Each day we wake up and make myriad choices that affect others. We clothe ourselves with shirts, pants, and shoes that may have been sewn together by women working in factories fourteen-plus hours a day for a nonliving wage; we buy products manufactured in ways the destroy forests, pollute waterways, and poison the air; we wash our hair with shampoos that may have been squeezed into the eyes of conscious rabbits or force-fed to them in quantities that kill; and on and on. As Derrick Jensen has written in his book "The Culture of Make Believe", "It is possible to destroy a culture without being aware of its existence. It is possible to commit genocide or ecocide from the comfort of one's living room

All the myths he believed in would crystallize into even greater mythology in future years and become weapons of war used by politicians and evildoers to kill defenseless schoolchildren by the dozens so that a few rich men spouting the same mythology that Doc spouted could buy islands that held more riches than the town of Pottstown had or would ever have. Gigantic yachts that would sail the world and pollute the waters and skies, owned by men creating great companies that made weapons of great power in factories that employed the poor, weapons that were sold cheaply enough so that the poor could purchase them and kill one another.

Why do we need so many people on Earth? I ask you. What are they good for? They live out ludicrous lives of pointless desperation. Ninety-nine percent of the human population is so much wasted resources. Stubborn vermin, we humans are. Granted, in the past, the unwashed masses were necessary. We needed them to till our fields and fight our wars. We needed them to labor in our factories making consumer crap that we flipped back at them at a handsome profit. Alas, those days are gone. We live in a boutique economy now. Energy is abundant and cheap. Mentars and robotic labor make and manage everything. So who needs people? People are so much dead white. They eat up our profits. They produce nothing but pollution and social unrest. They drive us crazy with their pissing and moaning. I think we can all agree that Corporation Earth is in need of a serious downsizing. ... The boutique economy has no need of the masses, so let's get rid of them. But how, you ask? Not with wars, surely, or disease, famine, or mass murder. Despots have tried all these methods through the millennia, and they're never a permanent solution. No, all we need to do is buy up the ground from under their feet -- and evict them. We're buying up the planet, Bishop, fair and square. We're turning it into the most exclusive gated community in history. Now, the question is, in two hundred years, will you be a member of the landowners club, or will you be living in some tin can in outer space drinking recycled piss?

If we are at all serious about ending factory farming, then the absolute least we can do is stop sending checks to the absolute worst abusers. For some, the decision to eschew factory-farmed products will be easy. For others, the decision will be a hard one. To those for whom it sounds like a hard decision (I would have counted myself in this group), the ultimate question is whether it is worth the inconvenience. We know, at least, that this decision will help prevent deforestation, curb global warming, reduce pollution, save oil reserves, lessen the burden on rural America, decrease human rights abuses, improve public health, and help eliminate the most systematic animal abuse in world history.

An industrial map in the mid-twentieth century colored New York’s Hudson River black. The mapmakers considered a black river a good thing—full of industry! The more factory outputs, the more progress. When that map was made, “nature” was widely seen as a resource to be exploited. Few people considered the consequences of careless disposal of industrial waste. The culture has shifted dramatically over the last fifty years. When I share this story today, most people shudder and ask how anyone could think of a polluted river as good.   But today we are doing the same thing with the river of culture. Think of the arts and other cultural enterprises as rivers that water the soil of culture. We are painting this cultural river black—full of industry, dominated by commercial interests, careless of toxic byproducts—and there are still cultural mapmakers who claim that this is a good thing. The pollution makes it difficult to for us to breathe, difficult for artists to create, difficult for any of us to see beauty through the murk.

One instance of this failure is the case of smoke, as well as air pollution generally. In so far as the outpouring of smoke by factories pollutes the air and damages the persons and property of others, it is an invasive act. It is equivalent to an act of vandalism and in a truly free society would have been punished after court action brought by the victims. Air pollution, then, is not an example of a defect in a system of absolute property rights, but of failure on the part of the government to preserve property rights. Note that the remedy, in a free society, is not the creation of an administrative State bureau to prescribe regulations for smoke control. The remedy is judicial action to punish and proscribe pollution damage to the person and property of others.48 In

Modern proletarian package: On day one we will work for ten hours in a polluted textile factory, passing the night in a cramped apartment block. On day two we will work for ten hours as cashiers in the local department store, going back to sleep in the same apartment block. On day three we will learn from the native people how to open a bank account and fill out mortgage forms.

Many of the streams that feed the river of culture are polluted, and the soil this river should be watering is thus parched and fragmented. Most of these we know, but let me briefly touch on some of the fault lines in the cultural soil (starving the soul) as well as some of the sources of the poisons in the water (polluting the soul).   Starving the cultural soul   One of the most powerful sources of cultural fragmentation has grown out of the great successes of the industrial revolution. Its vision, standards, and methods soon proliferated beyond the factory and the economic realm and were embraced in sectors from education to government and even church. The result was reductionism. Modern people began to equate progress with efficiency. Despite valiant and ongoing resistance from many quarters—including industry—success for a large part of our culture is now judged by efficient production and mass consumption. We often value repetitive, machine-like performance as critical to “bottom line” success. In the seductive industrialist mentality, “people” become “workers” or “human resources,” who are first seen as interchangeable cogs, then treated as machines—and are now often replaced by machines.

In this world, as in our own, nearly all the chief means of production, nearly all the land, mines, factories, railways, ships, were controlled for private profit by a small minority of the population. These privileged individuals were able to force the masses to work for them on pain of starvation. The tragic farce inherent in such a system was already approaching. The owners directed the energy of the workers increasingly towards the production of more means of production rather than to the fulfilment of the needs of individual life. For machinery might bring profit to the owners; bread would not. With the increasing competition of machine with machine, profits declined, and therefore wages, and therefore effective demand for goods. Marketless products were destroyed, though bellies were unfed and backs unclad. Unemployment, disorder, and stern repression increased as the economic system disintegrated. A familiar story! As conditions deteriorated, and the movements of charity and state-charity became less and less able to cope with the increasing mass of unemployment and destitution, the new pariah-race became more and more psychologically useful to the hate-needs of the sacred, but still powerful, prosperous. The theory was spread that these wretched beings were the result of secret systematic race-pollution by riff-raff immigrants, and that they deserved no consideration whatever. They were therefore allowed only the basest forms of employment and the harshest conditions of work. When unemployment had become a serious social problem, practically the whole pariah stock was workless and destitute. It was of course easily believed that unemployment, far from being due to the decline of capitalism, was due to the worthlessness of the pariahs.

The pump was connected to nothing. And sadly, neither was the man. For his wife did not love him. His children did not miss him. The town did not erect a statue in his honor. All the myths he believed in would crystallize into even greater mythology in future years and become weapons of war used by politicians and evildoers to kill defenseless schoolchildren by the dozens so that a few rich men spouting the same mythology that Doc spouted could buy islands that held more riches than the town of Pottstown had or would ever have. Gigantic yachts that would sail the world and pollute the waters and skies, owned by men creating great companies that made weapons of great power in factories that employed the poor, weapons that were sold cheaply enough so that the poor could purchase them and kill one another. Any man could buy one and walk into schools and bring death to dozens of children and teachers and anyone else stupid enough to believe in all that American mythology of hope, freedom, equality, and justice.

If it’s hard to believe that death could take the voice of a siren to seduce men, it’s certainly true that men, whether they knew it or not, wanted to die. For years, for decades. Pollution: the polluters sullied themselves first and foremost: “I live in my factory yard, even though I have a house in town,” says one company owner. It was violence, first and foremost against themselves. A young man charged with armed robbery is asked whether it was necessary to shoot at the cashier. He replies, “I don’t know why I shot the cashier, I wanted to shoot myself.

The real nemesis of the modern economy is ecological collapse. Both scientific progress and economic growth take place within a brittle biosphere, and as they gather steam, so the shock waves destabilise the ecology. In order to provide every person in the world with the same standard of living as affluent Americans, we would need a few more planets – but we only have this one. If progress and growth do end up destroying the ecosystem, the cost will be dear not merely to vampires, foxes and rabbits, but also to Sapiens. An ecological meltdown will cause economic ruin, political turmoil, a fall in human standards of living, and it might threaten the very existence of human civilisation. We could lessen the danger by slowing down the pace of progress and growth. If this year investors expect to get a 6 per cent return on their portfolios, in ten years they will be satisfied with a 3 per cent return, in twenty years only 1 per cent, and in thirty years the economy will stop growing and we’ll be happy with what we’ve already got. Yet the creed of growth firmly objects to such a heretical idea. Instead, it suggests we should run even faster. If our discoveries destabilise the ecosystem and threaten humanity, then we should discover something to protect ourselves. If the ozone layer dwindles and exposes us to skin cancer, we should invent better sunscreen and better cancer treatments, thereby also promoting the growth of new sunscreen factories and cancer centres. If all the new industries pollute the atmosphere and the oceans, causing global warming and mass extinctions, then we should build for ourselves virtual worlds and hi-tech sanctuaries that will provide us with all the good things in life even if the planet is as hot, dreary and polluted as hell.

The forager economy provided most people with more interesting lives than agriculture or industry do. Today, a Chinese factory hand leaves home around seven in the morning, makes her way through polluted streets to a sweatshop, and there operates the same machine, in the same way, day in, day out, for ten long and mind-numbing hours, returning home around seven in the evening in order to wash dishes and do the laundry. Thirty thousand years ago, a Chinese forager might leave camp with her companions at, say, eight in the morning. They’d roam the nearby forests and meadows, gathering mushrooms, digging up edible roots, catching frogs and occasionally running away from tigers. By early afternoon, they were back at the camp to make lunch. That left them

Compared to cotton, synthetic fibers require a lot less water to produce, but that’s not necessarily a good enough argument for using them, since they have other significant impacts: they are still made of oil, and their production can require a lot of energy. MIT calculated that the global impact of producing polyester alone was somewhere between 706 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, or about what 185 coal-fired power plants emit in a year.2 Samit Chevli, the principal investigator for biomaterials at DuPont, the giant chemical company, has said that it will be hundreds of years before regular polyester degrades.3 Plus, while the chemicals used in production typically aren’t released to the environment, if factories don’t have treatment systems in the last phase of production, they can release antimony, an element that can be harmful to human health, as well as other toxins and heavy metals. Despite having just written a good amount about the impacts associated with the production of synthetic fibers, that’s actually not why I wanted to call attention to your yoga pants and dry-fit sweat-wicking T-shirts, which we wear out to dinner. It is hard for me to leave my fashion critique at the door, but what I actually want to say about synthetic fibers is that they are everywhere—not just in all of our clothes, but literally everywhere: rivers, lakes, oceans, agricultural fields, mountaintops, glaciers. Everywhere. Synthetic fibers, actually, may be one of the most abundant, widespread, and stubborn forms of pollution that we have inadvertently created.

Suppose you were given a choice between the following two vacation packages: Stone Age package: On day one we will hike for ten hours in a pristine forest, setting camp for the night in a clearing by a river. On day two we will canoe down the river for ten hours, camping on the shores of a small lake. On day three we will learn from the native people how to fish in the lake and how to find mushrooms in the nearby woods. Modern proletarian package: On day one we will work for ten hours in a polluted textile factory, passing the night in a cramped apartment block. On day two we will work for ten hours as cashiers in the local department store, going back to sleep in the same apartment block. On day three we will learn from the native people how to open a bank account and fill out mortgage forms.

drop the economist’s beloved notion of ‘externalities’, those incidental effects felt by people who were not involved in the transactions that produced them—such as toxic effluent that affects communities living downstream of a river-polluting factory, or the exhaust fumes inhaled by cyclists biking through city traffic. Such negative externalities, remarks the ecological economist Herman Daly, are those things that ‘we classify as “external” costs for no better reason than because we have made no provision for them in our economic theories’.21 The systems dynamics expert John Sterman concurs. ‘There are no side effects—just effects,’ he says, pointing out that the very notion of side effects is just ‘a sign that the boundaries of our mental models are too narrow, our time horizons too short’.

Suppose you were given a choice between the following two vacation packages: Stone Age package: On day one we will hike for ten hours in a pristine forest, setting camp for the night in a clearing by a river. On day two we will canoe down the river for ten hours, camping on the shores of a small lake. On day three we will learn from the native people how to fish in the lake and how to find mushrooms in the nearby woods. Modern proletarian package: On day one we will work for ten hours in a polluted textile factory, passing the night in a cramped apartment block. On day two we will work for ten hours as cashiers in the local department store, going back to sleep in the same apartment block. On day three we will learn from the native people how to open a bank account and fill out mortgage forms. Which package would you choose?

Suppose you were given a choice between the following two vacation packages: Stone Age package: On day one we will hike for ten hours in a pristine forest, setting camp for the night in a clearing by a river. On day two we will canoe down the river for ten hours, camping on the shores of a small lake. On day three we will learn from the native people how to fish in the lake and how to find mushrooms in the nearby woods. Modern proletarian package: On day one we will work for ten hours in a polluted textile factory, passing the night in a cramped apartment block. On day two we will work for ten hours as cashiers in the local department store, going back to sleep in the same apartment block. On day three we will learn from the native people how to open a bank account and fill out mortgage forms. Which package would you choose? (p.205)

The river twists and turns to face the city. It looms suddenly, massive, stamped on the landscape. Its light wells up around the surrounds, the rock hills, like bruise-blood. Its dirty towers glow. I am debased. I am compelled to worship this extraordinary presence that has silted into existence at the conjunction of two rivers. It is a vast pollutant, a stench, a klaxon sounding. Fat chimneys retch dirt into the sky even now in the deep night. It is not the current which pulls us but the city itself, its weight sucks us in. Faint shouts, here and there the calls of beasts, the obscene clash and pounding from the factories as huge machines rut. Railways trace urban anatomy like protruding veins. Red brick and dark walls, squat churches like troglodytic things, ragged awnings flickering, cobbled mazes in the old town, culs-de-sac, sewers riddling the earth like secular sepulchres, a new landscape of wasteground, crushed stone, libraries fat with forgotten volumes, old hospitals, towerblocks, ships and metal claws that lift cargoes from the water. How could we not see this approaching? What trick of topography is this, that lets the sprawling monster hide behind corners to leap out at the traveller? It is too late to flee.

Despite all the immense achievements of the Chinese dynasties, the Muslim empires and the European kingdoms, even in ad 1850 the life of the average person was not better – and might actually have been worse – than the lives of archaic hunter-gatherers. In 1850 a Chinese peasant or a Manchester factory hand worked longer hours than their hunter-gatherer ancestors; their jobs were physically harder and mentally less fulfilling; their diet was less balanced; hygiene conditions were incomparably worse; and infectious diseases were far more common. Suppose you were given a choice between the following two vacation packages: Stone Age package: On day one we will hike for ten hours in a pristine forest, setting camp for the night in a clearing by a river. On day two we will canoe down the river for ten hours, camping on the shores of a small lake. On day three we will learn from the native people how to fish in the lake and how to find mushrooms in the nearby woods. Modern proletarian package: On day one we will work for ten hours in a polluted textile factory, passing the night in a cramped apartment block. On day two we will work for ten hours as cashiers in the local department store, going back to sleep in the same apartment block. On day three we will learn from the native people how to open a bank account and fill out mortgage forms. Which package would you choose?

The real improvements then must come, to a considerable extent, from the local communities themselves. We need local revision of our methods of land use and production. We need to study and work together to reduce scale, reduce overhead, reduce industrial dependencies; we need to market and process local products locally; we need to bring local economies into harmony with local ecosystems so that we can live and work with pleasure in the same places indefinitely; we need to substitute ourselves, our neighborhoods, our local resources, for expensive imported goods and services; we need to increase cooperation among all local economic entities: households, farms, factories, banks, consumers, and suppliers. If. we are serious about reducing government and the burdens of government, then we need to do so by returning economic self-determination to the people. And we must not do this by inviting destructive industries to provide "jobs" to the community; we must do it by fostering economic democracy. For example, as much as possible the food that is consumed locally ought to be locally produced on small farms, and then processed in small, non- polluting plants that are locally owned. We must do everything possible to provide to ordinary citizens the opportunity to own a small, usable share of the country. In that way, we will put local capital to work locally, not to exploit and destroy the land but to use it well. This is not work just for the privileged, the well-positioned, the wealthy, and the powerful. It is work for everybody. I acknowledge that to advocate such reforms is to advocate a kind of secession-not a secession of armed violence but a quiet secession by which people find the practical means and the strength of spirit to remove themselves from an economy that is exploiting and destroying their homeland. The great, greedy, indifferent national and international economy is killing rural America, just as it is killing America's cities--it is killing our country. Experience has shown that there is no use in appealing to this economy for mercy toward the earth or toward any human community. All true patriots must find ways of opposing it. --1991

Many 18th- and 19th-century artists rejected, criticized, or ignored the Industrial Revolution. Instead of uplifting man, industry seemed to demoralize and dehumanize him. Men, women, and children were forced to work 14 hours a day, 6 days a week in urban factories, without benefits or vacations. Factories polluted the cities, alienated man from the soil, and seemed to benefit only those who owned them. This led many artists to turn to nature or the past or to a make-believe Golden Age when life was beautiful and just. It provoked others to try to reform society through their art.

the impact of the rape, pillage and anarchy that marked the fifth century as the Goths, Alans, Vandals and Huns rampaged across Europe and North Africa is hard to exaggerate. Literacy levels plummeted; building in stone all but disappeared, a clear sign of collapse of wealth and ambition; long-distance trade that once took pottery from factories in Tunisia as far as Iona in Scotland collapsed, replaced by local markets dealing only with exchange of petty goods; and as measured from pollution in polar ice-caps in Greenland there was a major contraction in smelting work, with levels falling back to those of prehistoric times.

After World War II, the Italians made tremendous efforts to rebuild their country’s industry and economy. During the 1950s and ‘60s, with the aid of the European Recovery Program, the country encouraged new industries and improved its agriculture. Today, Italy’s industries are thriving, bringing work and wealth to the country. Nearly all families have homes, are well-fed, and own cars, televisions, and other consumer goods. Industrial success has brought problems, however. Building new factories, power stations, and roads has meant less land for housing, and millions of people live in crowded high-rise apartment houses. Industrial waste has caused pollution problems, especially in the rivers and along the coast. On the positive side, the gap between the rich, industrial north and the poorer, agricultural south is narrowing. The Southern Italy Development Fund has helped to make farming more efficient and established new industries, such as making electronic goods, in the south. Tourism has increased greatly, and more care is now being taken to preserve the country’s wildlife, natural landscapes, historical buildings, and works of art.

As illusions go, this one is pretty stubborn. When you’re obsessed with efficiency and productivity, it’s difficult to see the real value of education and care. Which is why so many politicians and taxpayers alike see only costs. They don’t realize that the richer a country becomes the more it should be spending on teachers and doctors. Instead of regarding these increases as a blessing, they’re viewed as a disease. Yet unless we prefer to run our schools and hospitals as if they were factories, we can be certain that, in the race against the machine, the costs of healthcare and education will only go up. At the same time, products like refrigerators and cars have become too cheap. To look solely at the price of a product is to ignore a large share of the costs. In fact, a British think tank estimated that for every pound earned by advertising executives, they destroy an equivalent of £7 in the form of stress, overconsumption, pollution, and debt; conversely, each pound paid to a trash collector creates an equivalent of £12 in terms of health and sustainability.

We are in a decade, perhaps an age, when all sorts and conditions of men are rising up to protest (declare against) all sorts and conditions in our human situation. Everywhere, the "have-nots" are challenging the "haves"; the morally awake are prodding the indifferently asleep; the impatient are threatening the patient; both the Left and the Right are attacking the Center; the new thinks, that it despises the old. In a well-worn sense, "whatever is" is wrong. The current traitor is the middle class, and treason is gradually being defined as the liberal view. The choice offered seems to be be either a soma-soaked brotherly "happening" with Whirl as benevolent king or the orderly, albeit vicious, tyranny of Orwell's 1984. Within our own borders the arenas are brimming and booming: inner city ghettos, rural slums, local draft boards, P.T.A. committees, factories exuding smog, churches gathering affluence, campuses and coffee houses, Selma and Cicero, the Mississippi Delta and the cities of Detroit and Newark, nuclear test sites and pornographic paperbacks. Under attack are segregation, the war in Vietnam, control of the universities, inequalities in selective service, Christian hypocrisies, second-class citizenship, white collar culture, poverty, river pollution, and the BOMB.

If we admire and enjoy the flourishing of human life, we shall naturally delight also in the flourishing of animal life. The prominence of this factor will affect the kind of concern we have for animals. Wild animals suffer pain and inflict pain on one another in the ordinary course of the struggle for survival; we may sympathize with this suffering, but any attempt to interfere is likely to do more harm than good. We can do more about the suffering that human beings cause to wild animals directly, when they hunt them for food or for sport; but even this may well be seen as less important than the suffering they cause indirectly, through pollution. With domesticated animals it is perhaps factory farming that involves the greatest impoverishment of life, but there are many other forms of cruelty, including frivolous 'scientific' tests and experiments.

Little did you know that the metals in that lawnmower, came from a factory, that had polluted an entire township and killed 25 people leaving 400 others sick and dying, suffering from your purchase.

Even if you think you’re eating a super-healthy diet of grilled chicken breast, egg whites, “fresh” (but farm-raised) salmon, and nonfat Greek yogurt, your brain is being undermined by the invisible changes in your food supply. Just a few generations ago, almost all farms were family owned and operated. They’re now predominantly gigantic factory farms that pump their cows and chickens full of cheap feed that doesn’t just change the animals’ health—it changes yours as well. Environmental pollutants like mercury and BPAs can also affect the health of our brains, and fundamental changes in our lifestyle and environment play a vital role as well.

the spring contemporaries were noting that the Rhine was running clean for the first time in generations. There were no factories left in operation to pollute it.97

Cheap relies on one other essential factor--a carefully constructed cover-up. In 1991, three golden-fried chicken fillets made at Imperial Food Products along with an order of fries cost $1.99 at Shoney's. This price, however, hid the real costs of the social system that allowed a company like Shoney's to charge so little for heaping plates of calorie-dense foods. Covered up were the costs incurred in farm subsidies and the piles of debt taken on by the chicken growers, some of whom had been turned into "modern-day serfs." The price didn't include the cost of food stamps for the underpaid, road building for transport, the cleanup of waterways polluted by animal factories, or the health care outlays needed in order to address the myriad issues linked to obesity and the litany of other ills associated with chronic overexposure to sugary, salty, and fatty foods. At the same time, the system of cheap never paid a dime for the wanton cruelty it imposed on animals or the injuries suffered by workers while killing ... and processing industrially produced chickens.

The forager economy provided most people with more interesting lives than agriculture or industry do. Today, a Chinese factory hand leaves home around seven in the morning, makes her way through polluted streets to a sweatshop, and there operates the same machine, in the same way, day in, day out, for ten long and mind-numbing hours, returning home around seven in the evening in order to wash dishes and do the laundry. Thirty thousand years ago, a Chinese forager might leave camp with her companions at, say, eight in the morning. They’d roam the nearby forests and meadows, gathering mushrooms, digging up edible roots, catching frogs and occasionally running away from tigers. By early afternoon, they were back at the camp to make lunch. That left them plenty of time to gossip, tell stories, play with the children and just hang out. Of course the tigers sometimes caught them, or a snake bit them, but on the other hand they didn’t have to deal with automobile accidents and industrial pollution.

The disastrous track record of the past three decades of neoliberal policy is simply too apparent. Each new blast of statistics about how a tiny band of global oligarchs controls half the world’s wealth exposes the policies of privatization and deregulation for the thinly veiled license to steal that they always were. Each new report of factory fires in Bangladesh, soaring pollution in China, and water cut-offs in Detroit reminds us that free trade was exactly the race to the bottom that so many warned it would be. And each news story about an Italian or Greek pensioner who took his or her own life rather than try to survive under another round of austerity is a reminder of how many lives continue to be sacrificed for the few.

Driving along the highway from the airport, they had passed mile upon mile of grain elevators, marking the most productive land in Mexico, but when they reached the place where Google Maps said the river should be, there was nothing but a dusty, toxic-looking trickle. The river — that great, fertile river that the first Spaniards had compared to the Nile — had been dammed long ago, diverted by a huge aqueduct to the factories in Hermosillo and Ciudad Obregón, and all that remained in the traditional villages was polluted, unsafe for irrigation or to drink.

Majority of this current generation are just broken factory machines that need repairs and if not repaired , they will continue to pollute the environment with what they call ''opinions

Others in global development, including groups like Oxfam and leaders like Paul Farmer, take a view that’s more grounded in history and politics. They see in today’s poverty the results of a colonial and imperial history that was designed to exploit countries and people. That exploitation continues in the lives of poorly paid workers in unsafe sweatshops stitching our clothing, in factories that pollute over there so we can have clean air over here, and in poor people using their bare hands to mine the metals that make our high-end smartphones work.

While we are in this embarrassingly negative corner of chemistry, I cannot avoid that other great pointed finger, the one directed at the environmental damage laid at the subject’s door, or at least at its drains. It is impossible to deny that the unwanted effluent of the chemical plant has wrought ecological havoc. Ever since Perkin’s factories turned the nearby canals red, green, and yellow according to the manufacturing priorities of the day, mankind’s aspiration for its own betterment has been at an environmental cost. In fact, the green shoots of environmental pollution, if that is not too ironical a term, can be traced back to the Greeks and Romans, for analysis of ice cores laid down in those eras show traces of the consequences of metal working. The way forward is either legal or chemical. The legal constrains by the prospect of punishment; the chemical avoids by elimination at source. The latter, always the better mode of action, depends on developments of chemistry itself and has inspired the politico-environmento-chemical movement of green chemistry. In broad terms, green chemistry aims to minimize the impact of chemical manufacturing processes on the environment by strict guidelines about the use of materials and the elimination of waste.

This is why John Ruskin, a century ago, tried to introduce a distinction between wealth and illth. This distinction did not become accepted and incorporated into our language because people, at that time, were not ready for it. Wealth, in Ruskin’s sense, consists of all those artifacts (concretized ideas) which enhance human life, or life generally. Illth consists of those artifacts which destroy, demean or degrade life. A factory that pollutes the air or water is illth in this sense; so is a bomb, a sword, a pistol, a tank of nerve-gas.

As countries became postindustrial, educated, and internationally linked, their rulers had to adapt—or, at least, pretend to. Amid the third wave of democracy, liberal norms spread worldwide. The force of this modernizing onslaught was what eventually caused the losers to rally. Today’s nativist populism—in both West and East—unites the economic resentment and obsolescent values of those hurt by the postindustrial transition. Workers and others from dying industrial regions; owners of polluting factories and mines; farmers and rural laborers; the illiberal old, disoriented by value change—all come together in a powerful but gradually shrinking coalition. That coalition furnishes support for populists in advanced democracies and spin dictators in semi-modernized autocracies. Instead of compensating and reintegrating economic losers, such leaders exploit them.

All the myths he believed in would crystallize into even greater mythology in future years and become weapons of war used by politicians and evildoers to kill defenseless schoolchildren by the dozens so that a few rich men spouting the same mythology that Doc spouted could buy islands that held more riches than the town of Pottstown had or would ever have. Gigantic yachts that would sail the world and pollute the waters and skies, owned by men creating great companies that made weapons of great power in factories that employed the poor, weapons that were sold cheaply enough so that the poor could purchase them and kill one another. Any man could buy one and walk into schools and bring death to dozens of children and teachers and anyone else stupid enough to believe in all that American mythology of hope, freedom, equality, and justice. The problem was always, and would always be, the niggers and the poor—and the foolish white people who felt sorry for them.

Yogurt is good for you. And it’s just one spoon,” Sharpcot had replied, but this stack summoned a billion voices, all of them saying in a chorus, “Just one spoon.” From kids’ lunches and store shelves and desk drawers and airline meal packs, in every country of the world: Canada and the United States and Nicaragua and Uruguay and Argentina and Ireland and Burkina Faso and Russia and Papua New Guinea and New Zealand and very probably the Antarctic. Where wasn’t there disposable cutlery? Plastic spoons in endless demand, in endless supply, from factory floors where they are manufactured and packaged in boxes of 10 or 20 or 100 or 1000 or individually in clear wrap, boxed on skids and trucked to trains freighting them to port cities and onto giant container ships plying the seas to international ports to intercity transport trucks to retail delivery docks for grocery stores and retail chains, supplying restaurants and homes, consumers moving them from shelf to cart to bag to car to house, where they are stuck in the lunches of the children of polluting parents, or used once each at a birthday party to serve ice cream to four-year-olds where only some are used but who knows which? So used and unused go together in the trash, or every day one crammed into a hipster’s backpack to eat instant pudding at his software job in an open-concept walkup in a gentrified neighbourhood, or handed out from food trucks by the harbour, or set in a paper cup at a Costco table for customers to sample just one bite of this exotic new flavour, and so they go into trash bins and dumpsters and garbage trucks and finally vast landfill sites or maybe just tossed from the window of a moving car or thrown over the rail of a cruise ship to sink in the ocean deep.

Each new blast of statistics about how a tiny band of global oligarchs controls half the world’s wealth exposes the policies of privatization and deregulation for the thinly veiled license to steal that they always were. Each new report of factory fires in Bangladesh, soaring pollution in China, and water cut-offs in Detroit reminds us that free trade was exactly the race to the bottom that so many warned it would be. And each news story about an Italian or Greek pensioner who took his or her own life rather than try to survive under another round of austerity is a reminder of how many lives continue to be sacrificed for the few. The failure of deregulated capitalism to deliver on its promises is why, since 2009, public squares around the world have turned into rotating semipermanent encampments of the angry and dispossessed.

In any situation where you can spot spillover effects (like a polluting factory), look for an externality (like bad health effects) lurking nearby. Fixing it will require intervention either by fiat (like government regulation) or by setting up a marketplace system according to the Coase theorem (like cap and trade).

Today, a Chinese factory hand leaves home around seven in the morning, makes her way through polluted streets to a sweatshop, and there operates the same machine, in the same way, day in, day out, for ten long and mind-numbing hours, returning home around seven in the evening in order to wash dishes and do the laundry. Thirty thousand years ago, a Chinese forager might leave camp with her companions at, say, eight in the morning. They’d roam the nearby forests and meadows, gathering mushrooms, digging up edible roots, catching frogs and occasionally running away from tigers. By early afternoon, they were back at the camp to make lunch. That left them plenty of time to gossip, tell stories, play with the children and just hang out. Of course the tigers sometimes caught them, or a snake bit them, but on the other hand they didn’t have to deal with automobile accidents and industrial pollution.

Designer labels are often made in Chinese factories in the same polluting conditions as cheaper products. To reiterate Dana Thomas: ‘Yes, luxury handbags are made in China.

But just as a beautiful fish will occasionally sparkle in the waters of a polluted river that runs through a stretch of factories, so in the flow of old paper the spine of a rare book will occasionally shine forth, and if for a moment I turn away, dazzled, I always turn back in time to rescue it.

But if my mother was an environmentalist at heart, I don’t remember her ever applying the label to herself. I think it’s because she’d spent most of her career working in Indonesia, where the dangers of pollution paled in comparison to more immediate risks—like hunger. For millions of struggling villagers who lived in developing countries, the addition of a coal-fired electrical generator or a new, smoke-belching factory often represented their best chance for more income and relief from backbreaking toil. To them, worrying about maintaining pristine landscapes and exotic wildlife was a luxury only Westerners could afford. “You can’t save trees by ignoring people,” my mother would say. This notion—that for most of humankind, concern about the environment came only after their basic material needs were met—stuck with me.

So you’re an environmentalist; why are you killing a distant river with every bite? “Energy-intensive US factory farms generated 1.4 billion tons of animal waste in 1996, which ... pollutes American waterways more than all other industrial sources combined.

China uses about half of the world’s cement for its new roads and buildings. According to the World Bank in 2007, China had 16 of the world’s 20 most polluted cities. One day in January 2013, the air pollution index in Beijing was 755—measured on a scale of 0 to 500! In late 2012, 16,000 dead pigs were found floating in the river that supplies water to Shanghai, the PRC’s largest city. For 2010, a ministry of the Chinese government estimated the monetary cost of the environmental damage caused by rapid industrialization at $230 billion, which is 3.5 percent of China’s gross domestic product. Air pollution from Chinese factories wafts over to the Koreas and Japan. Sometimes, upper atmospheric winds carry the sulphur dioxide from China’s coal-burning clear over to North America’s west coast.

The media is not sponsored by trees, it is sponsored by those who see in trees nothing more than the profit that can be made by their destruction. The media is not paid for by the animals that are killed by the oil spills and the factory farms and the pollution and the over-harvesting of mega fishing boats. The machine doesn’t factor in human survival, why should it care about other species?

The pirates left the boat in the Thames, next to the Palace of Westminster. They deliberately parked across two disabled spaces, because that kind of behaviour was pretty much the whole point of being a pirate. Back in those days the Thames wasn’t the beautiful crystal-blue colour it is today, and it didn’t have children splashing playfully about on its sandy banks. It was grey and drab and had old shopping carts floating in it. And you couldn’t cup your hands in the river and drink its delicious water like you can now, on account of all the pollution. Pollution came from the factories, because the factories of Victorian times didn’t make iPods and Internets and shiny DVDs – they made large clouds of black smoke, which were sold to countries that didn’t have so much in the way of clouds, like Africa.

And sadly, neither was the man. For his wife did not love him. His children did not miss him. The town did not erect a statue in his honor. All the myths he believed in would crystallize into even greater mythology in future years and become weapons of war used by politicians and evildoers to kill defenseless schoolchildren by the dozens so that a few rich men spouting the same mythology that Doc spouted could buy islands that held more riches than the town of Pottstown had or would ever have. Gigantic yachts that would sail the world and pollute the waters and skies, owned by men creating great companies that made weapons of great power in factories that employed the poor, weapons that were sold cheaply enough so that the poor could purchase them and kill one another. Any man could buy one and walk into schools and bring death to dozens of children and teachers and anyone else stupid enough to believe in all that American mythology of hope, freedom, equality, and justice. The problem was always, and would always be, the niggers and the poor—and the foolish white people who felt sorry for them. So it was appropriate that a nigger and a foolish white man buried him.