Ecosystem Crises Interactions. Merrill Singer
special note are the populations globally most adversely impacted by pollution. Over 90 percent of pollution‐related deaths are in low‐ and middle‐income countries. In all nations, pollution‐related disease is most prevalent among ethnic minorities, the poor, and the socially marginalized. In particular, children are at highest risk of diseases linked to pollution. In utero and in early infancy—periods of high vulnerability—exposures to even very low doses of pollutants can lead to disease, disability, and death, with impacts that occur throughout an individual’s lifespan. What’s more, “ambient air pollution, chemical pollution, and soil pollution—the forms of pollution produced by industry, mining, electricity generation, mechanised agriculture, and petroleum‐powered vehicles—are all on the rise, with the most marked increases in rapidly developing and industrialising low‐income and middle‐income countries” (Landrigan et al. 2018). Cities, especially the most rapidly growing cities in developing nations, are severely affected by the production and health risks of pollution. This constitutes one of the great global existential challenges of the Anthropocene.
These facts notwithstanding, pollution remains an understudied and often ignored cause of human morbidity and mortality. Even though 70 percent of pollution‐caused diseases fall into the category of noncommunicable diseases—those such as cardiovascular diseases, cancers, chronic respiratory diseases, and diabetes not transmitted from human to human or animal to human—there is rare mention of interventions to address them in the WHO’s Global Action Plan for the Prevention and Control of Non‐Communicable Diseases 2013–2020, and pollution is often downplayed in both global health assessments (WHO 2013) and evaluations of the full social costs of fossil fuel production (NAS 2010).
To the degree that environmental pollution has been considered as a driving force in global health, it has been treated as an inevitability, an inescapable blemish of socioeconomic development. This element of conventional wisdom is referred to as the “environmental Kuznets hypothesis” (Van Alstine & Neumayer 2010), a label stemming from the graphic known as the Kuznets curve, developed by Nobel Memorial Prize‐winning economist and statistician Simon Kuznets (1955). Specifically, the curve, in the form of an inverted U‐shape, reflects Kuznets’ hypothesis that, as a society develops from a primarily agrarian to an industrialized economy, market forces first increase and then later decrease its overall degree of economic inequality. This hypothesis has been applied to environmental economics, where it is postulated that pollution and environmental degradation will unavoidably increase during the early stages of industrial economic development, and that pollution will continue to rise until the threshold of per capita income is achieved, after which the level of pollution will decrease despite continued economic growth. If the environmental Kuznets hypothesis is accurate, rather than being a growing threat to the environment, economic growth should be seen as an anthropogenic means of eventual environmental improvement. As Stern (2004, p. 1419) points out, “[t]he possibility of achieving sustainability without a significant deviation from business as usual was an obviously enticing prospect for many—letting humankind ‘have our cake and eat it’.”
Despite its comfortable appeal, the environmental Kuznets hypothesis is not confirmed by environmental health research, and the data used to support it have been criticized as being econometrically weak (Perman & Stern 2003). Part of the problem is that a reduction in pollution levels in wealthy countries often results from the outsourcing of polluting production to cheaper‐labor developing ones (Carmin & Agyeman 2011). Indeed, enhanced environmental regulation designed to limit pollution in wealthier countries may contribute to corporate outsourcing to developing countries as a cost‐cutting/profit‐enhancing strategy (Lucas et al. 1992; Cole & Elliott 2003). The Lancet Commission on Pollution and Health concluded that “pollution is not the unavoidable consequence of economic development, and that it is much more important to formulate sound laws, policies, and regulations to control pollution than to wait for an economy to reach a magical tipping point that will solve the problems of environmental degradation and pollution‐related disease” (Landrigan et al. 2018, p. 467).
1.7 Thresholds in the environment
Like pollution, other forms of anthropogenic environment disruption are not inevitable, unavoidable, or too costly to avoid. The full costs of pollution and disruption are manifest in ecocrises interactions. Critical to the development of many ecocrises interactions is the crossing of the thresholds of planetary boundaries. Environmental conditions are defined as intrinsic features at local, regional, or global scales that constitute positions along one or more control variables, such as temperature and the albedo (solar reflection) feedback pathway involving floating sea ice. Icebergs in the ocean, being lighter in color than the surrounding water, reflect more solar radiation. Consequently, the significant rate at which sea ice is melting—a phenomenon driven by planetary warming—represents a negative feedback loop that feeds further warming. Once the volume of sea ice threshold is passed, environmental degradation will continue even without further human input, reducing the possibility for mitigation. Staying within such thresholds, as a result, is critical for human well‐being and the well‐being of the other lifeforms we depend upon and with which we share this planet.
On July 28, 2000, the U.N. Economic and Social Council established the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues to discuss and advise on issues facing indigenous peoples of the world related to social development, culture, environment, education, health, and human rights. Nine years later, on May 27, 2009, during the eighth meeting of the Permanent Forum in New York, one of the speakers was Nicolas Lucas Ticum, a priest and researcher from Guatemala of Maya ancestry. In seeking to reframe the human/environment relationship, Ticum stated: “All of humanity must work together to re‐establish harmony and unity with the natural environment … The Earth does not belong to human beings. Human beings belong to the Earth” (Economic and Social Council 2009). The alternative is ever more devastating anthropogenic ecocrises.
1.8 Sustainability of human life on Earth
Ultimately, ecocrises threaten the sustainability of human life on Earth. Already, research suggests that Earth may be in the midst of its sixth mass extinction of species, in no small part because of the human reshaping of the environment. At this point in our history, the idea of pristine environments untouched by our presence is an illusion. We have left an indelible impression everywhere on the planet; there are no hidden natural sanctuaries that are unsullied by the effects of human society and activity. Archeological, paleoecological, and genetic research suggests that:
As our planet experiences its sixth “mass extinction event” … the effect of anthropogenic landscape modification, habitat fragmentation, overexploitation, and species invasions could not be more apparent … These transformations are linked largely to the industrial economies, burgeoning populations, and dense transport networks of contemporary human societies.
(Boivan et al. 2016)
In fact, Boivan et al. (2016) stress, the human‐mediated alteration of Earth long predates the rise of industrial economies. Relative to our impact on other species, they identify four pivotal phases in the loss of pristinity: 1) the Late Pleistocene near‐global dispersal of our ancestors; 2) the emergence and spread of agriculture and livestock domestication beginning in the Early Holocene; 3) the human colonization of the world’s islands; and 4) the premodern expansion of urbanization and trade beginning 5000 years ago during the Bronze Age. While socioeconomic developments since the Bronze Age have dramatically accelerated the magnitude and range of the human impact, all of these prior moments in the making of a human‐dominated Earth are significant.
A significant biological effect of the Late Pleistocene expansion of our species, for example, was felt by larger animals or megafauna, those weighing over 100 pounds. While there is debate concerning the extent of the human role in the extinction of about 90 megafauna genera in the period between 50 000 and 10 000 years ago (Koch & Barnosly 2006), new analytic approaches affirm at least some direct human role through hunting in the disappearance of animals like the giant ground sloth, woolly mammoth, saber‐tooth cat, a giant 6‐foot‐long beaver, and the 3‐ton Diprotodon, the largest marsupial that