Pollution: world has one last card to play
AS a member of my school’s debating team I once argued in favour of a world government which will solve the problems that individual nation-states are unable to.
To many a parent who watched the debate, I must have sounded like a naive schoolboy who knew nothing of the world and of that jealously-guarded thing called national sovereignty.
But to this day the belief in a supra-national organisation has never quite left me.
Last Thursday’s article in The Straits Times on the challenge of satellite television proves yet again the nation-state’s inability to deal with the wide-ranging problems of life. If there is one area where international efforts are most urgently needed, it should be environmental protection.
Most people are so caught up with their own lives that they fail to recognise the extent to which man’s activities have begun to destroy his environment and the long-term effects that this would have on all life-forms on this planet.
Consider the effects of the breakdown of ozone in the world’s stratosphere. For millenniums, the ozone has shielded us and other living things from the sun’s ultraviolet rays.
But in the last hundred years or so, man-made chlorofluorocarbons or CFCs — commonly found in aerosol cans, refrigerants, solvents and in gaseous emissions of aircraft have caused the ozone layer to become thinner.
The harmful rays which are able to pass through could destroy aquatic life, diminish crop yields and produce skin cancer in humans.
If nothing is done to reduce the use of CFCs, 130 million people may succumb to skin cancer in the next 90 years.
Take another example — the emissions of nitrogen oxide and sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere by motor vehicles and coal-burning industrial plants. These pollutants are responsible for acid rain which destroys forests and marine life in lakes and rivers. Since the pollutants are air-borne they are easily carried across national borders.
This is why acid rain is a dispute in North America. Although there are coal-burning power plants in Ontario and Minnesota, the Canadians have done more to curb the emissions of sulphur dioxide than the Americans.
Studies have shown that more sulphur dioxide blows from the US into Canada than vice-versa. As is often the case, narrow economic and national self-interests prevent the problem from being resolved as quickly as it should.
Measures to implement tougher emission standards were opposed by the powerful American automobile, coal and steel industries. The reluctance of the Reagan Administration to spend on environment protection programmes also did not help.
It is probably in the Third World where the clash between national priorities and the need to safeguard our ecology is most sharp.
Scientists agree that indiscriminate deforestation could cause worldwide climatic changes.
But suggest the conservation of rain forests at an international forum and all you provoke is a fight between the developed and developing countries.
The arguments are familiar. Developing countries, in which are found most of what remains of the world’s thickest forests, retort that they will not renounce economic development just to protect the richer countries from the effects of earlier developments.
Yet the fate of the earth demands that we all do something now about man’s cumulative depredations of his environment. In this fight to redress the problem, time is of the essence.
In some developed countries, notably West Germany, environmental abuse is a national issue. According to a poll conducted four years ago, a majority of Europeans and Americans are willing to accept a slower economic growth for a cleaner environment.
In the developing countries where the priority is to modernise and create jobs, environmental consciousness is taking longer to develop.
Still, in many Asian countries, there is already some degree of government commitment to the environment, the result of international pressure and private lobbying efforts.
Education, preferably incorporated as part of the school syllabus, is the only way to produce a new man, one who is mindful of the environment even as he extracts from it the means of sustenance.
There must also be more coordination between international agencies and national governments to restrict the use of ozone-depleting chemicals and to search for substitutes.
That same co-operation must also extend into the areas of combating acid rain, toxic wastes and other matters which are a threat to the environment.
In taking collective responsibility for the creatures and resources of this planet, we will all hopefully come to think of ourselves not as citizens of one country, but as inhabitants of a common world.
- Martin Loh is on The Straits Times Political Desk.
Source : The Sunday Times 4th Sep 1988
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