Concept  Current Assessment  Experiences and Observations  Lessons

Sharpening our Senses to Pollution
- submitted by Peter Vasdi 10 July 2006

Concept

Pollution, like nicotine, is in the eye (and nose and skin) of the beholder. We can live in very polluted environments and not realize it. This is especially true of people who are born into such environments. They may perceive their surroundings as clean, and even beautiful, to the point where it becomes difficult or impossible to compare their personal environments objectively to cleaner environments elsewhere.

Pollution puts a stress on people, both mentally and physically, moving the focus on short-term survival and reducing the energy and focus towards global or large-scale improvements. The cost of somewhat cleaner air and water is balanced against the difficulty and perceived limited benefits of obtaining that advance. What the body becomes used to, it ceases to perceive.

Current Assessment

Europe, and the Mediterranean, is almost synonymous with the perfect vacation. Sunshine, clear water, beaches, good looking people, good food, wonderful moonlit romantic nights. People spend lots of money for weeks in Europe and come back with wonderful stories of wonderful trips and experiences. Postcards of mountains, seas, and all things beautiful.

In addition, Europe is extremely adept in reassuring the world about how wonderful it is in the area of environmental protection, energy conservation, and all other good efforts aimed at improving people's lives.

According to the European lobby, Europe comes out on top of most world standards, if not all. Quite carefully and with excellent forethought, many of Europe's efforts towards the perfect life have been held in non-European cities: Kyoto, Singapore. The resulting reports and decisions therefore contain the location's name: The Kyoto Agreement as an example. This adds an element of international approval towards positive steps in the right directions. Putting a non-European name into the title of such efforts makes the world feel that it is not Europe who is always calling the shots. And this gives the host city or country reputation and involvement from which they can benefit. All this is necessary to increase the power needed to accomplish such global tasks.

It is therefore with great care that I critique Europe's environmental efforts. Europe has many dedicated and great people working hard and with great intelligence and feel for humanity, towards their ultimate benefit - for, and frequently in spite of, the people who stand to benefit. It is a very hard task to try and turn that great ship of 800 million souls and 3000- to 5000-year history of many social mistakes and rare successes around now to finally start to sail in the right direction. But, with the European Union, there is hope that this shift in direction may actually happen.

Experiences and Observations

On the ground, this is what I saw during my Eastern Mediterranean cruise of June-July 2006:

• Air. Wherever we floated, around us there was never a clear horizon. It was always hazy. The sun never set into a clear blue line of water such as we experience in and around Canada.
  
  At any port, or near any land whatsoever, including the beautiful Greek and Adriatic islands, we gazed into a 300m high (1000ft) layer of greyish-magenta air that only appeared bluish above our heads because that layer was thin enough to allow the sun to pierce through. Without fail, nowhere was the air clear below that 1000-foot ceiling.
  
  The reasons for this layer of pollution - everywhere - were obvious. The ship itself belched a tunnel of black and dark smoke behind it (or into the port city when arriving and leaving that urban area). And there are hundreds such ships and large ferries crossing the Mediterranean constantly. The urban and country areas were laced with narrow dusty roads and thousands of small cars and vehicles with no emission standards whatsoever. People smoked almost everywhere. The air was dry. Although there were places with trees and wooded areas, there were few forests to speak of. Fresh water seemed scarce, indicating low-level aquifers and other natural water sources. Ocean mists would combine with the dust and pollution to form constant humidexes (uncomfortable hot soupy air). Of course, when you're born into this atmosphere, and especially if you smoke as well, you adapt and don't notice that there is anything wrong. And it seems that most Europeans don't notice or even accept that they live in such a polluted soup.
   
• Water. The water of the Adriatic, Ionian, Aegean, and Mediterranean, was clear enough to see the bottom sand and rocks. The impression was that of cleanliness. It was also tempting to consider clear water as desirable relief when the air was so hot and dry and this other alternative refreshment was everywhere (due to the lengthy pervasive indented multiple coastlines of the lucky Mediterranean countries). Bright sun rays shining straight down and being reflected from yellow sandy and rocky basins added to the appearance of cool and clean.
  
  What my common sense was missing here is that water is a clear substance. It takes incredible density of pollution to cloud water (like a major oil spill). Even the dirtiest water breaks up its dirt within hours and becomes clear enough to human eyes. So clarity of itself does not mean cleanliness. So, in addition to the clear water, this is also what I saw:
• The water was not crystal-clear. There was a bit of greenish murk that did obscure and prevent perfect clarity that we notice in less-populated places in the Caribbean, for example.
• In most harbors, and virtually everywhere there was any urban development (which was pretty well everywhere), floated dozens to sometimes hundreds of small to large boats, with engines hanging in the water. You can imagine the quantity of gasoline, oil, and other personal effluents, being dumped into the "clear" water constantly.
• In Malta, 2000 years ago, the Romans built aquaducts to funnel water from the hills into the towns. These days the citizens totally accept that it is quite right for the aquaducts to fall into ruin and be treated as ancient artifacts. No one seemed to question the possibility that aquaducts may still be a very cheap and effective mechanism to funnel water. The hills no longer contain water anyway.
   
• Garbage. The shorelines - especially in indentations and small rocky bays - contained clusters of floating garbage of all kinds: plastic bags, bottles, bandages, paper, ...:
  • The country roads, and city streets and open areas (in spite of frequent but full garbage containers at least in the urban areas) were bordered by clusters of garbage (bottles, paper, cans, etc., just like the shoreline).
  • In Katakalon, Greece, along the beach (which cars used to drive up and down), I saw a man crumple up his cigarette box and throw it out his window.
  • In Messina, outside the immediate city central area, there were clumps of fresh and dried feces every few meters along the sidewalks - hopefully deposited by large dogs.
     
• Life. There was no or little life of any kind, either in or around the sea water (or on land for that matter):
  • Few if any seagulls or sea birds.
  • No animals like we have inland and along our coastlines in Canada - even by the Rideau River. In the Mediterranean coastline, I saw only small fish. No seaweed or floating plants. No crabs. No sea urchins on the rocks underwater. I didn't even notice hardly any insects. I saw one beetle in Santorini, Greece. And some invisible things did bite me while I lay on the rocks avoiding garbage on a beach near Dubrovnik. My ankle did get stained with melted asphalt there. No squirrels in the towns. So no animals; also no real vegetation in the water (seaweed, aquatic plants). Why? Certainly not because the water contained the necessities of life for organisms smaller than man.
  • There were some occasional exceptions. In Corfu, there were thousands of swallows in Kerkyra swooping in and out the shore. But little else. And no such swallows elsewhere we landed.And in certain places, such as Malta, there were pigeons and small birds.
  • The black sand beach of Parvolos, Santorini, was mixed with thousands (maybe tens of thousands) of tiny white flakes of which I later determined must be dried pieces of stucco paint, which stuck to your skin as you lay on the sand by the water like hundreds of tiny pieces of paper mache. I'm not talking of just one location of several square meters, but of that entire section of beach.

It is no wonder than every place in Europe is at least twice as expensive as Canada (by expensive, I mean that it takes $2 to buy the same thing that you can get in Canada for $1). It is very costly to pay for even a partially fix towards personal well being and health. Bottled water is more expensive than natural water. Packaged foods shipped in from countries like Canada and the States are of course more expensive than home-grown food. And it is more difficult to produce home-grown food when the conditions needed by the food-producing organisms are inhibited in the ways I noticed during my cruise through the Eastern Mediterranean.

Lessons

Here are some things that I feel we can learn from my European observations:

• By helping others, we may also help ourselves? By going to Europe with our eyes, noses, and skin open, we can - if we keep our own council and yet stay prepared to truly help Europeans in the gentle and acceptable way - be the antennae that Europeans do not have. We can perhaps revive their sensitivity to their environmental needs. Subliminally, Europeans realize our assets of clean air and water (or cleaner air and water and less garbage), which is why so many of them are also tourists in our city and neighborhoods. It would be healthier emotionally and mentally if tourists, and newcomers to Canada, also realized and admitted these environmental reasons consciously. With such conscious approach, new people from other countries will be prepared to help us protect the environmental assets they have (at least for now) lost.
   
• By noticing the environmental state in Europe, we can perhaps value what we do have and individually and collectively - and certainly more proactively:
  • Protect the water, air, and land that we do have. Why is Europe so dry: because they do not have enough trees and major vegetation to create and retain their acquifers and water bodies; because once you destroy ground cover, you also lose the soil that can create ground cover.
  • Monitor the sources of potential garbage so that there is less potential garbage being sold so that the load for disposal is not placed entirely on the consumer.
  • Educate children and eventually adults to not take the easy route when it comes to disposing of garbage.
  • Help and educate people to control the birth rate so that environmental infrastructure improvement efforts are not aimed at constantly shifting goals.
  • Establish measureable per capita health and well being requirements that will allow us to bring the level of environmental infrastructure up to that required to sustain health.
     
• By paying attention to the health and existence of the animals around us (squirrels, birds, groundhogs, mice, rabbits, snakes, frogs, and so on), we can use them as an indicator of the health of our environment. For example, the clarity of water (as observed by us humans) is an inadequate indicator of the cleanliness of that water.