Problem  Community Submissions  Proposals  Progress towards a Solution  References

Sharpen our Senses to Pollution

Problem

Pollution is insidious in that people get used to it to the point where we cease to notice its effects directly. The result is that after prolonged exposure to a given level of pollution in water or air, we do not protest that pollution. We then tend to attribute the health effects from the cause (pollution) to other sources; for example, pollen, the "humidex", the overpopulation of specific insect and animal species, or the presence of harmful bacteria and other organisms in those animals.

Beginning to regard a level of pollution as an acceptable status quo makes it easy to avoid exerting the effort required to lessen the pollution; in fact, makes it easy to justify the activities that caused and now continue to increase the levels of pollution to the next "acceptable" level to be gotten used to.

How can we get off this slippery slope before the health effects lead us to more serious social problems?

Community Submissions

• Sharpening our senses to pollution - submitted by Peter Vasdi.

Proposals

1. Help ourselves by helping others. When traveling, keep our eyes, noses, and skin open. We can - if we keep our own council and yet stay prepared to truly help the people in the destination countries in a gentle and acceptable way; we can be the antennae that people living in perpetually polluted environments do not have. We can perhaps revive their sensitivity to their environmental needs and through this, help tourists and newcomers to Canada realize environmental problems consciously so that they can work with us to protect the environmental assets other countries have (at least for now) lost.
2. When traveling, in addition to visual beauty, notice the environmental state of countries we visit, so that we can value what we in Canada do have and individually and collectively - and certainly more proactively.
3. Protect the water, air, and land that we do have. For example, recognize the value and protect trees and other vegetation so that we retain and replenish our acquifers and water bodies.
4. 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.
5. Educate children and eventually adults to not take the easy route when it comes to disposing of garbage.
6. Help and educate people to control the birth rate so that environmental infrastructure improvement efforts are not aimed at constantly shifting goals.
7. 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.
    
8. Pay attention to the health and existence of the animals around us (squirrels, birds, groundhogs, mice, rabbits, snakes, frogs, and so on), and use their health 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.

Progress towards a Solution

References