Tópico: Como o impulso de proteção individual da poluição pode prejudicar o ambiente

[Buckaroo Banzai]

Tem alguns pontos interessantes, apesar de ainda endossar a comida "orgânica".


The Dangerous Delusions of 'Inverted Quarantine'

How people's impulse to protect themselves from poisons can actually hurt the environment
 
By ANDREW SZASZ

In 1982, just 25 years ago, Americans were consuming about 3.4 gallons of bottled water per person per year, 783 million gallons over all. By 2005, the latest year for which we have good figures, consumption had grown to 26 gallons per person per year. That's over seven and a half billion gallons of bottled water. [...]

Bottled water has a huge environmental footprint, the critics now say. It takes immense amounts of raw material and energy to make all those plastic bottles. At the other, postconsumer end of the product life cycle, hundreds of millions of empty plastic bottles end up in landfills, in an era when it is increasingly difficult to find new waste-disposal sites.

And for what? There is no real benefit, the naysayers argue. Bottled water is less stringently regulated than tap water. [...]

American consumers are buying "organic" or "natural" shampoos, soaps, and cosmetics; "nontoxic" household-cleaning products; clothing made of natural fibers; furniture, bedding, drapes, and rugs made only of natural materials.

What does all this "green" consuming mean? [...]

 Environmentalism raised people's awareness of toxic hazards. But it turns out that the awareness — that feeling of vulnerability, of being at risk — does not necessarily lead people to political activism to reduce the amounts or the variety of toxins present in the environment. [...]

Here is why we should be concerned, in fact alarmed: Inverted-quarantine products do not work nearly well enough to actually protect those who put their faith in them. But consumers believe they work. That belief, in turn, tends to decrease our collective will to truly confront serious environmental issues.[...]

But the person who spends money for inverted-quarantine goods thinks they work. That belief has political consequences. As W.I. Thomas, an early American sociologist, famously pointed out, "If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences."

The consequence, here, is the effect I have called "political anesthesia." Feeling that one has successfully insulated oneself from an environmental threat, one feels no pain, no fear, no anxiety (maybe I should have called it "political anxiety relief"). It follows that one feels less urgency to do something about that particular threat.

Take water, for example. It is estimated that hundreds of billions of dollars will have to be spent in the next decades to keep the nation's public-water infrastructure in good repair, to keep up with growing demand, and to upgrade water purification to deal with new pollutants. With a substantial portion of the population drinking bottled water and/or filtering their water, what is the likelihood that politicians will hear from their constituents that they should be voting to make that necessary investment?[...]


http://chronicle.com/free/v54/i20/20b01201.htm