Environment, Pollution

Pollution Trends

Today, pollution is occurring on a vast and unprecedented scale worldwide, impacting virtually everyone and everything. We can best understand the dramatic changes or increase in pollution in the 20th and 21st centuries in terms of four long-term trends.

First, the world's population increased more than threefold in the 20th century, along with a twentyfold increase in the gross world product. These increases caused a demand on the use of fossil fuels, thereby increasing the release of both sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide into the atmosphere. These emissions are the principal components of smog and give rise to acid rain.

The second long-term pollution trend recognized in the 20th century is the shift from gross environmental results to micro toxicity. Before World War II, the major public health issues centered on smoke and sewer-related issues. One incident, the killer fog over Donora, Pennsylvania, in 1948, sickened thousands and killed 20 people. An even more ominous micro-level threat has existed since the advent of nuclear technology. The ushering in of the nuclear age, chemical, biological, and nuclear warfare, and the peacetime [Page 308]applications of these technologies—such as agribusiness fertilization and power generation—has led to the development and widespread use of chemical, biological, and radioactive material, thus creating waste storage issues for generations to come.

The third environmental pollution trend is its global spread. Once thought to be a problem of the rich or more developed nations, pollution is now a serious problem for less-developed countries as well. For example, with the explosion of industrialization in both China and India, these countries are experiencing environmental pollution problems on a national scale that threaten the quality of life for both rural and urban residents. Moreover, data from the UN Global Environmental Monitoring System indicate that, by and large, cities in eastern Europe are more polluted with sulfur dioxide and other particles than most cities in Western developed countries. In essence, developing world citizens rank high in their exposure to pollutants, particularly toxic chemicals. Many of these impacted people reside in Mexico, India, and China.

The fourth trend in global environmental pollution is how localized environmental contamination becomes a larger, more global environmental assault, such as the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989, the burning of oil wells during the Gulf Wars, and the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986. Such incidents, despite their having occurred in confined geographical regions, have had wider global environmental impacts.

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