If you can hang your statistics on a comparison to the COVID-19 butcher’s bill these days, you can get people’s attention. The United Nations published a report that reminded us that more people, most of them poor and insecure, die each year from the effects pollution than are those who die from pandemics. From Reuters:
The report said pollution from pesticides, plastics and electronic waste is causing widespread human rights violations as well as at least 9 million premature deaths a year, and that the issue is largely being overlooked … “Current approaches to managing the risks posed by pollution and toxic substances are clearly failing, resulting in widespread violations of the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment,” the report’s author, U.N. Special Rapporteur David Boyd, concluded.
Feel free to enjoy a brief sigh of relief that there’s an ongoing environmental catastrophe relatively unconnected to the climate crisis. The UN plans to tackle this issue in the same manner as it did the climate crisis. This report, however, highlights another way in which lax environmental regulation causes people to become sick and causes them to die.
It calls for a ban on perfluoroalkyl (man-made substances used in household goods such as nonstick cookware) that have been linked with cancer. They are also known as “forever chemicals” due to their slow breakdown. It also recommends the clean-up of polluted sites and, in extreme cases, the possible relocations of affected communities – many of them poor, marginalised and indigenous – from so-called “sacrifice zones”.
“Sacrifice zones,” by the way, is a term that was invented to describe nuclear test zones. It has a deeper and richer meaning today. From the Guardian:
These communities have a higher rate of cancer and other diseases than those living just a few miles away. Many of them may not realize this. The Environmental Protection Agency does know – and allows it to happen. This means that thousands of Americans have been killed by a government agency meant to protect them.
The helpful people at ProPublica provided a map of America’s sacrifice zones. They located 1,000 of them, where 250,000 American citizens live and breathe. Sacrifice zones are created by all that’s been bad about government policy over the past several decades: systemic racism, radical deregulation, the further political disenfranchisement of marginalized populations, and the endless procession of horrors that the global economic system foists upon the poor, horrors that the world’s political systems are incapable or unwilling to alleviate. And then there’s the climate crisis, but that’s a story for another day, or the day after that, or some day in the future.
Charles P Pierce is the author and editor of four books, including Idiot America. He has been a working journalist since 1976.
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