Top Ten Environmental Hits of our Century

Anyone who has been in a fight knows the primary definition of a hit. A hit song is wildly popular and sells millions of copies. An environmental hit is an idea or event that causes profound and permanent change in our world. We have made it to the end of this final century of our second millennium. Here are my choices for the top ten hits of the last hundred years.

1. THE INTERNAL COMBUSTION ENGINE:
Ships, trains, Planes and automobiles carry our food, our supplies and our loved ones everywhere every day.

Oil wells reach down five and more miles, even under the sea to get the precious fuel. Millions of tons of exhaust is sprayed into the air every day containing sulfuric acid and other oxides of sulfur, carbon monoxide, other photochemical oxidants, nitrogen oxides and dioxins to name only a few.

I was shocked to learn that nine tenths of a bowl of cereal is made with diesel fuel. Fuel is needed for the tractor and the combine passing over the land from harvest to harvest, and for the trucks and trains that deliver the product to our neighborhood store. Machines that harvest the wood to make the box and the trucks that ship the ink that prints out the name on the package depend again and again on the snap, crackle and pop of the internal combustion engine.

Here in central Washington we don't have much air pollution from cars, but we live with their leaking underground fuel tanks. These tanks have been fueling thousands of internal combustion engines here for much of the last century.

Over eighty percent of the registered hazardous sites in this area involve spilled petroleum products. In any large city or intensive farming area, leaking underground fuel tanks are a huge environmental problem. Gas fumes from leaking tanks can fill basements of houses hundreds of feet away from the source. Water wells can be easily contaminated. The idea that many of these compounds naturally disperse and disappear is not supported with any scientific study that I know of.

2. THE SUBURBS:
In the last century, people would walk to work. Now because of cheap internal combustion engines, we all drive. However, we must find room near our homes to park. Average lot widths in America have grown from twenty four feet during street car days, to sixty eight feet today. All this extra space is to accommodate the private car. Electric street cars used to be the prime people mover. Public urban transport is now only economically marginal.

This expansion has eaten up vast areas of land. Not included in this area is the additional land required for freeways and parking lots at our places of work, play and shopping.

3. WORLD WAR I:
The generals rejected the idea that planes could ever be used to spy on enemy movements. They thought that the ground would be a blur due to the speed of the flight. In spite such stupidity, the fighter plane, the tank and the aircraft carrier were born at this time. Never before had competition for the upper hand in war caused such a rush of invention. The power of industrial manufacturing had come of age. People were migrating to cities from all directions.

4. INDUSTRIALIZED AGRICULTURE:
The universities produced standardized species of pest resistant, hardy grains. Chemical fertilizers appeared. Suddenly the country could feed itself and a new world export market appeared. The number of farmers began to fall from more than half of the national population at the beginning of the century to a small fraction by the end. This was only possible with the increasingly powerful machines of agriculture.

The cities swelled in size between the wars. Most of the land that could be farmed had been cleared, broken and planted.

5. CHLORINATED ORGANIC COMPOUNDS:
During the 1930's some curious chemists discovered a wonderful thing. When common organic compounds were combined with the chlorine atom under special conditions of pressure and temperature, hundreds of new compounds were formed.

You will recognize many of these compounds: chlorofluorocarbons (CFC's) including dichlorodifluoromethane (freon) plus hundreds of industrial solvents, volatile paints, plastic foams, aerosol sprays, chlordane Insecticide, DDT, chlorinated biphenyl compounds (PCB's), halon compounds used in soil fumigants and fire extinguishers, carbon tetrachloride, etc., etc. . .

Many of the chlorinated compounds radically changed our lives for the better and are in safe use today.

However some of these compounds were found later to be highly poisonous and persistent in the environment. Local cities of Warden, Quincy and Moses Lake are and will be spending millions of dollars to protect their water wells from leaking chlorinated compounds associated with agricultural and industrial development.

6. WORLD WAR II:
Never in history had the rate of technological change happened so fast. The jet engine, the rocket, radar etc. enlarged our power to seek and destroy the enemy. In our haste we often neglected to take out the trash.

The US is the most powerful military power ever. However the cleanup from WWII is a legacy of that great conquest. The cleanup is only beginning.

Trichloroethylene (TCE), is another chlorinated compound used in aircraft maintenance across the country. TCE has been found in water wells miles from the site of disposal. Contrary to popular myth, natural bacteria in the ground does not cure this problem.

7. THE "A" BOMB:
There is little doubt that our enemies would have used the bomb against us first if they could have. Fortunately we beat them to the punch with this number one hit.

The rush to develop the bomb was a messy business. The pollution caused by bomb development in Russia is many times worse than that created here.

Unfortunately much of the United States' problem is still here in central Washington. Hanford contains over six hundred "locations" where waste is or was leaking. The best estimate from the US Department of Energy is that four hundred and forty four billion gallons of unknown liquid radioactive waste has been dumped into unlined pits at Hanford since the war. In agricultural terms, this is over one hundred eighty two thousand acre feet of water contaminated with radioactive substances.  back to introduction

8. THE BIRTH CONTROL PILL:
"The pill" gets to take the hit for a range of inventions and social customs that have changed the way we live. Perhaps it was really TV, or the economy or something else that started to split the family. However, people in the USA live at slightly more than two to a house. At the turn of the last century, the number was about six people per house often including three or four generations.

The environmental results are that we live more and more spread out. Every time a family splits, another house is needed. The new house is usually miles away. This generates hundreds of trips a year to re connect the family members.

9. COMSATS:
The communication satellite brings us back together by inexpensive phone calls and computer links. Also we have a large scale view of the planet with weather satellites. Our world is beginning to resemble that "global village" that we heard of a few years ago. Whether its monitoring the temperature of the Indian Ocean or mass graves in Bosnia, our view of the earth will never be the same.

10. SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURE:
This is a new term that has come from somewhere between the earth movement and the university. There is not yet a specific definition, but the idea is simple. The soil cannot be forever fed with fossil fuel based chemicals to correct one problem after another. This is not only expensive, but this approach negatively effects the quality of the food in the minds of many consumers.

By using integrated pest management methods, crop rotation, plus the careful attention to soil fungi, bacteria and chemistry, our dependence on petroleum based chemicals can be drastically reduced. This creates a more natural condition of integration between our needs for Ag products and the land.

Some environmental extremists may claim that some of these hits may have cost us more than they were ever worth. I disagree. Basically we get what we pay for, both financially and environmentally.

The earth is going to survive no mater what we do. Our survival will depend on how well we can develop sustainable methods to provide for our vital needs. We got to this point by extracting everything we need from the earth. we are beginning to face depletion of once endless supplies of fish and timber. Some day in the future we will run out of easily obtainable mineral resources. The only place to get raw materials will then be by growing them.

People disagree as to when we should begin to worry about running out of things. Some say we won't have to worry about raw material shortages in our lifetimes. Others say it is already too late to save large parts of our natural world such as our climax continental forests.

However if the next century has as many hits in store for us as the last one, we would be smart to get ahead of the curve. We could start by planning a sustainable future for all segments of our urban and agricultural environment.

by John Glassco of ECO-NOMIC - reprinted from the Grant County Journal