Early Soviet poster, before the modern awareness: "The smoke of chimneys is the breath of Soviet Russia"

Pollution began to draw major public attention in the United States between the mid-1950s and early 1970s, when Congress passed the Noise Control Act, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and the National Environmental Policy Act.

Bad bouts of local pollution helped increase consciousness. PCB dumping in the Hudson River resulted in a ban by the EPA on consumption of its fish in 1974. Long-term dioxin contamination at Love Canal starting in 1947 became a national news story in 1978 and led to the Superfund legislation of 1980. Legal proceedings in the 1990s helped bring to light Chromium-6 releases in California--the champions of whose victims became famous. The pollution of industrial land gave rise to the name brownfield, a term now common in city planning. DDT was banned in most of the developed world after the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring.

The development of nuclear science introduced radioactive contamination, which can remain lethally radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years. Lake Karachay, named by the Worldwatch Institute as the "most polluted spot" on earth, served as a disposal site for the Soviet Union thoroughout the 1950s and 1960s. Second place may go to the to the area of Chelyabinsk U.S.S.R. (see reference below) as the "Most polluted place on the planet".

Nuclear weapons continued to be tested in the Cold War, sometimes near inhabited areas, especially in the earlier stages of their development. The toll on the worst-affected populations and the growth since then in understanding about the critical threat to human health posed by radioactivity has also been a prohibitive complication associated with nuclear power. Though extreme care is practiced in that industry, the potential for disaster suggested by incidents such as those at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl pose a lingering specter of public mistrust. One legacy of nuclear testing before most forms were banned has been significantly raised levels of background radiation.

International catastrophes such as the wreck of the Amoco Cadiz oil tanker off the coast of Brittany in 1978 and the Bhopal disaster in 1984 have demonstrated the universality of such events and the scale on which efforts to address them needed to engage. The borderless nature of the atmosphere and oceans inevitably resulted in the implication of pollution on a planetary level with the issue of global warming. Most recently the term persistent organic pollutant (POP) has come to describe a group of chemicals such as PBDEs and PFCs among others. Though their effects remain somewhat less well understood owing to a lack of experimental data, they have been detected in various ecological habitats far removed from industrial activity such as the Arctic, demonstrating diffusion and bioaccumulation after only a relatively brief period of widespread use.

Growing evidence of local and global pollution and an increasingly informed public over time have given rise to environmentalism and the environmental movement, which generally seek to limit human impact on the environment.

Philosophical recognition

Throughout history from Ancient Greece to Andalusia, Ancient China, central Europe during the Renaissance until today, philosophers ranging from Aristotle, Al-Farabi, Al-Ghazali, Averroes, Buddha, Confucius, Dante, Hegel, Avicenna, Lao Tse, Maimonedes, Montesquieu, Nussbaum, Plato, Socrates and Sun Tzu wrote about the pollution of the body as well as the mind and soul.

Perspectives

The earliest precursor of pollution generated by life forms would have been a natural function of their existence. The attendant consequences on viability and population levels fell within the sphere of natural selection. These would have included the demise of a population locally or ultimately, species extinction. Processes that were untenable would have resulted in a new balance brought about by changes and adaptations. At the extremes, for any form of life, consideration of pollution is superseded by that of survival.

For mankind, the factor of technology is a distinguishing and critical consideration, both as an enabler and an additional source of byproducts. Short of survival, human concerns include the range from quality of life to health hazards. Since science holds experimental demonstration to be definitive, modern treatment of toxicity or environmental harm involves defining a level at which an effect is observable. Common examples of fields where practical measurement is crucial include automobile emissions control, industrial exposure (eg Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) PELs), toxicology (eg LD₅₀), and medicine (eg medication and radiation doses).

"The solution to pollution is dilution", is a dictum which summarizes a traditional approach to pollution management whereby sufficiently diluted pollution is not harmful.^[20][21] It is well-suited to some other modern, locally-scoped applications such as laboratory safety procedure and hazardous material release emergency management. But it assumes that the dilutant is in virtually unlimited supply for the application or that resulting dilutions are acceptable in all cases.

Such simple treatment for environmental pollution on a wider scale might have had greater merit in earlier centuries when physical survival was often the highest imperative, human population and densities were lower, technologies were simpler and their byproducts more benign. But these are often no longer the case. Furthermore, advances have enabled measurement of concentrations not possible before. The use of statistical methods in evaluating outcomes has given currency to the principle of probable harm in cases where assessment is warranted but resorting to deterministic models is impractical or unfeasible. In addition, consideration of the environment beyond direct impact on human beings has gained prominence.

Yet in the absence of a superseding principle, this older approach predominates practices throughout the world. It is the basis by which to gauge concentrations of effluent for legal release, exceeding which penalties are assessed or restrictions applied. The regressive cases are those where a controlled level of release is too high or, if enforceable, is neglected. Migration from pollution dilution to elimination in many cases is confronted by challenging economical and technological barriers.

Controversies

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Industry and concerned citizens have battled for decades over the significance of various forms of pollution. Salient parameters of these disputes are whether:

• a given pollutant affects all people or simply a genetically vulnerable set.
• an effect is only specific to certain species.
• whether the effect is simple, or whether it causes linked secondary and tertiary effects, especially on biodiversity
• an effect will only be apparent in the future and is presently negligible.
• the threshold for harm is present.
• the pollutant is of direct harm or is a precursor.
• employment or economic prosperity will suffer if the pollutant is abated.

Blooms of algae and the resultant eutrophication of lakes and coastal ocean is considered pollution when it is caused by nutrients from industrial, agricultural, or residential runoff in either point source or nonpoint source form (see the article on eutrophication for more information).

Heavy metals such as lead and mercury have a role in geochemical cycles and they occur naturally. These metals may also be mined and, depending on their processing, may be released disruptively in large concentrations into an environment they had previously been absent from. Just as the effect of anthropogenic release of these metals into the environment may be considered 'polluting', similar environmental impacts could also occur in some areas due to either autochthonous or historically 'natural' geochemical activity.

Greenhouse gases and global warming

Main article: Global warming

Historical and projected CO2 emissions by country.
Source: Energy Information Administration.^[22][23]

Carbon dioxide, while vital for photosynthesis, is sometimes referred to as pollution, because raised levels of the gas in the atmosphere are affecting the Earth's climate. Disruption of the environment can also highlight the connection between areas of pollution that would normally be classified separately, such as those of water and air. Recent studies have investigated the potential for long-term rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide to cause slight but critical increases in the acidity of ocean waters, and the possible effects of this on marine ecosystems.

See also

Environment Portal

Environmental Science

• Example Standards
• Environmental epidemiology
• List of environment topics
• List of Superfund sites in the United States
• Remediation
• Timeline of environmental events
• Timeline of major US environmental and occupational health regulation

References

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to:

Pollution

Look up Pollution in
Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Environment Agency (England and Wales)
• Environmental Assessment Agency - Canada
• Environmental Protection Agency - USA
• Environmental Defense Fund
• Extoxnet newsletters - environmental pollution news. Last update 1998.
• Environmental Working Group
• Institute for Energy and Environmental Research
• OEHHA proposition 65 list
• OSHA limits for air contaminants
• National Toxicology Program - from USA National Institutes of Health. Reports and studies on how pollutants affect people.
• Toxnet - NIH databases and reports on toxicology.
• Superfund - manages Superfund sites and the pollutants in them (CERCLA).
• Toxic Release Inventory - tracks how much waste USA companies release into the water and air. Gives permits for releasing specific quantities of these pollutants each year. Map
• Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry - Top 20 pollutants, how they affect people, what USA industries use them and what products they are found in.
• The ToxTutor from the National Library of Medicine - An excellent resource to review human toxicology.
• Pollution Information from, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
• World's Worst Polluted Places 2007, according to the Blacksmith Institute
• The World's Most Polluted Places at Time.com (a division of Time Magazine)
• Chelyabinsk: The Most Contaminated Spot on the Planet Documentary Film by Slawomir Grünberg (1996)