Hi everyone! It has been 12 long weeks of looking at pollution. When we started off this journey, we asked an important question:
“What is pollution?”
Let us now look back at what all the various forms of environmental pollution have in common before we come up with our own definition. Using this definition, we will then attempt to test its usefulness and try to derive as absurd a conclusion as possible. After all, negative testing is one of the ways we can test the validity, or comprehensiveness of our definition.
What is environmental pollution:
Firstly, we realised that sources of environmental pollution may be natural or anthropogenic. However, the anthropogenic sources are of more concern as our capacity to pollute often exceed that of the environment’s (Victor et al., 2014). Thus, laws that target environmental pollution should only focus on pollutants of anthropogenic sources. Secondly, pollutants can be substance-based, such as greenhouse gases or waste, or energy-based, such as noise or radiation. Thus, both forms should be considered when defining “environmental pollution”. As we have mentioned, all substances are hazardous and the extent that we are affected stems from the concentration of the pollutant. Hence, “environmental pollution” should only occur when a pollutant occurs in concentration in excess of the normal (background) amount. Thirdly, we have learnt that pollution can travel far away and affect places distant from its source, such as the transboundary haze (Hill, 2010). Thus, a pollutant should always hold responsibility for its impact regardless of how far the impact is felt from the source. Lastly, harm need not be necessary for pollution to take place. The mere impairment of normal functions is sufficient for “environmental pollution” to take place.
After understanding this variety of contexts for pollution, we thought that we should keep things simple and come out with the most basic framework to define environmental pollution where we consider the source of a pollutant, and the impacts it brings. Thus, we define environmental pollution as:
“The anthropogenic release of substances or energies in excess of normal capacity, causing an impairment of environment and human health in situ or ex situ. Harm on the environment is not necessary as condition for pollution”
With this, we ask if you agree with our definition. We recommend you to try and disprove this definition with us by either finding forms of pollutions that do not fit into our definition, or acts which are not pollutive but fit into this definition! We hope to see you in the next post as we seek to do the same ourselves.
Lee Yang
References
Hill, M. K. (2010). Understanding Environmental Pollution: Cambridge University Press.
Victor, D., Zhou, D., Ahmed, E., Dadhich, P. K., Olivier, J., Rogner, H.-H., . . . Yamaguchi, M. (2014). Introductory chapter.