The following is a transcript of a speech delivered by Richard Levins to a conference of public health workers on The Exportation of Hazardous Industries to Developing Countries held in New York City on November 2, 1979. Published in Puerto Rico Libre, Dec 1979
It is very important to discuss particular cases of environmental impact in particular industries to evaluate the behavior in the environment of particular kinds of molecules. When we do that, we find that there are a number of clear-cut cases where we can demonstrate the health impact of individual industries., and then there is a large area of ambiguous situations—situations where workers in an industry will know damn well that they are being poisoned, but the sample is too small, or the data is incomplete, or we don't have a matching population with the same age distribution, or for all kinds of technical reasons, the evidence in a particular case is not all that overwhelming.
Sometimes it's also advantageous to step back and attempt to look at the system as a whole from the perspective of ecology rather than of clinical health. From that perspective, we see several characteristics of Puerto Rico as a system which is particularly vulnerable to the undesirable impact of hazardous industries. Some of this vulnerability comes from its physical geography, climate and ecology, some of it from its political status as a United States colony, but the social and the natural are really inseparable.
First of all, Puerto Rico is a small country, and this means that it is not possible to isolate one kind of activity from another. If it were necessary to evacuate a 50-mile radius around the closed nuclear plant at Rincon, half of the island would be empty. If we have to evacuate 50 miles around Arecibo, we would all be living at the lighthouse in Cabo Rojo or the Navy's firing range in Vieques. The country is just too small to talk about putting some industries out of the way where they won't do any harm.
Secondly, what happens in one habitat will necessarily affect what goes on in another habitat. Any place along the coastal plains of Puerto Rico, the smoke is capable of reaching the mangrove swamps. The mangroves are important as nesting grounds for birds which eat insects in the pastures, also for the reproduction of marine life. So it wouldn't be sufficient to say that this industry will be put on a piece of waste ground which isn't useful for anything else. The smells from the petrochemical complex in the dry lowlands reach the humid forests. This means that we cannot attempt to segregate out areas that we can dispense with, where we will allow full contamination in the hope that it will not affect the rest of the environment.
Next, Puerto Rico has a low dilution capacity. The rivers of Puerto Rico are not very large, and already, the production of electric power, the burning of fossil fuels, dumps and much hot water into the ocean around Puerto Rico as about half the water coming through the rivers. So the industrial activity is already out of scale in relation to the geological processes. Furthermore, many of the industries that have been established in Puerto Rico have very high water demands. This means that while Pittsburgh Plate Glass was actively competing with the town of Yauco for a water supply, its use of 8 million gallons a day seriously impaired the development of agriculture in the region. Sometimes the impact of industry takes place indirectly, destroying opportunities for other activities.
The same thing occurs when the pollution from industries which may create a few jobs destroy the material base for other industries. The fishing industry was the first to be affected by the contamination of the coastal waters from the fertilizer factory a Guanica, and later from the petrochemicals. Agriculture has also been affected. We've noticed that the sugar cane yields have declined in the downwind areas around some of the factories. Ethylene has had the effect of speeding up the ripening of pineapples to the extent that they could no longer be harvested and shipped and so forth.
When you have a number of different kinds of industries in the same area it's no longer possible to even separate their impact; and if somebody is sick, you can see a debate developing in the court: is it the sulphur dioxide from my smoke stack that is killing him, or the mercury from your thermometer factory?
From the point of view of the country this debate doesn't matter; from the point of view of allocating fines it becomes the intellectual boundary of the problem.
Geologically, much of Puerto Rico is of tertiary limestone shot through with potholes, sinks and underground streams; if something spills in that area, we really don't know where it's going to come out. This is one of the problems that developed with copper mining when the company decided that they would have a tailings pond, but it really couldn't guarantee that the heavy metals from the tailings would not get into the water system of Arecibo and some of the other north coast towns.
The country is just too small; the tropical environment with high humidity also speeds up the conversion of some of the primary pollutants into secondary products that are sometimes more serious. And it's because of that situation that it's possible for Puerto Rican industries to meet the sulphur dioxide standards while simultaneously destroying people's lungs. Sulphur dioxide in the island rapidly turns into particulates, sulphates, or into sulphuric acid which aren't as completely covered by the standards. When we look at the system as a whole the, we see obviously and clearly from the medical records that the pattern of industrial development has been bad for people. But there is another dimension to the vulnerability of Puerto Rican ecology and the Puerto Rican health system.
This is the political vulnerability that comes in one way or another from the status of Puerto Rico as a colony, as a place where to a greater extent that on the mainland costs and benefits are separated not only socially, but geographically. This separation of costs and benefits is one of the striking characteristics of the colonial pattern of exploitation. Within this pattern it has been the policy of the various colonial regimes to attract U.S. capital as a strategy for building jobs and getting income, but attracting capital means creating a favorable climate for investment which is not always a favorable climate for breathing. The favorable climate for investment means that environmental standards cannot be too severe, and not enforced too rigorously. It's important to recognize here the futility of simply imposing rigorous standards, because anybody who actually moves to enforce those rigorous standards is immediately faced with the pressure that this is not going to be good, this is going to undermine the economy, "it's going to destroy the confidence of business," and so forth. And so in fact, even though Puerto Rico is covered by some legislation for protecting the environment, the environment is bad and people are getting sick. High unemployment also acts as a coercion against the labor movement which for a long time has had a great deal of difficulty facing the alternative of choosing between breathing and starving, where the threat is that the industries would close down if the standards imposed were too great and there simply aren't other ways of making a living.
The absence of other ways of making a living, however, is also a result of the colonial pattern of exploitation so that the favorable climate was created as well as utilized. The favorable climate for investment is also protected by the political repression of dissidents and so as environmental problems become more serious, as unemployment becomes more serious, the FBI becomes one of the major contaminants of our environment as well.
A colonial country is dependent not only in the physical sense of being occupied by a foreign power and having foreign investments, but also in the sense that there is an intellectual domination over the science, the research and development work, even by the criteria by which standards are imposed. As long as the United States' pattern of evaluating environmental impact is the method we have to use, it's really a hopeless task to protect the environment for several reasons.
In the United States at the present time, there are about 45,000 chemical compounds on the market and several hundred are released every year. Let's say with a figure of 600 new compounds being released yearly, a certain proportion of these are toxic even though it's not obvious in the beginning. Let's suppose that only ten percent of them are damaging to health. The time that it takes to identify a product as being dangerous depends upon how stringent the criteria for evaluation is and how thorough the testing. Suppose that would take something like five years before a compound on the market is identified as harmful. This means with the 60 or so harmful compounds released each year, we'd have an accumulation of about 300 compounds which are harmful in the environment at any one time.
While the due process procedure of screening and removing from the market was working perfectly, people are dying; the pattern will be changing from year to year, but that'll be small consolation. So the process of allowing people to poison the environment until we go through an elaborate process of identifying the pollutants guarantees that there will be a lot of paper shuffling in the administration, and also that the health will not be protected.
Another characteristic of the colonial health pattern is the combination in the same population of the diseases of underdevelopment and of industrialization. While Puerto Rico still has an infant mortality rate of about double that of the industrial countries of Europe, and it has other features of underdevelopment such as intestinal parasites and so on, it is also showing the patterns of mortality brought on by industrialization. So what happens is that lungs weakened by malnutrition are then attacked by modern chemicals, and it's this which makes the environment so unhealthy. When we attempt to study such a system and evaluate measures for protection, we immediately run into all kinds of difficulties, some of which can be described as ignorance.
However, it's important to realize that ignorance is not the absence of knowledge. Ignorance is the positive product of human decision making, defining some problems as out of bounds, other problems as legitimate.
Ignorance is the result of deciding that we will not look for trouble. If science is a commodity being sold to clients as evaluations of environmental impact, we will certainly examine those effects of pollutants which are likely to come up in hearings, but not exercise our imaginations too much in discovering something beyond those boundaries. If we are giving advice to government agencies as scientists, we become terrified at losing our credibility and therefore we will never give advice which seems to be beyond the boundaries of the politically feasible during the tenure of the existing regime. It is because of this fact that environmental standards seem to be the attempt to pin a particular specific weight to a particular compound, while real environmental impact involves the weaving together of direct and indirect influences of many molecules coming together in a physical environment and a political economic environment that we cannot disentangle into individual responsibilities.
What this means is that it's not possible to plan the environment by correcting abuses. It isn't even possible to operate by imposing standards on industries that have already been designed. What is necessary is a much more positive planning in which before a chemical compound is released in the habitat, it must be demonstrated that there is a necessary social purpose for its release. Among the small number of compounds for which we can establish such a purpose it becomes possible to carry out a more effective long-term kind of screening without the hurry, the pressure we are now under to get things approved. And, if industry can clearly demonstrate that such a procedure would discourage innovation, then it's no so much an argument in favor of relaxing standards as an argument in favor of displacing private industry as a source of production.
What happens, then, is that a small country like Puerto Rico simply cannot afford the destruction of the environment subject only to after-the-fact controls. We need the positive engineering which begins the design of industrial enterprise by building in considerations for the health and safety of the workers and the community. We need decisions of allocating the resources in terms of what would be socially needed for a country rather than only being allowed to complain after it's proven that sufficient numbers have been poisoned. We need standards which talk about the net toxic load on people rather than individual standards for particular molecules. It's quite possible to have ten thousand different compounds each of which is below the accepted threshold while their joint effects, inseparable statistically, would be undermining the health of the people. It means that we have to break through the kind of crackpot realism which accepts the boundary conditions of "let's not make things too difficult for industry or they'll be discouraged, poor dears." But this means approaching science in a different way and this means the intellectual independence to pose the problem of the relationship of a human society with its natural and physical environment as a whole system, using the variables of nature and the variables of nature and the variables of economics together in the same kind of model building Unfortunately that kind of science runs against the grain of the Western tradition where we're taught to specialize, isolate things, don't rock the boat, separate thinking from feeling.
In the long run the battle for environmental protection is also a battle around the kind of scientific epistemology we use in our research as against the specialization, reductionism, pragmatism of the present day development. We have to insist on an approach to science which emphasizes the inseparability of phenomena in different disciplines, the rich interconnection of the world, its inherent heterogeneity and variability, contradiction and so forth which means an independent science strongly informed by the insights of dialectical materialism.
