Does Pollution Really Exist?

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While listening to a recitation from Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, I heard Alinsky assert that “once you organize people around something as commonly agreed upon as pollution” the battle is already joined. Since when do we agree on what is pollution, where it is, or how much is bad? Who even decided that pollution was bad? What does pollution really mean?

Pollution plain and simple means anything that enters an environment that upsets the stability of that environment. In that case, almost anything can be considered a pollutant, and at the same time nothing is a pollutant, depending on the point of view and scale under consideration. On a nanoscopic scale, anything except a pure substance pollutes it. Shoot, I have a vial of calcium chloride on my desk that is “polluted” by the fact that it’s hygroscopic and now contains more water vapor per mole than “natural”. On a universal or galactic scale, any conceivable natural product that exists anywhere in that realm of focus belongs where it is.

Plants are often used as the be-all and end-all for defining the health of the earth. I learned while studying Vitis vinifera as a graduate student that grapes are actually weeds, like ALMOST EVERY OTHER CROP PLANT. A weed is simply a plant that grows somewhere where we don’t want it. In that way, shade trees, bushes, tulips growing in the lawn, or lawn growing in the flower beds sometimes constitute weeds. People ignorant of metabolism will claim that carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, radioactive isotopes, terpenes, and gobs of other compounds are “unnatural”. Yet, from my own metabolic studies of grapes under water deficit stress I know that plants generate a great deal of “pollutive” substances naturally. I lack an exhaustive list, but keep in mind that even plants make carbon dioxide.

Any substance that could conceivably occur naturally anywhere randomly in the realm of focus belongs there. As such, I maintain that pollution is a creation of tyrants- a way for a small few to restrict the liberty of many others. Plants make rubbers, tars, volatile gases, poisons, refined sugars, narcotics, et al., naturally. In the process of the reconstitution of plants to raw materials, further “pollution” results. Is it really preferable to have mountains of vegetable matter sitting around that never rots than to have the microbes responsible for its reutilization metabolize and reuse it (including the production of fossil fuels)? Or is the claim of environmentalists to reduce, reuse, and recycle only extended to and expected from humans? Natural events cannot possibly be pollution.

When Mt. St. Helens erupted in the early 1980s, it threw gobs of volcanic ash into the atmosphere. That ash killed plants and animals and blocked the sun. The ash was however perfectly natural, a result of natural events within the earth’s core over which men exert little to no control. Nobody made a big deal about spending lots of money to stop volcanoes from being able to pollute in the future. They only care about men.

Environmentalism is the new communism. Green is the new red. They want to tell you what you can and cannot do- a new enslavement of man to whom God clearly bequeathed the earth as part of a responsible stewardship. If we don’t use the fossil fuels, heavy metals, radioactive materials, etc., in America, someone else will.

Pollution is something I don’t happen to like somewhere where I don’t happen to like it. There are plenty of “blades of grass” growing in the flower beds of civilization and free society. Marx would be so proud.