By ASHWANI VASISHTH

Pollution!!! Billowing smoke stacks, belching tail pipes, the stench of chemicals, smoggy skylines—sights and sounds and smells. That’s what we think of, when we hear the word pollution. Because we are sensory creatures, first and foremost. Things are always more real to us when we can see, and touch, and hear, and feel, and taste them, than when we can’t. Abstractions are those things we can only conceive of in our mind’s eye. Reality is what’s empirical, what’s tangible, measurable.

People say, “pollution is getting better.” And it is, visibly speaking. But cancer rates are rising. Asthma is getting worse. Allergies are becoming more the norm. To the best of our knowledge, these trends are driven mostly by environmental factors. But these factors are increasingly becoming less tangible, less visible, less manifest. All trucks and buses and planes used to belch thick black smoke not so long ago. Now, visible exhaust is the exception not the norm. Has pollution gotten better? Or is it just different? Less visible. Does that make it harder to fight?

Fighting Pollution, In the Community

Environmental justice is a movement that has grown up around the fact that there is a tendency of polluting activities to locate in the very same places where poor people and people of color tend to locate themselves. Or, sometimes, at poor people live where pollution levels are higher. Why? This is partially because both poor people and polluting activities are looking for the same thing—cheap land. And partly it is the case that poor people have less political and monetary power, and are less able to oppose the location of polluting activities in their back yards, so to speak.

Community organizing is one tool that has emerged as being at least somewhat effective in combating pollution. It requires the education and the empowerment of community members, showing them why they need to care, and then showing them how they can take back some of the power that has been wrested from their control over generations of “civilization.”

But there is a problem here, one that is going to get worse with time. Pollution is becoming invisible. And out-of-sight is out-of-mind, they say. If people can’t see, smell and otherwise directly sense the pollution, will they care enough to make the phenomenal effort needed to organize protest against the status quo?

The problems we face, environmentally, are less and less about pollution that we can see and smell and taste, and more and more about pollution that can only be thought about. It’s still real, but it’s a reality that we can only grasp with our minds. This matters, because it may be harder to get folks opposed to things that we can only tell them about, but cannot actually show them.

Take ultra-fine particles, as one example. Particles with an aerodynamic diameter less than 2.5 microns (PM 2.5) are absolutely invisible to the human eye. We will fight tooth and nail against thick black smoke, and yet be relatively indifferent to PM2.5. Yet, the thick black smoke may well be less harmful to us than those teeny-tiny particles, which can get deep into our lungs, our blood stream, and make their way to every organ in our body.

Greenhouse gases, which cause climate change when they get into the upper atmosphere, such as carbon dioxide (CO2) are another example of pollution that is not directly visible to us. We must understand complex interactions and phenomena in order to become convinced of the reality of climate change. And then there are the policy issues—cap-and-trade versus carbon taxes, for instance. The idea that carbon dioxide, which we exhale and which plants inhale, is a pollutant can be a radical thought for some. So community organizing for climate change may be much more difficult than community organizing against a smelly chemical factory or a coal-fired power plant.

The Tyranny of Small Decisions

Then there is the issue of cumulative impacts. Dinky little pokes that add up—just when you’re not looking—to one massive adverse impact that never got measured as such. Like death from a thousand cuts, no one impact is really all that bad, and if the decision process on locating emitters like this are sufficiently segmented, we’d never see the cumulative impacts coming.

Decisions make at the level of the collective are aggregations, usually, of individual decisions made with one’s own version of “self-interest” in mind. What we, as individuals, care about will determine what we choose to do. But if there is not a feedback process, a loop that somehow brings us face to face with the cumulative implications of our various individual decisions before our individual decisions are actualized, we’d never see the consequences of our disparate decisions until it was too late to hit the undo button.

In the case of Los Angeles, one of the reasons the region is so heavily underinvested in public transportation is because each one of us, individually, has chosen the “convenience” of a single occupancy vehicular trip over the “inconvenience” of sharing trips with many others. The net result, of course, is that the single occupancy trips become gradually less and less convenient, but, by the time this reality comes home to roost, we’ve sucked the transit system dry of funding, and we are left with no alternatives—at least, apparently—but to keep on driving in spite of the growing levels of congestion.

Pollution, too, is subject to the laws of cumulative impact. Each single pollution source seems not to be a big deal, but, taken together, we might get a whole new instance of “cancer alley.” By the time we realize the cumulative impacts, the inertia of the status quo makes their removal that much harder.

Los Angeles International Airport and the San Pedro Port Complex of the Ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles are two other examples of facilities that have extraordinarily high adverse environmental health impacts. But we came to these levels of impact in a very gradual process of growth and of encroachment. One more truck, one more plane, one more house, and before we knew it, we have the highest rates of cancer and of respiratory ailments anywhere in the Southland.

Why are people, even today, when we CAN know better, choosing to move into close proximity to the I-710 Freeway? Because there is no visible red-flag that might viscerally warn them away. I have friends who were, in this day and age, considering buying a house near the freeway. It took a lot of discussion to “show” them why this was not a good idea. Why would a scientist, who moved recently into proximity with the freeway, and soon after saw herself and her child develop serious respiratory ailments, make the connection between location and illness, yet still continue to live in that same location?

The fight for environmental justice is made much harder, I would argue, when pollution becomes invisible, less accessible to the senses, and thus, in important ways, less “real.”

The Changing Face of Community Organizing

Conventional community organizing involves graphically showing people a problem that affects them directly and viscerally, educating them about the consequences of the problem, showing them ways to take on the dominant power structure, and then helping guide them through the maze of bureaucratic opposition to protest. Community organizing in the near-term future, on the other hand, is going to have to deal with realities where that essential first step is missing—where we cannot “show” them the problem, but can only try to convince them that it really does exist.

Put differently, the fight for environmental justice is born of passion—passion driven by outrage, by anger at patent unfairness, by revulsion and disgust at manifest instances of pollution and contamination. Community organizing is an emotional thing, driven by reactions from the heart, for all that it is grounded in the cerebral articulation of strategic activity, and fueled by knowledge and by data.

So the question is this—if we cannot see it, hear it, feel it, or smell it, is it still real to us? Can we get as passionately outraged about it? We will increasingly need to, I fear.

Ashwani Vasishth is assistant professor in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning and director of the Institute for Sustainability at California State University, Northridge. His book, Getting Humans Back Into Nature: An Ecosystem Approach to Integrative Ecological Planning, was published in 2008.

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