The realities of personal and planetary health are bound together. Air and water pollution, fires and floods, current and potential pandemics, all of these hazards to our well-being are clear and present dangers, not just precursors to future disasters. More and more people, especially our youth, are understanding the connection between ecological destruction and capitalism.
Poisoning of our Life-giving Resources
While nowhere on earth is free of environmental dangers, low-income communities are particularly affected by the pollution of essential resources. The Louisiana area known as Cancer Alley is an 85 mile-long stretch of land between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, with 150 oil refineries and petrochemical plants that cause an oily taste in the water, blackened leaves on fruit trees, and an acrid odor. People living there, primarily poor and African American, are over 50 times more likely to get cancer than the national average, in a stunningly egregious example of environmental racism.
Residents of Southeast Los Angeles live in an environmental disaster zone resulting from lead pollution caused by a now-closed lead-acid battery smelter owned by Exide Technologies. While they wait forever for a state agency to remove contaminated soil from thousands of homes, low-income families that can’t escape the community are exposed to brain-damaging dirt and dust when they venture outside.
In Appalachia, where coal companies are using huge amounts of explosives to blow the tops off mountains, the water in poor rural communities has been poisoned. Residents have testified that their bathrooms and kitchens have been deeply stained red-orange by iron, sulfur, and arsenic from the household water supply.
Whether it’s lead in the water in Flint, Newark, Chicago, or Baltimore, carcinogens in our food, or fracking and pipelines endangering water on indigenous territory, the neglect of environmental health has led to disastrous consequences for human health. The good news is that there has been significant community fight back against the corporate powers and their political lackeys, responsible for every situation mentioned in this section.
Floods, Fires, and Smoke
For two weeks in the summer of 2020, wildfires caused by extreme heat and drought burned 5 million acres in California, Oregon, and Washington, killed 33 people, and displaced tens of thousands. Smoke from these West Coast blazes stretched for thousands of miles, all the way to New York. Counties in California’s agricultural Central Valley, which already has some of the most polluted air, were especially hard hit, exacerbating the already high rates of asthma in children.
During that same time, five tropical cyclones were in action off the Atlantic Coast in one single day. The 2020 hurricane season had thirty-one named storms in the Atlantic, the most ever, affecting North and Central America and the Caribbean. Australia had 15,000 bush fires across every state in 2020, killing 33 people directly and 417 from the smoke, as well as close to three billion animals. Major floods occurred in East Africa, China, Yemen, Afghanistan, Sudan, Central Vietnam, India, and Bangladesh. Globally, the number of reported weather-related natural disasters has more than tripled since the 1960s, resulting in over 60,000 yearly deaths, mainly in developing countries.
Immediate measures to cope with such disasters also affect the ability to control and treat the coronavirus pandemic. Putting people in sheltered spaces for fires, floods, and smoke makes distancing difficult. During the California wildfires, people were caught between having activities outside to avoid the virus or inside to avoid the smoke. Disaster victims and pandemic patients compete for health care resources.
Pandemics, Superbugs
There are many interwoven factors between the environment and other human illnesses. For instance, the poor health of people in Cancer Alley led to that area dealing with some of the highest coronavirus death rates in the country. Poisons in the water supply can compromise health and cause underlying conditions that weaken one’s immune system in this time of pandemic. Asthma aggravated by poor air quality can lead to more severe coronavirus symptoms. Studies are being done on climate variables, the effect of extremes, and the seasonality of COVID 19 transmission.
The loss of habitat for animals and large livestock farms in contact with humans increasingly lead to zoonotic diseases that jump from animals to humans. COVID 19 originated in this way. This is not a new phenomenon; yellow fever, some influenzas, Lyme disease, HIV, Ebola, rabies, and brucellosis are all examples. With continued ecosystem destruction, it will get much worse, unless responsible mitigating processes are put into place.
The evolution and proliferation of superbugs, which are harmful bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics, illustrates the complex intersection of technology, healthcare, and the environment under capitalism. As of 2019, drug-resistant infections were the third leading cause of death in the United States, at 162,000 a year. A study by a British expert panel shows that if the trend continues, in 2050, they will kill 10 million people a year globally. The WHO says the problem is so severe, it threatens the achievement of modern medicine.
Capitalism is the Enemy
Capitalism and private property are the biggest barriers to solving these enormous problems. The growth imperative and profit motive stand squarely in the way of the widespread sustainability measures needed to slow or stop ecological destruction, let alone reverse the damage and return the planet and its humans to health. This will take a major transformation from a capitalist to a cooperative society, which our youth understand. In a recent poll, 49 percent of Generation Z (ages 16-23) view socialism favorably. Sixty percent of Millennials (age 24-39) support a “complete change of our economic system away from capitalism,” and 57 percent of Gen Z does as well. These are significant increases from just last year.
In the recent elections, several youth organizations, including Dream Defenders, March for Our Lives, the Sunrise Movement, and United We Dream, formed the “Count On Us” Coalition. These organizations fight for racial justice, climate justice, immigrant rights, and gun control. They mobilized their hundreds of thousands of members through direct voter contact.
This electoral effort of youth was against Trump, but they will hold Biden accountable. A post on the Sunrise Movement’s Facebook page reads in part, “and you know what the number one swing issue for young black folks and young Latinos was? Climate. We just gave Joe Biden a #ClimateMandate. …… Is he gonna lead with bold power? Biden won on the strength of his GND-influenced economic recovery and climate plan — the plan we redesigned with @AOC as part of the Biden-Bernie climate task-force.”
The Green New Deal, over which the youth are claiming ownership, is the most far-reaching proposal advanced by the class to deal with the environmental crisis and must be supported. The dialectic of how we fight for the survival of ourselves and the planet is well put by John Bellamy Foster: “We cannot deal with the climate crisis, much less the overall planetary ecological emergency, in an effective way while conforming to the logic of a globalized capitalist economy. But we currently live in such an economy, and we have a very short time in which to respond to climate change. So it becomes a question of immediately choosing to steer society toward putting people and nature before profits, as opposed to what capitalism does, i.e., putting profits before people and nature. We have to go against the logic of the system even while living within it.” RC
March/April 2021 Vol31. Ed2
This article originated in Rally, Comrades
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