Solving the Environmental Dilemma

If you had a choice between dumping out some leftover paint down the drain or going to the nearby hazardous waste collection program for its disposal, which would you pick? Which would friends, neighbors, or people all over the world pick? I presume most are at least aware of the potential damage such actions would have in regards to water pollution. However, as recently learned, in our global society we take part in this concept of commodity fetishism where the commodity overrules everything else because as far as the individual is concerned, it is all that matters. Water pollution poses a global problem as the health, wealth, and security of societies depend on clean water. With the onset of industrialization in many regions, the notion of health is often compromised to achieve the other two. The environmental problem of water pollution is very much a prisoner’s dilemma. It cannot be solved with “selfish” big players trampling over everyone else and can only be solved with the cooperation of all its players. Serious health effects have occurred because of neglect on the part of individuals and institutions polluting local waters for their own industrializing purposes in obtaining further wealth and security which can never be solved without immense, globally scaled efforts.

The poisoning of Minamata involved dumping large amounts of mercury waste into the local Minamata Bay affecting all organisms in its wake. The company, Nippon Chisso, manufactured acetaldehyde, used to produce many products such as plastics. It made its way into the human food chain and resulted in what is known as the Minamata disease among children as well as killing off fish, a detrimental blow to their local fishing industry. After decades of mercury dumping, silencing of researchers with evidence, and protests, the Japanese government forced Nippon Chisso to cease productions and pay millions in compensation to the families. This bittersweet ending does little to alleviate the pain victims have already suffered as most face bleak futures by coping with birth defects or having no future prospects for marriage due to the risk of deformed offspring (McNeil 2000). In this instance, polluting the water for technological and economic growth was done by one region, one factory, and merely one pollutant but victims and their health are still shadowed by the enormity of its repercussions.

Elsewhere in China, a rapidly growing populating amidst a rapidly industrializing nation suffers from “critical deficits in basic water supply, sewage treatment infrastructure, and lack of coordination between environmental and public health objectives” (Wu 1999). Many of the groundwater sources do not meet government drinking standards and pollution from heavy metal and chemical industries around major rivers dump wastes and pollute the water causing liver and stomach cancer related deaths to double since the 1970s. Poor or limited infrastructures in treating sewerage wastes results in communities simply discharging increasing volumes of human excreta among other household and industry wastes into surrounding rivers and lakes. This widespread contamination leads to increasingly high rates of illnesses and death. A large percentage of rural citizens and a smaller but significant percentage of urban dwellers have been affected by water pollution and their health was sacrificed for industrialization as the country continues producing more and more commodities and goods.

Water is the most essential nutrient for all organisms in any environment and accessible drinking water is sourced by few freshwater lakes and rivers. Perhaps due to this availability for some, water is generally treated as a common property resource as humans tend to push water pollution problems to others or overlook significant effects polluting water will have especially on surrounding organisms. We see this in Chicago when they conducted a large scale sanitation project that reversed the flow of rivers to dump waste into the Mississippi River flowing South instead of their own drinking supply. As chemicals from farm runoffs find their way into bodies of water, eutrophication occurs reducing oxygen for other aquatic life. Dumping waste into larger bodies of water will allow better capacity for dilution. This is acceptable as long as it is far away from the edges. Perhaps we can relate to Freud’s theory—we only see what we want to see and so maybe when the problem disappears from sight, it is no longer our problem. Essentially we are adapting to constraints on our culture by the physical environment in that drinkable water is scarce. Every region and individual has the capacity to rethink their own water polluting ethos without compromising health, wealth or security but in order for that to happen, cooperation on all levels need to agree on stricter controls, tighter decision-making and greater respect for the world’s natural resource—if each prisoner can only solve the dilemma.



McNeil., J.R., 2000: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World: Something New Under the Sun. Norton & Company, Inc., New York, 421 pp.

Wu, Changhua., 1999: Water Pollution and Human Health in China: Environmental Health Perspectives, 107, 251-256. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3434590.