As Pollution Drops, Cities on Lockdown Reveal Cumulative Harm of Technology Use
“Act so that the effects of your action are compatible with the permanence of genuine human life.” — Hans Jonas
The change was sudden and stark. After just one week of lockdown due to the pandemic, the smog was gone in Los Angeles. The air was also cleaner in Paris, Milan, Madrid, and other densely populated cities around the world.
It’s not an illusion. Researchers in late March found that levels of nitrogen dioxide, a major pollutant, dropped by about 70 percent in New Delhi after just one week of stay-at-home measures. The decline of air pollution is directly attributable to the absence of millions of people, their vehicles, and their activities.
The key word here is millions. New Delhi has a population of more than 21 million. Los Angeles, nearly 4 million. Madrid, 6.6 million. And so on. Now, almost all of them are sheltering at home. Photos, like this one of Manhattan, show that the streets are nearly deserted.
The resulting reduction of air pollution underscores the fact that the impact of humans on our environment is cumulative but also reversible — and knowing that, we cannot escape the moral responsibility of how we use technology. It’s something that philosopher Hans Jonas warned us about 40 years ago in his book, The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age.[1]
Technology as Cumulative
A few years ago, I had a conversation with a stranger who didn’t believe human activity was causing climate change. He had a small farm, and he said he needed a tractor to tend to it. “My tractor isn’t doing anything to the greenhouse gases,” he told me.
I just nodded. He was a stranger, after all. And he was right, in a way: his tractor and its emissions weren’t doing much damage. But he was short-sighted. It is the worldwide cumulative emissions of millions of tractors and other vehicles, added to the millions of factories, coal-burning power plants, and other fossil fuel technology that causes air pollution and contributes to climate change.
In his book, Jonas argues that the widespread use of advanced technology requires a rethinking of ethics. He writes, “Modern technology has introduced actions of such novel scale, objects, and consequences that the framework of former ethics can no longer contain them.”[2]
Compared to past eras, today’s technology is vast, widespread and cumulative — and so are the effects. It’s not just emissions, either. The mining of metals, the manufacture of parts, the generation of energy, the extraction and refinement of oil — all of these activities build upon each other as they are multiplied millions of times and repeated continuously over the years.
One vehicle is no problem. Billions of vehicles have created an environmental disaster.
The old ethics of individual responsibility and action can’t address this situation. Cumulative effects require collective effort. But first, we need a deeper understanding of humans vis-a-vis nature.
Nature and the Cumulative Effects of Civilization
Another consequence of lockdowns is that when people are gone, animals take over. We’ve all seen the photos of wild animals wandering in the deserted streets of cities. Mountain goats walking by parked cars near a coffee shop in a city in Wales. A pride of lions napping on a highway in South Africa. Monkeys running and climbing over empty plazas in New Delhi.
The animals have been there all along, of course. They’ve been living in undeveloped areas on the fringes of the cities, in parks and empty lots, ditches and along creeks. Many, like Chicago’s coyotes, are occasionally spotted by residents late at night or early in the morning.
But wildlife are cautious; for most of them, their most serious threat is human activity. This is not a new phenomenon. Since ancient times, the actions of humans have consumed natural resources, changed the landscape, caused deforestation and erosion, poisoned water, and hunted animals to extinction.
For most of human history, the earth has a whole has not been threatened. Populations were small, and when people rendered their surroundings unlivable, they moved on, and the earth healed itself. It’s no wonder people developed the attitude that the resources of the earth were boundless and inexhaustible.[3]
But over the last century, it’s become clear that is no longer the case. The scale and range of human habitation combined with the cumulative effects of their technology have led us to an unsustainable situation. The earth is dying, and so is the future of humanity. A change of ethics is needed, and these moral decisions must be enacted through public policies.
Cumulative Ethics as Public Policy
Since the 1970s, environmental activists have urged each us to reduce, reuse, and recycle. And we’ve been trying. In 2017, Americans recycled 67 million tons of solid waste and composted 27 million tons of organic materials. It hasn’t been enough. Recycling efforts can’t keep up with the cumulative manufacture of harmful substances. For example, more than 300 million tons of plastic is produced each year, and most of that is single use, such as plastic bags, soda bottles, and containers for cleaning products. Less than 10 percent is recycled.
Just as one tractor can’t cause pollution, neither can the absence of one tractor solve it. Individual actions can help, but without massive, coordinated effort, regulations, and changes in public policy, the problem cannot be solved.
Take air pollution, for example. Over the past several decades, air quality has also steadily improved. But this progress wasn’t achieved through individual effort; it took laws and regulations, such as the Clean Air Act, to make it happen. Now, America under the Trump administration is loosening or eliminating environmental protections rules. The reasoning? To help businesses and manufacturing. These actions are unethical and unsustainable. The short-term gain of profits come at the cost of the long-term survival of human life on earth.
According to Jonas, both public policies and individual behavior must be changed out of a sense of duty to future generations, without expectation of profit or reciprocity, and these actions must be consistent and sustained.
It took only a week to significantly reduce air pollution after human activity virtually ceased. That is not a permanent change; we know when the people come back, so will the smog. Still, the rapid ability of the earth to bounce back, to begin healing itself just a little, is a sign that we can make a difference — but our efforts, like our technology, must be cumulative.
