What a fantastic progress against pollution, since 200 years!

Humanitarian catastrophes (including resource wars and conflicts), natural, climate and industrial (except nuclear or oil forum fossil and nuclear energy). Pollution of the sea and oceans.
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Exnihiloest
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What a fantastic progress against pollution, since 200 years!




by Exnihiloest » 21/05/17, 12:24

"If someone asks me how one can stay in this dirty den of all the vices and all the evils piled one on top of the other, in the middle of an air poisoned by a thousand putrid vapors, among the butcheries, the cemeteries, hospitals, sewers, streams of urine, piles of excrement, dyers', tanners, tanner shops; in the midst of the continual smoke of this incredible quantity of wood, and the vapor of all that coal ; in the midst of arsenical, sulphurous, bituminous parts, which are constantly exhaled from the workshops where copper and metals are tormented,

if you ask me how we live in this abyss, whose heavy and foul air is so thick that we can see and feel the atmosphere more than three leagues around; air which cannot circulate, and which only swirls in this maze of houses, how finally man voluntarily languishes in these prisons, while if he released the animals which he fashioned at his yoke, he would see them , guided by the only instinct, to flee with haste and seek in the fields the air, the greenery, a free ground, embalmed by the perfume of the flowers:

I will answer that habit familiarizes Parisians with humid mists, harmful vapors and foul mud. "


"Table of Paris", by Louis-Sébastien Mercier, 1781

No, it was not better before. Progress is real, whatever the adepts of catastrophism and degrowth say, and all the haves complaining about the least of their boo-boo: they ignore their privileged condition compared to their ancestors and their chance to live today.
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Re: What fantastic progress against pollution, since 200 years!




by Janic » 21/05/17, 16:05

they ignore their privileged condition compared to their ancestors and their chance to live today.
It is true that our era, freed from certain constraints, is in a way privileged, but compared to what?
When there is yin there is automatically yang which completes it. everything that is won on one side is automatically lost on the other. It remains to be seen whether what has been acquired compensates for what has been lost and which continues to be lost. The number of depressed, suicidal, sick people invading doctors' offices and hospitals, environmental allergies like food, explosions of cancer and heart disease, nuclear waste and therefore the atomic bomb, obesity, etc. ... are they worth the change compared to our old ones?
Then all the French population, at the time of Mercier, did not crowd in the big cities, France was essentially rural and out of these fetid places. Unfortunately, the situation of large metropolises has hardly changed and horse droppings have been replaced by fuel oil deposits and the invasion of the atmosphere by fine carcinogenic particles of diesel, among others. What was unknown in 1781.
It is therefore not certain that yesterday's one-eyed man was not replaced by a blind man today!
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Re: What fantastic progress against pollution, since 200 years!




by sen-no-sen » 21/05/17, 21:11

Your initial remark Exnihiloest is completely contradictory since it is progress that is the cause of pollution ...

Considering progress, that is to say the improvement of living conditions thanks to technology, is a purely subjective vision.
Objectively, progress does not exist.


The reduction in pollution is also an illusion, since any local improvement is part of a logic of global degradation.
Environmental standards therefore only aim to optimize the saturation of the whole to go further and longer in the transformation of the biosphere into a technosphere.
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Re: What fantastic progress against pollution, since 200 years!




by Christophe » 21/05/17, 22:59

Exnihiloest wrote:they ignore their privileged condition compared to their ancestors and their chance to live today.


Yes but not even bothering to dig up ancestors ... 3/4 of the world population lives much less well than us ... not sure that most can define themselves as privileged ...

It does not prevent the safeguarding of the climate (or rather of its stability) is closely linked to our privileged conditions ... I say that I say nothing ... : Mrgreen:
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Re: What fantastic progress against pollution, since 200 years!




by sen-no-sen » 22/05/17, 23:44

A typical example of progress:

Image
Slum in Sierra Leone ...
Note that this kid is even better here than to hunt according to an ancestral "primitive" culture, fortunately we are exporting our know-how!
One day we will have to recognize the positive aspects of neo-colonization!

Image
Somewhere in the 18th arrondissement of Paris ... in France ... in 2017 ..

The question of the Roma in Paris has been admirably well treated: migrants are now hiding the Roma!
Because this is also progress, the pooling of problems for ordinary people and the privatization of benefits for some ... : roll:
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Re: What fantastic progress against pollution, since 200 years!




by Exnihiloest » 24/05/17, 22:20

sen-no-sen wrote:Your initial remark Exnihiloest is completely contradictory since it is progress that is the cause of pollution ...
...

Yes, but there is progress, you say it yourself, so it's positive.
In addition everything is not black: for example the air of the big cities in France is much better today than in the 60s: there it is progress and less pollution.
I know that there is still work (pesticides in particular) but complaining without stopping and risking a deterioration of our living conditions by measures which for example by improving pollution, would degrade other elements of life favored by means of which a certain pollution is the reverse, would be counter-productive even in extreme cases, criminal.

Objectively, progress does not exist.

In this case I do not see the point of discussing ecology or telling us about the slums.
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Re: What fantastic progress against pollution, since 200 years!




by Janic » 25/05/17, 08:09

In addition everything is not black: for example the air of the big cities in France is much better today than in the 60s: there it is progress and less pollution.
It was also the era of all oil for heating, because of its low price, and its cloud of pollutants. It is therefore not progress to replace a direct pollutant with another indirect such as nuclear.
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Re: What fantastic progress against pollution, since 200 years!




by Ahmed » 26/05/17, 13:24

Exnihiest, you answer Sen-no-sen:
Yes, but there is progress, you say it yourself, so it's positive.

"Progress" as a concept of propaganda invented in the XNUMXth century is obviously positive, but in substance and in reality this word is completely neutral and its meaning depends only on the context in which it is used: thus, in its negative uses , we can talk about the progress of the epidemic, erosion, a fire ...
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Re: What fantastic progress against pollution, since 200 years!




by Exnihiloest » 26/05/17, 21:09

Janic wrote:... It is therefore not progress to replace a direct pollutant with another indirect such as nuclear.

This sentence erected in principle means nothing if the harmfulness of each pollutant is not compared. Replacing one pollutant with another that is less polluting than the first is progress.
No human action is neutral, nor even human life; whatever we do there are always elements of pollution.
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Re: What fantastic progress against pollution, since 200 years!




by Exnihiloest » 26/05/17, 21:22

Christophe wrote:
Exnihiloest wrote:they ignore their privileged condition compared to their ancestors and their chance to live today.


Yes but not even bothering to dig up ancestors ... 3/4 of the world population lives much less well than us ... not sure that most can define themselves as privileged ...

yes, but we must see the reasons, in particular religious, geographical and climatic, which made the western advance.

It does not prevent the safeguarding of the climate (or rather of its stability) is closely linked to our privileged conditions ... I say that I say nothing ... : Mrgreen:

This is where we diverge. Man is neither responsible for the climate nor has the means to change it.
It is good to believe that man is guilty but that he can redeem himself. It reminds me of an old story. This recycling is very ecological after all. 8)
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