Environmental Degradation and Subversion of Health - Dag ...

72 Mira Shiva
chemical, it is also biological, social and psychological. The resulting damage,
disability, disease and death are totally unwarranted, usually irreversible
and hardly ever compensated; the ultimate tragedy is that they are often
compounded by exploitative trade practices and heavily weighted research
priorities.
To my mind, the problem may be articulated as one of extreme deprivation
on the one hand, and of irrational excess on the other. The deprivation is
that of essentials, such as food. clean and adequate water, air, health care.
and safe living and working conditions. The excess consists of bombarding
our beings, our lives, and our environment with hazardous gases, chemicals
and biological contamination, i.e., irrational and inessential toxification.
Important lessons in this area of deprivation and excess can be drawn from
the experience of the politics of population policies, which has long divided
the South from the North.
History has shown that laws can act as a deterrent whereby social conscience
and responsibility take precedence over individual profiteering. But where
vested interests have ensured an accumulation of power and money, the silence
of the tormented is enforced, and that of law enforcers bought. Legal
loopholes are given precedence over morality and ethics, and unjust laws
are passed, while attempts to enforce controls are scuttled, whether they relate
to the Bhopal gas tragedy, the violation of the Baby Food Code, drug
dumping or the indiscriminate use of toxic pesticides. Ecological and health
hazards cannot be prevented or dealt with unless a collective consciousness
is built up among those who are willing to make sacrifices and to live without
destroying and exploiting. It is only when enough people have cared and
dared that changes have been enforced.
The impoverishment of the poor is increasing worldwide, even as unprecedented
power and means of control are being monopolised by a few, through
instruments like GATT, structural adjustment programmes, or through a
development model which causes debt and dependency rather than benefiting
the poor, as it purports to do. As the disparities and inequities grow, as
liberal market forces are let loose, we will see more and more people deprived
of essentials, and both people and environment flooded with the irrational
and hazardous.
Deprivation of The deprivation of adequate and appropriate nutrition: of safe and
essentials adequate drinking water and pure air; and of basic needs including health
care, education, employment, the right to safe working and living condi-