E-Stork III: Where Poisoned Babies Come From

Green Ned Flanders Stork Museum

Part III of 4:   Does it really matter whether the pollution in Guiyu China came from E-waste, or from iron mining, or from textile mills?

If we are responsible for the Stewardship of our own upstreams and downstreams, as seems reasonable, why take any risk at all?

Isn't it appropriate for us to use our buying and selling power to procure the best available services, providing the best possible standards?

If so, why shouldn't our society, in essence, assign a liability for bad consequences to corporations we buy from?  Why shouldn't we ourselves remain legally liable for anything we once owned?  This concept is behind the "precautionary principle", championed in Europe:

The precautionary principle or precautionary approach states that if an action or policy has a suspected risk of causing harm to the public or to the environment, in the absence of scientific consensus that the action or policy is harmful, the burden of proof that it is not harmful falls on those taking the action. [wikipedia 2011.11.20]

If the individual making the purchasing decision suspects risk, and there is a vacuum or absense of scientific consensus, the burden of proof (liability) might dictate we should "avoid bad neighborhoods".  In the "absence of scientific consensus" we have reputation, news reports, green fingerpointing upon which to formulate our cognitive risk.  EPA enforcement cannot happen (in the USA) in absence of science.  Perhaps we need Watchdog organizations to boost our collective sense of liability.  Whether or not what we did was responsible for the watershed pollution in Blackstone, Louhrajang, OK Tedi, or Guiyu rivers, perhaps we need watchdogs who bark falsely, to keep us on our toes.

Or so said the lawyer for the boy who cries wolf...

Populist Cognitive Risk:   The "suspected risk" of the precautionary principle has boiled down to racial profiling.   Reputations of Africans for "waste tourism", "organized crime", burning computers they purchase for thousands of dollars after spending thousands of dollars to ship them over the ocean and through customs...  Given most Americans command of language and geography (most would place Mauritania next to Malawi, Madagascar, and Mozambique...), a photo of a sad child or sandalled woman elevates the "suspected risk".  A friend of mine in Massachusetts, a recycler of conscience, said to me that if there was even a chance that a computer exported wound up in Guiyu, that she couldn't sleep at night if a computer her town collected might wind up there.*

[see Bambauer, "Shopping Badly: Cognitive Biases..." 2006)

E-Stork II: Where Poisoned e-Waste Babies Come From

The first E-Stork post was a tale of three rivers:  Blackstone, Louhrajang, and Cape Fear.  Each poisoned river was traced upstream;  in each case, a textile mill was found.

When science sends journalists upstream, to witness the cause of pollution,  it's excusable to use a poster child baby in the story.  In the case of the Blackstone River, Saturday Evening Post stories about mill working children brought the pollution of the river into stark, cognitive risk.  Laws corrected the textile mills, and the rivers healed.

China's industrial revolution looks a lot like the Blackstone River Valley in the early 1900s.  Regulations may be ignored, but ignoring regulations is being documented.   This group of professors in China is bringing attention to an unpermitted steel mill (shanghaiscrap.com).  They aren't using baby pictures, but they are generating attention by being viral on the web.

Consensus over regulation begins with facts and science, getting the upstream and downstream on the table.   Annie Leonard is right about demand for "Stuff" driving competition to cut corners.   But the WSJ is also right, that cheaper goods benefit the poorest people (both in manufacturing and consumption).  It's easy for the rich to assert that Cheap is Bad.   If it helps you sleep at night to wear certified organic wool, good for you.

EPA took an important step in 2008 to try to bring groups to the table to air out such a compromise, in what eventually was labelled R2 or Responsible Recycler certification.