The first issue of this column addressed rather general topics, like peace, thence a bit abstract; this second one will be at the opposite and very down-to-earth: plastic pollution. But here again, the tool of antonyms will lead us to strange views.
Last summer, a huge forum took place at the Palais des Nations, where all the stakeholders of environment, plastics, air, and dust were advocating their policy platforms—under the scrutiny or on the shoulders of the top scientists who had been studying the subject, unmasked the risks, and blew whistles. In short, plastic is bad, those making or selling it should be curbed, treaties should be signed, info should be shared…
Well enough, but we all know when seeing litter, that plastic pollutes, and cows or whales know even better how ill it is for the body. So, what is the solution, or—with our game—what is the antonym of ‘plastic pollution’?
‘Clean environment’ answers a famous AI engine, but that doesn’t tell much; toying with words, one could say ‘plastic depollution’, but ‘non plastic pollution’ as well, or better ‘anti pollution public agencies’ or even ‘ban on plastic production’… which are hardly more telling but could help later (see below). So far, all these definitions stumble on blocks not as easy to remove as it was easy to shout ‘down with plastics’.
Beyond villains and victims
First, the boom of plastic is not just the outcome of a conspiracy by manufacturers: it has been the answer to a lot of logistics and hygienic problems. It may be that corporations like 3M have been slow at studying or disclosing dangerous side effects, but crime was not their core business.
Then come another few questions: what have all the public agencies on air, health, and safety been doing since plastics became a part of household life? And why blame first and foremost business and corporations, when rivers carry into the seas tons of bottles thrown away by ‘the people’?
One or two steps further: is plastic dust worse than other organic dust, or than mineral or metallic dust? Asked each day a bit of these questions during the forum, world experts gave little by little less assertive answers, ‘I never said that they are worse than other dusts… I just say that nano-dust is more treacherous than macro-dust.’
So, basically, at the end of the forum, we were back at the starting point; since then, scores of minor meetings on climate or pollution issues were held, in the same spirit of fairy tales… with one exception.
The dilemma behind pollution
While this winter the climatic prayer mill had resumed at the UN with an Intergovernmental Panel on Plastic, Waste and Pollution with flocks of advocates, a quite different (and unrelated) talk was delivered at the Faculty of Science by an expert in court on pollution. The heroes of his talk were not Mr Advocacy and Sons but Ms Dilemma and Family. Two dilemmas were especially telling:
In Lyon, along the Rhône river, there is an industrial ground polluted with infamous ‘PFAS’. Sure, downstream from there are high levels of PFAS. But the polluting plant accounts for peanuts in that: most stem from a huge fire just across the river, which had to be fought with PFAS foam. Therefore, the question: how many casualties are caused yearly by PFAS compared to fire?
Figures for PFAS are hard to grasp, as the effect is long-term and not clear yet, while fire kills one or two hundred thousand people per year (worldwide). Thus, the antonym of ‘PFAS pollution’ could be ‘PFAS elimination’, or—since PFAS also has an upside against fire versus its downside as a pollutant—‘PFAS salvation’.
Are ‘green activists’ always blind to that one half of the issue which doesn’t serve their ends? In a time when the cement industry, like Holcim, is sued for raising the level of oceans, suing the Intergovernmental Panel (above) for complicity in the Crans fire would avoid double standards.
The second dilemma addressed by the expert at the Faculty of Science deals with standards. If a corporation was in line with required standards, it cannot be sued after an accident. But what if standards were not adequate? Did industry know but not alert the state, or was it the state which didn’t do its homework properly?
These two examples show that ethics is neither a checklist nor a posture but a permanent dilemma. Advocacy might well be the antonym of dilemma.
The comfort (and risk) of advocacy
Last summer at the plastic summit, I took a dozen pages of notes, but going in-depth into them wouldn’t help much: sure, we got top people and top science there, but most such forums have a flaw—advocacy! Its very name should arouse caution, but one feels so reassured to hear, each day, that we are the good guys while there are bad guys up there… Therefore, anyone making a career of telling us what we want to hear is holy. And how could our minds get rid of our children’s tales of David & Goliath or the Little Taylor? The nuance between ‘advocacy’ and ‘lobbying’ is faint, but in civil society, they are – here again – antonyms.
In short, being well-informed and well-meaning might be part of the problem as much as part of the solution: is this what the hero of a recent American film, The Whale, meant? Before taking leave of his online students in journalism and communication, he told them,
Soon, you are going to have other teachers… teaching you to become ever more learned… ever more objective… but ever less genuine.
Few people are genuine enough to address the ambiguities mentioned above; that is why the only case I witnessed remains engraved in my memory.
Against the tyranny of consensus
It was one or two decades ago, when ‘land grabbing’ was the big hit about ‘business and human rights’ at the Palais; once at a side event staged by Stiftung Friedrich-Ebert, I objected:
‘Your view of the world is like the one in Tintin comics, where Rastapopoulos (a nice crook) can fold his belongings in a small case and run away beyond borders; but folding a mining factory or a banana estate into a case isn’t as easy; even if the chief of state is your buddy whom you bribed, he might well be all the more keen to play the ‘nation saviour’ in grabbing your assets and putting you in jail.’
Far from rejecting my objection, one of the ‘advocates’ stayed silently thoughtful for a while… then said,
‘It is time we pause and reflect about the limits of advocacy.’
But such genuine ‘good guys’ cannot make a career in ‘civil society’, and less and less even in academia: ‘Advocacy’ means selling the ‘right’ words to the public; but in any language, the thesaurus is a battlefield as much as a tidy brick store, and ‘meaning’ has a sense only when emerging from two options (as Karl Popper said in other words).
It takes bad guys, troublemakers even, to challenge the ‘good guys’, of which AI is the ultimate avatar! Mark Twain felt how good it was at times to be a bad guy when he said,
‘Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.’
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