Particle pollution is a prerequisite of industrial society, as minerals need to be mined and fuel needs to be burned to keep production going. This particle pollution causes respiratory symptoms in all humans, shortening lifespans by several years and diminishing quality of life. Particle pollution causes severe reactions in certain groups of people, putting their lives in immediate danger.
Here are some of the symptoms of industry on the human body:
Acute, reversible decrement in pulmonary function. Inflammation of the airways and lung (this is acute and neutrophilic). Bronchial hyperreactivity. Acute phase reaction. Respiratory infections. Decreased lung function growth in children. Chronic loss of pulmonary function in adults. Asthma development and frequent visits to the emergency rooms by asthmatics. Premature mortality and a lower quality of life due to frequent asthma attacks and constant breathing difficulties.
These groups are in more immediate danger:
People with heart or lung disease, older adults, children, people with diabetes, and people of lower socio-econonmic status are at greater risk of particle pollution-related health effects. Children with asthma are at high risk from the effects of pollution because they have faster breathing rates and their lungs are still developing.
Millions of people suffer with this lung disability:
COPD is a major cause of disability and is the third leading cause of death in the United States (Ford et al, 2013). COPD is a lung disease characterized primarily by chronic airway inflammation, mucous hypersecretion, and progressive airflow limitation. These structural changes result in symptoms of cough, dyspnea, and increased sputum production. COPD comprises a spectrum of clinical disorders that include emphysema, bronchiectasis, and chronic bronchitis. COPD risk factors are both genetic and environmental. Elevated particle pollution contributes to the exacerbation of this disease and likelhttps://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-44612642y its pathogenesis. [..]
Like people with asthma, people with COPD are at greater health risk from particle pollution exposure than healthy individuals.
By forcing everyone to live in an industrial world, in congested cities with polluted air, soil and water, and not giving us the choice to opt-out of this industrial wasteland, procivs are supporting our continued suffering. They would sooner see us dead than change their lifestyle.
Traffic and power generation are the main sources of urban air pollution. The idea that outdoor air pollution can cause exacerbations of pre-existing asthma is supported by an evidence base that has been accumulating for several decades, with several studies suggesting a contribution to new-onset asthma as well. [...]
Outdoor air pollution contributed more than 3% of the annual disability-adjusted life years lost in the 2010 Global Burden of Disease comparative risk assessment.
Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4465283/
Civilization is directly responsible for the death of marginalized children.
Illegal levels of air pollution linked to child's death. Ella wasn't born with asthma. A nine-year-old girl's fatal asthma attack has been linked to illegally high levels of air pollution. Ella Kissi-Debrah lived 25m (80ft) from London's South Circular Road - a notorious pollution "hotspot". She experienced three years of seizures and hospital stays before her death in February 2013. During that time, local air pollution levels breached EU legal limits.
Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-44612642
Bezotcovschina wrote (edited )
First of all: I don't want to invalidate the point of the original post. Just the whole pro-civ/anti-civ dispute is, probably, the most confusing and frustrating thing for me. I mean, I've read some primers, that usually been linked when this subject emerges, but I still can't decide which side I'm actually on. And should I pick any?
"Anticivs don't care about disabled people" - I can see why this thrope is being (unjustifiably) thrown so often. The reason, as I see it, is that the most of social-media anarchists are privileged enough to take modern medecine as granted. Most of them are not nihilists either, so, in their utopia world they like to have at least the same access to medicine, as they do now, and that utopian vision is extremely important to them. That's like a minimal requirement for any utopia. To ensure that requirement is met, it's almost necessary to justify at least some amount of industry (civilization? hierarchy?). And when you criticizes their worldview, their, at best expect an alternative, that still satisfy minimal requirement (modern medecine). Of corse you can't satisfy this demand.
I've rewrote the paragraph above several times. And each time I felt like I'm describing myself. Well, probably, that's should be fair to admit that I'm that priveleged self-proclaimed social-media anarchist.
I completely see the point in the anti-civilisational discourse. I've always (well, almost) despised civilization. Always sought civilization as a tool of colonialism, empires and oppression. Technology, though, I've always found liberational. Living in a notoriously poluted town (hell yeah, no verification), where polution level is above legal norms literaly constantly (sometimes, order of magnitude higher), nothing makes me more angry than fumed industrial pipes. But some of my comrades rely on a modern medicine to survive, so I feel like I'm ready to tolerate some industry.
N. B.: It took a while to wrote the whole thing, and I'm gradually getting more drunk, so it's possible for complete BS somewhere here. But, likely, I was honest.
EDIT: I promise I won't delete my whole account this time.