Environmental Question #34 [Impact of Industrial Pollution]

Broadly speaking do you think that industrial pollution has had an irreversible impact on the ecosystems of earth?  

Courtesy of Reddit user u/M1ST3RJ1P

Q: Broadly speaking do you think that industrial pollution has had an irreversible impact on the ecosystems of earth?

_______________________________________________________

A: In short, yes, but this question is tricky depending on what you mean by "irreversible" and what time scale you're looking at. Industrial pollution has already driven many species extinct around the world over the past 200 years through direct exposure and through the indirect path of pollution leading to climate change leading to extinction. Amphibians are particularly vulnerable to pollution because they breathe through their skin, so any contamination in the water they live in has huge impacts on their health. The animals and plants driven extinct by pollution will never come back, so in that sense the effect of the pollution is irreversible. Even some entire local ecosystems will be lost forever.

That said though, just because the Earth will never go back to the way it was before the pollution started doesn't mean it can't heal in other ways. Think of it like a person healing a broken bone--after the bone heals it will never be the same as it used to be, it might even ache sometimes, but it won't cause enough trouble to be something they'd think about every day. Pollution can be cleaned up and ecosystems can be restored by reintroducing native species. If some of those species have gone extinct, the new ecosystem will be different from the old one, but it can still be healthy and vibrant.

I grew up in New York State, near the Hudson River, so as a kid I heard all about a nonprofit called The Clearwater Project. Their project is dedicated to cleaning up the massive amount of pollution that GE dumped into the Hudson River over several decades, and over several more decades of work the project has been largely successful. When I was a kid the project had made substantial progress already, so all I knew about it was that the nonprofit offered free sailboat rides on the Hudson for people to learn about the river and all the work being done to keep it healthy (I was really just in it for the sailboat ride, I learned all of the other stuff when I got older). For years it wasn't safe to eat fish that were caught in the Hudson River either, but now the waterfront in my home town is lined with fishermen every weekend. There are still some types of fish that are not recommended for eating because they accumulate more of the remaining pollution, so there is still more work to be done, but the fact that there are any safe fish to eat from the Hudson shows that the Clearwater Project has made tremendous progress. Ecosystems can be restored through hard work over long periods of time, and I'm confident this same story can happen in every polluted corner of the world if people make it a priority and work together.