Under an Earth-Yellow Sky

Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity. But I'm not so sure about the universe.

——Einstein

This morning, the sky over Beijing was earth-yellow. Since the Spring Festival, Beijing has basically been in a smog state, but today should be the worst day. Looking up, the whole sky was a layer of earth-yellow smog, visibility extremely low, and the air carried a pungent smell.

This scene reminded me of the flying sand and rolling stones when demons arrive in the childhood TV series Journey to the West—a vivid proof of Einstein's famous remark. We foolish humans, in pursuit of comfort, have ruined our own home; in ruining our home, we have also ruined our own health and our cheerful mood.

Einstein had another famous saying: ℌthe rule of fools is insurmountable, because there are so many of them, and their opinions matter as much as ours.” Here the word “rule” needs some explanation: it does not refer to what rulers do, but to the common choice of the overwhelming majority of human beings.

Most of us bear some responsibility for today's air pollution, myself included. Every sheet of paper we waste, every grain of food, every unit of electricity, and every plastic bag we throw out all push the deterioration of our environment forward.

As the historian Will Durant said: we always hope that law and morality will constrain our neighbors, but give ourselves a free pass. In dealing with the environment we always blame others while placing no restraint on our own conduct.

We have overpraised the fruits of science and civilization since the Industrial Revolution and belittled the survival wisdom our ancestors accumulated over millions of years. We have seen the sophisticated equipment produced with the help of modern technology, and we have also seen the serious pollution caused by modern industry.

We are paying for all this. Every year, over ten million people worldwide die from air pollution, and developing countries are the hardest hit. Moreover, because generations have lived inseparably from chemical products, human reproductive health has also been affected as never before. Sperm count and quality in men keep declining; more male infants are born with reproductive-organ abnormalities; girls enter puberty early; egg quality in adult women declines; miscarriages increase.

Four years ago, the prominent reproductive-health scholar Shanna H. Swan calculated that from 1973 to 2011, average sperm count in Western men fell by 59%. Not only in humans: scientists have found abnormally small penises in other animals such as alligators, otters, and minks. In some regions, large numbers of fish, frogs, and turtles simultaneously bear both male and female organs.

The reason for these reproductive-health problems is that a class of chemicals called endocrine disruptors is widely used in our everyday products: plastics, shampoo, cosmetics, seat cushions, pesticides, canned foods, and ATM receipts all carry endocrine disruptors. Of course, the health problems these endocrine disruptors bring go beyond reproductive health, including various other diseases related to endocrine disruption, such as ovarian cancer and breast cancer—cancers closely tied to the endocrine system.

How many of us are willing to give up modern comfort? People all over the world hope to live prosperous, beautiful lives, heedless of the irreversible pollution our environment is undergoing. Pollutants are being passed, through food-chain effects, into the body of every living thing on Earth. Even penguins in Antarctica have been found to contain DDT (the main component of agricultural insecticides); what animal on Earth can escape being poisoned by industrial pollution?

The mutated fruit flies that the teacher of biologist Hermann Joseph Muller collected over a lifetime in nature were fewer than the number he produced one evening in the laboratory using nuclear radiation. And gene mutation is the root cause of cancer! The WHO predicts that by 2030, the incidence of human cancer will be 1.5 times what it is now. When we live under an earth-yellow sky, whether we get cancer depends largely on luck.

No matter how worried the scientific community is, the public remains numb to all this. Before disaster falls on their own heads, no one wants to believe they could be the unlucky one. The distant future is not something I can predict; what I can see is now and ten years from now, roughly how many people on this planet will die from pollution—these figures can be counted and estimated.

I have always doubted the rationality of crowds. As the philosopher and psychologist Le Bon said, when people, under the sway of various slogans, currents, and ideologies, form into groups, their IQs drop markedly. Humans often fall into a state of collective frenzy, only waking up after paying a terrible price. This view has been repeatedly confirmed by history; I believe that in the near future we humans will receive an even higher-priced environmental ticket from nature. Perhaps by then our descendants may at last not have to live under an earth-yellow sky.