Ecocatharsis of the Earth – Awareness of the Need and Ways of Implementation

First, let’s explain the new term “ecocatharsis”, introduced by the author in a lecture at the Open Ecological University in Moscow on March 2, 2022 [1], which is easy to do using the example of the term “ecology” proposed by E. Haeckel in 1866. “Ecology” is derived from two Greek words: “oikos” - habitat, and “logos” - science, i.e. “ecology” - the science of the environment. The term “ecocatharsis” also includes two Greek words: “oikos” - habitat and “katarsis” - purification, i.e. “ecocatharsis” - purification of the environment. According to the classical research of Professor of Moscow State University, Vladimir I. Vernadsky [2], geological evolution, which took place over a period of about four and a half billion years, led to such a chemical composition of the geosphere of our planet that in about another billion years the first living organisms were born in the Earth’s aquatic ecosystem. The biological evolution of these organisms for about three billion years led to the formation of plants and animals, and about 80-90 million years ago the first people appeared, as a result of whose further evolution about 40 thousand years ago Homo sapiens appeared. This man has already begun to manage the planet Earth in such a way that people have a habitat that will provide them with housing, food and drinking water (Homo Vitruvianus). In different regions of the Earth, people formed nationalities that allowed them to solve problems related to overcoming obstacles that arose in their normal life. When solving these issues, they, as a rule, thought only about the implementation of direct tasks, without thinking about the possible negative effects of the ways of implementation they used. This led to many negative consequences, including diseases and deaths of many people [3].

The first realizations of such mistakes arose among specialists, such as the metallurgist Georg Agricola, who already in the 15th century, while producing iron from ores, realized that workers began to suffer from chronic bronchitis, bronchial asthma and coronary heart disease. To prevent these diseases, Agricola proposed to build two-story smelters instead of one-story ones, in which there were smelting furnaces on the ground floor, the pipes of which led toxic gases to the second floor, where there were vats of water that absorbed sulfur and nitrogen oxides to form sulfuric and nitric acids. However, Agricola was quickly forgotten and in the next five centuries of human development, business representatives, taking advantage of the insufficient attention from the federal and regional authorities (both administrative and legislative) to solving problems of environmental safety, directed their efforts mainly to the development of capital-intensive sectors of the economy and the military-industrial complex, which did not allow investing adequate capital investments in the rational use of natural resources and ensuring the environmental safety of the population [4,5].

Among the various sources of chemical pollution of the environment of living organisms (industry, transport, energy, agriculture and communal services), the problem of municipal solid waste (MSW) management, which has developed rapidly in recent years, should be singled out. The chaotic organization of MSW landfills in all countries and on all continents due to the catastrophic increase in the amount of MSW, generated by the population of the Earth has created a problem of the scale of the unprecedented until the end of the 20th century in terms of negative impact on humans and the environment, which is no longer in doubt not only among experts, but also among the general public [6,7]. The author of this article called MSW landfills “chemical time bombs” about thirty years ago, which is explained by the interaction of various types of waste with each other in the body of the landfill for many years with the formation and emissions of landfill gases into the atmosphere and the formation and seepage of leachates into the soil with their further percolation into natural reservoirs. The extent of these emissions into the atmosphere and penetration into soil and aquifers are directly dependent on climatic conditions, precipitation, average annual temperature, wind direction, etc. The main components of huge amounts of emissions from nonburning landfills are gases that can have a direct negative effect on human health: hydrogen sulfide, mercaptans, sulfides, ammonia, phosphine and arsine, formed in the body of landfills as a result of chemical, biochemical and microbiological processes [8,9].

As a result of the active functioning of methane-synthesizing bacteria, significant amounts of the greenhouse gas methane are formed, the global greenhouse coefficient of which is 84 times higher than that of carbon dioxide, i.e. MSW landfills have a very strong impact on global climate change. The picture fundamentally changes when the landfill begins to burn and smoke. In this case, the chemical composition of gaseous emissions and leachates is completely different – instead of hydrogen sulfide, mercaptans and sulfides, sulfur dioxide is formed, instead of ammonia – nitrogen oxides, and instead of methane – mono- and carbon dioxide, formaldehyde, mono- and polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), polychlorinated dibenzodioxins and dibenzofurans. Thus, burning landfills are powerful sources of emissions of supertoxic substances that cause mass diseases of people both working in landfills and living at distances within several kilometers from them. At the same time, the most important greenhouse gas – carbon dioxide – is formed, which causes a significant increase in the average temperature of the Earth’s atmosphere (by almost 1.50C), thus, in our opinion, causing the intensive melting of ice that was considered eternal in Antarctica, the Arctic, Greenland, as well as on Spitsbergen and on the tops of mountains. It should be noted that the new MSW management system in Russian Federation, which was proposed by us in 2020 [10,11], is based on the analysis of the life cycles of primary and secondary resources, as well as consumer goods and waste within the framework of the requirements of the modern cyclic (circular) economy and includes: 1) separate collection by the population of MSW - “dry” (glass, metal, paper, cardboard, polymers) in blue containers and “wet” (food and vegetable waste) in gray containers; 2) separate logistics of these MSW by regional operators to complexes for professional additional sorting and preparation of them for processing (CPS); 3) removal of MSW prepared for processing by interested consumers and processing of sorted MSW into secondary material resources (SMR), as well as thermal neutralization of non-separable polymer, food and plant MSW with the production of energy (thermal or electrical).

It is also necessary to point out another extremely important environmental problem of modern megacities – hypoxia (oxygen starvation), due to the constantly growing number of cars in these megacities, which leads to the construction of new roads, inevitably accompanied by the felling of more and more new green spaces on the streets, squares and boulevards of megacities. Seven years ago, we presented in our monographs [8,9] a simple chemical equation that unequivocally shows that one average molecule of gasoline destroys fourteen (!) oxygen molecules in the urban atmosphere when burned in a car engine
C₉H₂₀ + 14O₂ = 9CO₂ + 10H₂O

forming nine molecules of greenhouse carbon dioxide and 10 molecules of greenhouse water vapor.

The situation is even worse with diesel fuel, one middle molecule of which, when burned in a car engine, destroys eighteen (!!) oxygen molecules in the urban atmosphere
C₂₀H₁₂ + 18O₂ = 10CO₂ + 10CO + 6H₂O

forming ten molecules of greenhouse carbon dioxide, ten molecules of the supertoxicant carbon monoxide and six molecules of greenhouse water vapor. CO molecules, getting into the bodies of residents of the metropolis, firmly bind Fe2+ cations in blood hemoglobin molecules, preventing the transfer of oxygen molecules to vital human organs. Therefore, leaders and mayors of megacities should think about the limits of urban growth and the number of people and cars in these cities, instead of which it is much more important to increase the number of green spaces in order to provide existing residents of megacities with an atmosphere with the necessary amount of oxygen, in particular, in order to successfully resist viral epidemics and pandemics.

The SARS-Covi-2 coronavirus pandemic characterized an unprecedentedly large number of identified infected people on Earth - from December 2019 to March 2022 - 429,688,379 people (Table 1). Fortunately, the mortality rate (in %) was low (1.4%). However, the number of deaths causes sad emotions (5,917,157 !!) (Table 1).

Table 1:Mortality from coronavirus and other pathogenic infections.

The result of an unreasonable attitude to these environmental problems was a high level of degradation of the main ecosystems of the planet Earth (atmosphere, natural waters and soils). Accordingly, people, animals and plants under the influence of these pronounced environmental stresses, which included air pollution with various highly toxic substances and greenhouse gases, pollution of aquatic ecosystems with inorganic, organic and organometallic toxicants, as well as radioactive substances, and soil degradation (physical, chemical, etc.) began to fall ill with new diseases, primarily oncological, cardiovascular, as well as the destruction of hormonal systems. If we add to this the bacterial and viral epidemics and pandemics that have recently occurred regularly, claiming millions of lives on all continents of our planet, then we can characterize the environmental situation on Earth as close to catastrophic.

For the first time, this problem was formulated in a generalized form in a report to the Club of Rome in 1972 entitled “The Limits to Growth” [4] by a group of young specialists led by Dennis Meadows from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the field of system dynamics, who built a model of world development on the assumption that the world would develop at the same pace and according to the same criteria as before. The report became an instant bestseller after its publication and played an outstanding role in changing the worldview of millions of people on our planet. However, it would be a mistake to think that this work of outstanding importance led to radical changes in the majority of government officials and business representatives in their specific activities to bring the environmental, social and economic criteria of human development into the necessary alignment. As before, the main investments went to the economy, and minimal amounts were allocated for the rational use of natural resources and ensuring environmental safety. Therefore, when the UN World Summit on Security and Development was announced to be held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, the attention of the progressive world community was riveted on two important documents. One of them is a voluminous report of the specially created UN Commission “Our Common Future”, the authors of which, headed by Mrs. Gro Harlem Brundtland, carried out a lot of analytical work and outlined the contours of the “progressive development of the world”. The second document was a new report by Denis Meadows and his colleagues “Beyond the Limits” [5], in which the authors showed that over the past 20 years, practically nothing has changed and for real changes in society, an ecological revolution is needed, which, just as the industrial revolution once replaced the agrarian foundations of society, will lead to a change in the world by the end of the 20th century.

By that period the new paradigm, based on the principles of balanced and self-sustaining development has been proposed and named “sustainable development”, which, for obvious reasons, has been causing discontent among creative representatives of various fields of science, education, culture, economy, business, managers, administrative workers and legislators. It was also by that period, when Professor of Moscow State University Nikita N. Moiseev, having conducted a deep and comprehensive analysis of the current situation, came to the conclusion that mankind must make every effort to reach a new level of interaction with nature, which allows the “co-evolution of man and the environment” [12]. Soon after, in order to visualize the above ideas, we proposed the model of the “Bus of Sustainable Development”, in which each wheel represented one of the four cornerstones: rational use of natural resources, ensuring environmental safety of people, a selfsustaining (balanced) economy and social problems (education, science and culture). At the same time, it was assumed that the sustainable development of the community in the Bus (i.e. moving forward) would only take place if each of the four wheels was adequately inflated (i.e. financed). If at least one wheel is not inflated enough, then the Bus will not be able to move forward, but will either spin around one inflated wheel (if, for example, only the economy is financed), or stand still (if only two or three wheels are inflated).

However, at the UN Summit on Security and Development in Rio de Janeiro in 2012, we witnessed how representatives of many developing countries stated that they first want to achieve the economic level that is already in developed countries, and only then will they discuss the possibilities of implementing the principles of sustainable development and, in particular, rational use of natural resources and ensuring environmental safety of people. Therefore, at the UN General Assembly Summit in September 2015, within the framework of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, 193 UN member states adopted 17 Sustainable Development Goals until 2030, which correspond to 169 targets that are relevant to all countries of the world, both developed and developing. And among these goals, of course, were: the eradication of poverty and hunger, ensuring a healthy lifestyle, clean and affordable water resources, clean energy, economic growth, responsible waste management, the need to stop global warming, the rational use of oceans, seas and marine resources, the preservation of terrestrial ecosystems, the need to plant trees and protect the environment.

Thus, the analysis carried out in this work shows that the most important problems for the whole world are the tasks of preventing further pollution of the Earth’s biogeosphere, but first of all, it is necessary to purify the habitat of humans, animals and plants. We can certainly argue that ecocatharsis is necessary for our planet in order to: 1) save humanity from death due to mass damage from cardiovascular diseases, cancer and the destruction of hormonal systems; 2) save the Earth from catastrophic climate change and 3) save humanity from mass extinction as a result of global viral pandemics. The main ways to implement the Earth’s ecocatharsis are: 1) a legislative ban on the sale and use of items containing toxic and radioactive substances; 2) a ban on technologies that introduce toxic and radioactive substances into the environment (with preference for the best available technologies); 3) transition to a reasonable combination in the use of carbon, low-carbon and carbon-free energy (with careful monitoring of trends in global climate change, as well as in changes in the oxygen content in the atmosphere of megacities); 4) legislative, including at the international level, prohibition on the functioning of laboratories and enterprises for the creation of new microbiological pathogenic organisms that cause mass infection, epidemics and pandemics.

None.

No Conflict of interest.

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