Have you ever wondered why it’s difficult to get a handle on industrial pollution? For air pollution think smog and acid rain. For hazardous waste think Love Canal and our 1,500 nationwide superfund sites. For oil spills think Exxon Valdez and Deepwater Horizon. Dave Baiocchi and William Welser IV, of the RAND Corporation, have taken an objective look at pollution, in its many forms, to compare its origins, its awareness in the public eye, and multiple strategies to mitigate it’s effect and remediate it’s presence with the growing problem of orbital space debris.
In their study which they published as “Confronting Space Debris, Strategies and Warnings from Comparable Examples Including Deepwater Horizon”, Baiocchi and Welser give us a history lesson on how major episodes in industrial pollution became public problems and have constructed for us a framework to understand when they entered the public debate and what was necessary in order for corrective measures to be enacted. Now in fairness to the author’s objective monologue Baiocchi and Welser stop short of calling space debris, pollution. I am guilty of using the more polarizing term. Yet although Baiocchi and Welser stop short of using this term, of the nine comparative problems they examined, seven—acid rain, asbestos, chlorofluorocarbons, hazardous waste, oil spills, radon, and spam— are pollution and six are from manmade sources. I think they are striving for complete objectivity in their monologue but there is no escape from the reality. Space debris is man-made industrial pollution. It has yet to emerge into the public debate as such because no children have grown up playing in the harmful chemicals and no cancer clusters have broken out. Yet there is a problem. Perhaps we are still decades away from needing a space vacuum, but that time will almost certainly arrive, and unless those who pollute space learn from these past examples, the damage the space debris will cause and the cost of its physical remediation will no doubt be high.
The assessment framework they introduce creates a timeline within which they examine when the problems first begin, when they become such a problem that it was recognized that something must be done, when corrective and mitigating actions were taken to reduce the problems, and finally when extreme measures were necessary to eliminate the problems with remediation techniques. In addition they show who must be involved from the single affected individual through the multinational group with a diverse set of interests. Finally, they show that until those responsible or blameworthy, become those affected, a change in behavior will never occur.
This book was written in part to influence the current debate over what to do about space debris. However the framework to compare similar problems that emerge in the public domain is a powerful tool to use in many other discussions and makes it a must read for those involved in public policy debates, particularly those that involve damage to the environment. This is a clear and well written assessment which is accessible to all. Four stars over all. Five stars for the way they have opened up this discussion and given it a framework. I’ve deducted one star because they have not presented more detail on space debris in general, when I am sure they command a more comprehensive knowledge of the subject.
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