Swept under the rug

Kids are slobs. Think about your room when you were younger, carpeted with Legos or those pointy little Barbie shoes or any number of other things that would send a barefooted passerby who didn’t watch his step to the emergency room. Even so, when your mom told you to clean your room up, it seemed pretty illogical, didn’t it? If you trashed your room, as long as you kept the door closed, what did it matter? And if company came over, why put on a front of cleanliness? Why run the risk of creating unrealistic expectations for the future?

This August, the city of Beijing had “company,” to say the very least, in the form of hundreds of thousands of foreign visitors and a swath of international cameras fixed on it during the Olympics.

As a city notorious for its air quality problems – a rising number of cars on the road, industrial pollution, and dust storms have increasingly come to define life there – Beijing had a lot of cleaning up to do. Efforts were drastic, yet apparently successful. Researchers measured a 20 to 40 percent reduction in airborne particulate matter, that is, when the country shut down all nearby factories and ordered half the cars off the road. But radical, Band-Aid solutions will likely have no long-term effect, and sweeping these issues under the rug won’t get rid of them. This isn’t to say there aren’t legitimate campaigns and efforts to remedy these issues once and for all, but even in light of those, if your environmental justice radar isn’t going haywire in the case of Beijing, you might need to adjust it.

When officials from the World Health Organization issued warnings for visitors with asthma or cardiovascular diseases, it wasn’t because foreigners are whiny, inhaler-toting wusses (well, not all of them), but rather because particulate matter and the like are actually very dangerous to human health. The push to have blue skies over Beijing is admirable, but consider that before the world directed its attention to the area, and after the cameras turn to other corners of the planet, 17 million people  will still be living there, dealing with these hazards on a daily basis. Maybe the purported reforms will continue, but then again, maybe they won’t. And maybe the word “reform” isn’t accurate either, as factories closing and moving their operations to outlying areas hardly fits the bill. But the most disturbing element of this situation comes when an outsider asks himself why it took such a globally scrutinized event to create concern in the first place.  

Not every environmentally troubled area in the world can host an Olympics. Not every region that deserves international concern will get it. Still, returning to the state of your room as a child (and probably your apartment now), remember that no matter how valiantly you try to ignore the Hot Wheels causing your closet to burst at the seams, or the Pizza Express cups filling your sink, they aren’t going anywhere, even if there isn’t anyone there to shake their heads and chastise you about them.