Pollution and Environmental Protection

The Upjohn resolution demands a specific course of action to correct the problem, while the Occidental resolution calls for an environmental impact report. The charges against Occidental are, however, more serious than those against Upjohn, since there is some ambiguity about the exact nature of the safety hazard involved in the Upjohn case. The moral problem associated with pollution can be stated simply enough: one person cannot dump his garbage on another person’s property without the latter’s permission. The solution to this problem is either to get permission or to find some other way to harmlessly process one’s waste. There is, of course, a third alternative—one that seems to be at the core of the positions of many extremist environmental groups. The third position is that producing garbage is wrong, and thus the problem can be solved by stopping the production of garbage.