Thoughts for January 8, 2023
Good afternoon. This week’s categories are visual pollution, humans to Mars, and the US-India relationship.
Visual Pollution
Visual pollution refers to artifacts in the landscape that are perceived as offensive to the eye. Some of the major sources of visual pollution include billboards, open waste dumps, power lines, and cell phone towers. This paper goes into some of the major sources and attempts to rank them.
A major early attempt to deal with visual pollution was the Highway Beautification Act of 1965. This bill restricted billboard advertisement along Interstates. Here is some more detail on the legislative background and provisions of the bill. If you have driven an Interstate in the United States, you have almost certainly noticed the logo signs created by this bill.
The Clean City law in São Paulo, Brazil banned outdoor advertising in the city. This book chapter, if you can tolerate the author’s evident political axe to grind, provides some useful history of the law.
With most kinds of pollution, such as smog, carbon dioxide, and nitrogen runoff, there are objective harms that can be quantified, though sometimes with difficulty. The impact of noise pollution is emerging as a major area of concern. But visual pollution is a particularly difficult issue to quantify. Several attempts have been made, such as with billboards distracting drivers and causing car crashes, estimating the impact of wind turbines on property values of nearby residences, and machine learning models to quantify visual pollution. But the fundamental problem is that ugliness is not an inherent feature of cell phone towers or power lines. It is, rather, a subjective perception of the viewer, and one that is mediated by a constellation of ideological views.
The above image juxtaposes an idealized vision of a well-planned (from an aesthetic viewpoint) city, from the Renaissance painter Fra Carnevale, with a poorly planned city, exemplified by the 2006 Michael Judge movie Idiocracy. Is the upper image really the ideal the author portrays it as? It’s a nice painting, but the cityscape looks sterile, and I can’t help but notice how few people are in it, raising the question of whether the values meant to be invoked by the author really have human needs as their basis.
I referred to the ideological underpinnings behind the designation of visual pollution, and it is worth digging deeper into this point. This is the abstract from a study on visual pollution and mental health (bold text added by me for emphasis):
When we drive or go for a walk what we see is the visual environment. The natural environment of the earth is beautiful and most import it is healthy and pleasant for all the species including us. All the factors that causes harm make it unpleasant or try to influence this natural environment can be called pollution. Pollution has various forms and types such as air, noise, and water, visual. Every living thing on this planet such as plants, insects, birds, animals, humans is affected by visual pollution. Here we are discussing the visual pollution and its effects on human mental health. Visual pollution is an aesthetic issue and refers to the impacts of pollution that impair one’s ability to enjoy a view. Visual pollutions harm the visual area of human beings such as eyes, visual memory by making the environment unnatural or negative. Visual pollution has increased the road accidents rate in India. It distracts the human mind in a way that it can harm the mental health. Visual pollution includes billboards, open storage of trash, space debris, telephone towers, electric wires, buildings and automobiles, overcrowding of an area. Visual pollution is everything which is not natural and manmade irregular formations which we look in the natural environment.
I don’t think a clearer example of an appeal to nature can be formulated.
This paper, by John Nagle, is very much worth reading. Centered around the issue of building cell phone towers in Granger, Indiana, the paper goes into many of the legal and political issues around visual pollution. Nagle discusses the ongoing challenge of turning aesthetic perceptions into objective standards that are usable for zoning purposes.
Aesthetics come up all the time in municipal zoning debates, and they are the number two objection to residential development, behind traffic and parking issues. People imagine that with design standards to enforce good aesthetics, much of the opposition to new residential construction will be neutralized. I contend that such standards will have little effect, as this argument misunderstands the nature of the aesthetic objection, for which the actual appearance of the development is only a small piece of the picture. Overcoming the aesthetic objections to new housing, industrial projects, cell phone towers, or anything else comes down to establishing a cultural milieu that values progress and openness.
Humans on Mars
This article from last week is fairly representative of the argument against human space flight, in this case specifically to Mars. The main arguments are as follows.
Human space flight to Mars would be very expensive, and the resources would be better spent on robotic exploration.
There will be high risks to the health and safety of the crew for the foreseeable future.
There is high risk of cross-pollination of life, greatly hampering the ability to conduct astrobiology.
The editorial has its flaws. I suspect that the discussion of contamination risk greatly overestimates the risk and harms that would follow from the introduction of earth-based life to Mars, and really that much of the planetary protection program has devolved into security theatre. It also takes some gratuitous swipes at spaceflight advocates, especially at SpaceX and Elon Musk, as has now become fashionable.
But the case for human space flight, and to Mars in particularly, at least as it is generally made now, really is weak. There is some handwaving about the spirit of Lewis and Clark and the impulse to explore and hope of reviving the supposed gifts to humanity of the Apollo Program. The case is easier to make if we take a multicentury, humanity-wide view: a spacefaring civilization will be far more numerous, far more prosperous, and far more free than is possible with a terrestrial civilization. But translating this into a scale relevant for contemporary actors has been a challenge.
US-India Relations
The 2022 National Security Strategy, which provides the best look into how the Biden administration thinks about foreign policy and national security issues, says this about India:
As India is the world’s largest democracy and a Major Defense Partner, the United States and India will work together, bilaterally and multilaterally, to support our shared vision of a free and open Indo-Pacific.
In 2022, a Gallup Survey found that 77% of Americans viewed India favorably (compared to, e.g. 71% who viewed Israel favorably). These views are widely held across the American political spectrum. Here is an editorial from Fox News calling for a stronger US-India partnership in the wake of the border dispute with China.
It wasn’t always this way. During the early Cold War, the United States was more aligned with Pakistan than India, seeing Pakistan as an anti-communism bulwark. Then-Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, along with his counterparts in Yugoslavia, Egypt, Ghana, and Indonesia, spearheaded the Non-Aligned Movement, which sought neutrality in the Cold War contest between the NATO and Soviet-aligned blocs. Relations have warmed since the end of the Cold War, with major points of cooperation the rivalry against China, noted above, and counterterrorism.
A broad divide in foreign policy is between the realist and idealist schools of thought. Idealists believe that foreign policy should emphasize national values, e.g. punishing human rights violations, while realists emphasize security and prosperity and downgrade the importance of considering another country’s internal policies. The United States has oscillated between the two modes of thinking, often jumping to one in reaction to the perceived failings of the other, but few people argue that a country’s commitment to democracy and human rights doesn’t matter at all in how the U.S. approaches them, and this consideration should prompt greater skepticism about the US-India partnership.
It is a cliche to refer to India as the “world’s largest democracy”, but they are considered only partly free by Freedom House’s measurement, the same category as Hungary. While India does conduct free and fair elections, they lack a free press, a fair judiciary, political liberties, and the government is rife with corruption. Under the Hindu nationalism of Narendra Modi’s ruling BJP, the sizable Muslim minority faces severe discrimination, including against the right to marry. India has a deplorable history with population control, and forced sterilization continues to this day.
American and Indian interests correspond on some important issues, but diverge on other matters of vital importance to the United States. Last October, India abstained from a General Assembly resolution to condemn Russia’s sham referenda to annex parts of Ukraine. India refused to abide by the $60/barrel price cap, designed to curtail Russia’s ability to continue financing the war. Russia remains an important supplier of Indian arms.
Genuinely positive relationships exist between the United States and the nations of Western Europe, Australia, and Japan. These are based in common values and deep aligning interests. The US-Indian relationship cannot be like this; it can only be transactional and provisional.