Nearly all the pollutants in our everyday environment can be found easily — albeit less problematically — when one leaves our planet’s surface. Ozone is the most ironic example, restricted at ground level and protected above. And the atmospheres of Mars and Venus are mostly carbon dioxide, which at least in our atmosphere, where it is only a trace gas, the Supreme Court says it can nonetheless be mitigated under the Clean Air Act.

The largest source of what would be regulated pollutants on Earth can be found in what Jay Lockman, principal scientist of the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia, calls “the Milky Way’s atmosphere” — properly, the interstellar medium. In a cosmic irony, the scientific instruments that detect interstellar atoms and molecules are potentially jeopardized by an anthropogenic source of extraterrestrial pollution — the industrialization of low-Earth orbit.

Astronomers have discovered that the molecules behind biology can be found where the interstellar medium is dense and cold enough that gravitational attraction can overcome thermal energy, resulting in the collapse of gas clouds into new stars. The most massive stars burn out quickly and explode in supernovae, enriching the interstellar medium with the products of nucleosynthesis. This process yields elements like oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur which, along with already abundant hydrogen, constitute some of the most basic building blocks of terrestrial biology. It also yields mercury, regulated as a CAA pollutant; arsenic, restricted as a drinking water contaminant; and lead, regulated as both. Our sun and its planets formed from this enriched medium. We thus got some of the elemental good stuff and bad stuff at birth.

Further, in stellar nurseries these atoms are shielded from ultraviolet radiation by small dust particles, which if in the Earth’s troposphere would be regulated under the CAA. This particulate matter allows the interstellar gas temperature to fall and molecules to form. Unfortunately for astronomers working with large optical telescopes, these dust clouds show up as dark nebulae — opaque regions in space.

But radio telescopes like Lockman’s have revealed that the clouds contain molecules basic to life. And in another cosmic irony clouds have also brewed up simple chemicals that would be regulated on Earth. The bad stuff includes sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and carbon monoxide, which are criteria air pollutants, plus other substances restricted by other means, such as carbon dioxide, formaldehyde, methane, and ammonia. CO2 in the right concentrations is of course also a beneficial chemical for plant life, and the list of good interstellar stuff contains water, protected under the Clean Water Act and Safe Drinking Water Act. Lockman notes the list also includes many organic molecules typical of those that nurture life on our planet today.

Earth formed from all this. Fortunately, plate tectonics and atmospheric conditions massaged these elements and compounds, good and bad alike, into conditions suitable for the biosphere to start up. But lately, we humans have begun replicating the simple chemistry of dark nebulae, creating and releasing into our own environment the pollutants that now endanger all life on Earth.

So it is sad to report that radio telescopes — critical instruments of information about the enriching conditions of dark nebulae and everything else back to the Big Bang — are a threatened species. Optical telescopes are endangered by light pollution that everyone can see. So it is less well known that radio telescopes are jeopardized by invisible electromagnetic pollution, not just sources like TV transmitters but from garage openers and other devices that have stronger signals than do twitches from millions of light years away.

The U.S. National Science Foundation’s 100-meter-diameter dish at Green Bank is surrounded by a 13,000-square-mile multi-state regulatory National Radio Quiet Zone, where signals from new transmitters are controlled so that they don’t interfere with the big dish and other radio telescopes at the facility. Close to the Green Bank telescopes, even microwave ovens, wifi routers, and cell phones are closely regulated.

Unfortunately, discoveries about how the basics of life came to be included in the formation of the Earth are endangered by a new kind of pollution, a source that is virtually unregulated. The skies have become filled with 3,200 functioning satellites whose transmitters blind radio telescopes at critical frequencies.

Worse, entrepreneurs are rushing tens of thousands of additional satellites into orbit to bring the Internet to every square meter of the Earth. In 2019, Elon Musk’s SpaceX launched the first of 12,000 satellites, each to be radio linked with each other so they can envelope the entire terrestrial surface in electromagnetic radiation.

“It is unfortunate,” says Lockman, “that satellites designed for communication on Earth are increasingly preventing us from learning about our place in the universe. We need to be good stewards of the radio spectrum as well as our physical environment.”

News That's Reused

When I worked in newspapers, a common pastime for junior newsroom personnel was to paw through the yards of printout from the AP wire ticker for outrageously humorous straight news items, usually only an inch or two of copy. Our labors had actual merit — in addition to the laughs, it produced articles useful in the layout process, filling holes when stories ran short.

For instance, I well remember the New Orleans pool party held to honor city lifeguards after the season had finished with no drownings, and of course a lifeguard drowned at the party. But it took some work to find those comedies of errors.

Today, it is much easier. Google sends me an alert anytime an article appears on environmental law. Thus, I recently read an AP story of the “baby wipes [that] clogged the wastewater system in Beulah in northern Michigan, causing a backup of 10,000 gallons of human waste from a manhole.” Ironically, if understandably from a technical viewpoint, “The spill was on the grounds of the village’s wastewater treatment plant. Superintendent Brady Streeter said it was cleaned up within a few hours last week.”

But the incident brought up a real concern: citizens going about their business with no wish to cause an environmental incident, trying to be responsible in protecting public health while simultaneously endangering it.

It reminds me of the AP story I read recently concerning the storm sewer system in a Connecticut town. It seems that every few months, workers had to clear the screen at its discharge point into Long Island Sound because it had become clogged with plastic bags holding dog poop. That’s right: residents dutifully picked up after their pets, honoring one local mandate, and then stuffed the refuse down a storm sewer drain, violating littering laws and probably other regulations, both local and state. The environment would have been better off if there had been no mandate on pet waste.

Meanwhile, in Michigan, “‘Wipes are a recurring problem for sewer or septic systems,’ said Scott Dean, a spokesman at the state Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy.” Indeed, one suburb of Detroit was putting out 4,000 pounds of wipes per week that ended up clogging a local pumping station. This is obviously way more than the local population of babies would warrant, putting the finger on adults who seek a softer daily experience.

The problem, of course, is that unlike ordinary toilet paper, sturdy baby wipes don’t easily break down in the environment. Owners of septic systems know this and practice accordingly, or end up paying a big bill to a specialized plumber to pump out their system. For people on town sewer systems, however, the tragedy of the commons obtains. The situation is much like that in the Connecticut town with the miscreant pooper scoopers: an excessive and misguided intention to do something good that ends up going bad.

It wasn’t too bad in Beulah. Containment and cleanup took two hours, no waterways were impacted, and no residents came in contact with the dangerous flow, according to the Traverse City Record-Eagle. The paper noted that “EGLE officials recommend bathroom tissue be the only paper product to be flushed down toilets to avoid these types of clogs.”

Perhaps cognizant of the Connecticut dog owners, and protective of Michigan waterways, the state agency counseled, “Non-toilet paper products — including all wet wipes — should be thrown into the garbage and not flushed down the toilet, experts have said,” as quoted in the Record-Eagle.