Five facilities near schools and houses in LA County fumigate produce shipped from overseas with methyl bromide. But the air agency doesn’t plan to monitor the air or take any immediate steps to protect people from the gas, which can damage lungs and cause neurological effects.
“I’m makin’ money and I don’t know the people around here, so fuck 'em!”
This is, sadly, the reasoning at the core of the problem in the heads of the people who know about the problem but choose not to do the right thing. They may rationalize away the cognitive dissonance of knowing they’re likely harming others and not wanting to think of themselves as a bad person by making up various excuses, but the truth of the matter is that human beings make decisions more based on emotion than reason, and most people are going to feel stronger feelings about the things that affect them and theirs than things that affect complete strangers. Our psychology—like most other aspects of us—evolved to function in small, tight-knit communities. We are simply not adapted to live in societies as large as we’ve created.