NEARLY A year ago, I interviewed David Evers, the executive director of Maine’s Biodiversity Research Institute, on the revelation that insect-eating inland songbirds can accumulate mercury at dangerous levels every bit as much as fish-eating river and coastal birds. He called the findings a “game-changing paradigm shift” for understanding mercury’s pernicious presence.
The paradigm has shifted anew in a far more dramatic way. The institute and IPEN, the global anti-toxics network, released a first-of-its-kind report Wednesday that found mercury levels in fish and human hair samples from around the world exceed guidelines set by the US Environmental Protection Agency. The report is titled “Global Mercury Hotspots.” In reality, the whole world is a hotspot.
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We need a global pro-democracy movement, to rid our political systems of control by the wealthy elite and their corporations. Coal should remain in the ground for public health and safety! Mountain top coal mining in West Virginia spreads toxins all the way to the Mississippi. Coal is 19th century fuel that is dirty and dangerous to life during every stage of its extraction and use. Add the really dangerous tar sands mining, natural gas fracking, and conventional drilling (and spilling), and you see why we are destroying a living planet and our health along with it.
It's awful how fish, so healthy for us to eat, are now so polluted with mercury and other toxins like dioxin that you can't eat halibut once a month...and the stocks of our favorite species have declined by 90%, anyway. It's outrageous.
Either we use our intelligence to take care of nature, or nature will take care of us, and not in a good way.
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Hear, hear.
Now none of this could have to do with Obama's drive for "green" energy could it? Nah. Wonder if we could find a study that refutes this study? Did Obama pick up the phone and say "Hello? EPA? I need those standards lowered, I want fossil fuel GONE, NOW!" Never in a million years. Just like he had NOTHING to do with Fast N Furious. Uh huh, and I just rolled off a turnip truck.
Dr Z strikes another blow for a "One-World-Order". Maybe if Obama had done something about Syria, we could have saved SIXTY THOUSAND LIVES and counting over there. Now THAT"S something to cause real alarm! !
Do you really think if President Obama were to get involved in Syria that the opposition wouldn't jump all over him for it? We bogged ourselves down into two foreign civil wars, and you want to add a third? How is that in the national interest?