Environment Links
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- Toxic Waters - Clean Water Laws Are Neglected, at a Cost in Human Suffering - Series - NYTimes.com
- The New York Times
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Stowe said:
Looks like the EPA has completely lost its way. The level of mining-related pollution in W. VA. is staggering. "In the last five years alone, chemical factories, manufacturing plants and other workplaces have violated water pollution laws more than half a million times. The violations range from failing to report emissions to dumping toxins at concentrations regulators say might contribute to cancer, birth defects and other illnesses.
However, the vast majority of those polluters have escaped punishment. State officials have repeatedly ignored obvious illegal dumping, and the Environmental Protection Agency, which can prosecute polluters when states fail to act, has often declined to intervene.
Because it is difficult to determine what causes diseases like cancer, it is impossible to know how many illnesses are the result of water pollution, or contaminants’ role in the health problems of specific individuals."
Added: September 13, 2009 at 11:32AM EDT
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Stowe said:
"Grizzly bear with a freshly caught pink salmon. Alexandra Morton
As salmon numbers drop, bears are also few and far between along B.C.'s wild central coast – signalling what conservationists say is an unfolding ecological disaster.
First the salmon vanished, now the bears may be gone too.
Reports from conservationists, salmon-stream walkers and ecotourism guides all along British Columbia's wild central coast indicate a collapse of salmon runs has triggered widespread death from starvation of black and grizzly bears. Those guides are on the front lines of what they say is an unfolding ecological disaster that is so new that it has not been documented by biologists."
Salmon die-off in the Fraser river has major ecological impact.
Added: September 11, 2009 at 9:18AM EDT
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Stowe said:
The Tuesday vote, conducted by mail, came a year after the city council here approved a 20-cent fee. The council measure had been slated to become law but a petition drive, financed largely by the plastic bag industry, forced the issue onto the ballot. The industry spent $1.4 million in an advertising campaign in the weeks before the vote.
Added: August 19, 2009 at 11:24AM EDT
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Stowe said:
"In general, the replacement of natural-capital services (like sun-drying clothes, or the propagation of fish, or flood control and water purification) with built-capital services (like those from a clothes dryer, or an industrial fish farm, or from levees, dams and treatment plants) is a bad trade — built capital is costly, doesn’t maintain itself, and in many cases provides an inferior, less-certain service. But in gross domestic product, every instance of replacement of a natural-capital service with a built-capital service shows up as a good thing, an increase in national economic activity. Is it any wonder that we now face a global crisis in the form of a pressing scarcity of natural-capital services of all kinds?
This points to the larger, deeper flaw in using a measurement of national income as an indicator of economic well-being. In summing all economic activity in the economy, gross domestic product makes no distinction between items that are costs and items that are benefits. If you get into a fender-bender and have your car fixed, G.D.P. goes up."
Added: August 10, 2009 at 8:54AM EDT
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