Pollution in the Everglades remains significant despite billions of dollars spent on cleaning and restoring the park over the last decade, according to new analysis from the U.S. EPA. On the bright side, erosion has stabilized and mercury levels in the tiny mosquitofish have dropped; on the, um, not-bright side, mercury levels still accumulate in higher-up-the-food-chain fish enough to require state health warnings, and phosphorus from sugar farms, suburbs, and polluted Lake Okeechobee has spread deeper into the park. Toxic contamination notwithstanding, the Bush administration recently backed a decision by the U.N. World Heritage Committee to remove the Everglades from an international list of endangered sites.
source: Miami Herald
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stevenearlsalmony Posted 11:36 pm
20 Sep 2007
People in the very best positions to do meaningful things are lost to this cause, it appears.
For example, Forbes Magazine indicates in their latest list of the 400 Richest People that, for the first time, all the billionaires will not fit on the list of 400. Apparently 82 billionaires had to be left off the list. At least to me, it looks as if too many of our "brothers-with billions" are so singlemindedly focused on the accumulation of wealth and power, in feathering their own gigantic nests, frequenting exclusive clubs, flying private jets, sailing yachts and visiting exotic hideaways, that they have forgotten how human life depends upon Earth's limited resources and frangible ecosystem services for its very existence.
These "powers that be" have evidently also forgotten what words mean when we say that the Earth is not flat and endless but round, finite and relatively small. One consequence of their widely shared and consensually validated denial of the requirements of practical reality is that the scale and rate of conspicuous per capita consumption is dissipating natural resources faster than the Earth can restore them for human benefit. So great is per human overconsumption by a minority of people in our time that biodiversity is being extirpated, the environment degraded and humanity itself endangered.
Is the fulfillment of the insatiable wishes of unrestrained consumers unexpectedly and perversely tangled up with unbridled big business interests relentlessly pursuing a course of endless economic expansion? Are we fecklessly consuming the very resources needed for our survival? Is humankind being taken for a ride along a primrose path the ends up with our species inadvertently eating itself out of house and home?
Thanks for your consideration and comments.
Sincerely,
Steve
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