A Clean Environment? Maybe in One Hundred Years
Paul Peters | Sep 18, 2009 | Comments 2
These days, fish in California comes with side of mercury.
Sometimes I worry about my work on asbestos issues. It seems impossible, crazy, almost paranoid to say that public beaches in Illinois are polluted with a particularly dangerous form of asbestos, and the government’s standing by and doing nothing.
There’s the crazy run around people in Libby have been getting for years and years. There’s El Dorado. Manhattan. Mercedes. Reading and writing stories like these makes me worry I’ve become like a “9/11-Truther” (how the heck did they get to be called “truthers” anyway?). Just another conspiracy theorist.
And then there’s a week in the news like this. Perhaps the interesting thing has been this excellent series on water pollution by New York Times reporter Charles Duhigg. The stories, especially this one, which focuses on water pollution from coal mining in West Virginia, are an example of how the the agencies that are supposed to be keeping our water safe, like the EPA, are completely broken and corrupt.
As much as I’ve taken the EPA and other governmental environment and health agencies to task on this site and in other work, I do believe there are good people who work for these agencies, who joined with the idea of helping protect health and the environment. My suspicion for a long time is that this attitude is actually detrimental to a career in these agencies, and that is certainly held up by this story.
Matthew Crum, according to the Times story, was an idealist who decided leave a career as an attorney and join West Virginia’s state EPA in 2001. He quickly found out that there was widespread fear of retaliation among his co-workers. Still, he began shutting down West Virginia mines that were contaminating that state’s drinking water. Within a few years, corrupt politicians, pushed by the mining industry, had him kicked out of the agency. There are towns in West Virginia now where residents cannot use their tap water for anything.
The story also shows that all over the United States there are places where the federal EPA and other agencies know for a fact that polluters are in violation of the Clean Water Act, and are doing nothing about it. Not fining, not shutting polluters down, nothing. The Times even produced this handy tool, which allows you to check out the Clean Water Act violations by city, zip code and state, and see for yourself how nothing is being done.
Along the lines of nothing being done about pollution issues, there’s this AP story that also came out this week. It’s all about mercury in Central California that’s been allowed to seep from mines for years and years, contaminating fisheries and drinking water.
From the AP story:
“There’s probably a water body near everybody in the state that has significant mercury contamination,” said Dr. Rick Kreutzer, chief of the state Department of Public Health’s Division of Environmental and Occupational Disease Control.
Mercury is considered one of the most harmful types of hazardous waste there is, causing brain and nervous system damage, especially in children and fetuses. The EPA and other agencies are well aware of the problem, but, as the EPA’s assistant superfund manager for the region told the AP:
“It took a hundred years to occur… And it may take a hundred years or more to solve.”
That’s assuming that we’re not too brain damaged, or dead, to solve the problems. What these stories make clear is that serious environmental health problems are not the stuff of conspiracy theories. They exist all over our country and the agencies that are supposed to protect us from them are doing nothing. The question now is, do we care? If so, what are we going to do, besides wait 100 more years?
Paul Peters
PrintFiled Under: Breaking News Blog
Nice work Paul. The questions you bring up are important. The employees that join EPA and other agencies, that are actually “good” people often end up defeating what good they may contribute by defending the agency they are with. Becoming indignant when faced with facts that demonstrate precisely what you bring up in your story. But also, all of the employees believe they are good people, even when they are doing (or not doing) extremely bad things!!! All of them!! After all they aren’t thieves or murderers (per se) and lying to the public is simply something that comes with the job and is accepted by almost all government employees. (Surprisingly, shockingly, our Supreme Court disagrees with that paradigm, indicating that “lying to the public by any government employee is a crime”!! My caveat here is that I do not know if this applies to elected officials?). All these good people don’t stop there, they inflate themselves with their goodness and their omniscience until, in a very few years, there is no reason at all that any normal human being should have anything to do with them, except to wash the scent of them off their clothing and body, if any chance encounter with these giant bags of hot wind occurs.
My inclination is to simply say, “well, we could solve the problem if it was never allowed for any of these agencies to adopt a platform that is untrue or never to allow lying to the public”. The problem I run into is that these people don’t often know that they are lying. They have been passed what they belive to be “science” or “truth”, usually 4th or 5th or even 10th hand, and they simply repeat it as if it must be true. Imagine the picture, some giant inflated bag of wind grooming his or her ego by preaching to the public things they have no chance of knowing, not even the thought of investigating, whether it is true or not. It is not a pretty picture. This is way before we get to enforcement and the huge problems that presents.
So the next place I mentally turn, since my generosity above obviously wouldn’t work, is to think that some level of intelligence must be required to work with or for these agencies in the future. Government in general is notorious for bottom feeding at the various Universities and Colleges around our country in search of future employees. That and graduates turn to government when they have no other choices. Bottom feeding results in precisely what you think it would. People who don’t have any hope of knowing what truth is let alone maintaining their self esteem at an appropriate level, commensurate with the work they do.
Ultimately, these agencies, paying little to no attention to our Constitution, paying less attention to common politeness, are susceptible to the peoples’s wishes. The people are a far more important factor and have far greater power than their vote in any election, with these issues. Unfortunately, given the complexity of these issues, to do that, they must find truth someplace. It is with the greatest of sorrow that I announce that even in a skeptical environment, people generally turn to these agencies for “truth” on any subject. A sure fire method of having disaster after disaster after disaster occur for centuries into the future, not just decades.
Best regards,
Terry Trent
Hi everyone.Hope this finds you all doin fine.This is a awesome story Paul and one that most of us have found ourselves many times in disbelief in how such things exist in a Humane world(suppose to be) at the cost of human suffering and life.It is like we all can expect this to be our future.Like what is done is done and the price being paid is the sickness and death of millions of human beings.Being a victim,as we all are, we tend to see things from a different side of the planet no matter how black and white this are, it is like we are programed to shut up and obey with a price if we do not.We have become a Nation of fear.Fear of so many things that we have to exclude ourselves from sosiety because the reality has become too much to endure.By that I mean and we all understand,the denial to this asbestos dialogue and reality that we all face today and long after we are all gone.It is because of what we leave behind that the concern, if there is to be one, is the warning and informing to protect those…by telling the truth.WE have done that since I have met all of you.This IS what WE DO,WHY we are here,WHY WE CARE…to save others from what was done to us and continues to be done on more innocent human beings by a Govt that allows these continued killings by lies being told that something is safe when in fact it is deadly.I have wondered many many times WHY something like this is so ignored and lied about.And your story again Paul,tells it like it is.Like we/they have been programed to care less and remain slaved to the Govt who kills them.Pretty damn wild if you ask me.Great example is Libby Mt.Wouldn’t you say???