Environment in Crisis

Environment in Crisis

www.dispatch.com

Evidence suggests that many of the planet's marvelous offspring will have a harder time surviving in 2011.

...a Coca-Cola official described as "heart-wrenching" the plight of Manitoba polar bears in this era of global warming. David Moran, who noted Coke's use of the bears for 80 years as an advertising hook, witnessed an iceless ocean in November and noted the bears were "virtually starving because they need the ice to hunt. ..."

(visit the link for the full news article)



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This article helps explain some of the die-offs being reported here on ATS, and outlines current crises starting with bat die-offs in North America, moving on to the honey bee colony collapses, to fish contamination and die-offs and in the end, the polar bears imminent extinction.

Want to know why everything is dying? Make a list, starting with the Gulf Oil "Spill." Then flip a coin. Everything works together and usually, you can't pinpoint just one reason. Basically, we've buggered everything.

A bit more from the article:

As you read this, North American bats are dying in the mines and caves in which they hibernate. Killing them is a flesh-eating fungus, known as white nose syndrome. ...

• A memo made public by Wikileaks indicates the U.S. EPA gave the go-ahead to use of clothianidin, a pesticide sold under the brand name Poncho by its developer, Bayer CropScience AG, despite misgivings about its long-term effects on bees. Bayer's home country, Germany, banned Poncho two years ago after colony collapse disorder ravaged 11,500 honeybee colonies in that country.

...researchers have found that phytoplankton, the basis of the oceanic food chain and a significant producer of the oxygen required by most living things, have been disappearing from the seas at a rate of about 1 percent a year for the past 110 years. The decline since 1950 has been about 40 percent. ...

• Sperm whales, a top-of-the-food-chain predator and a fellow mammal, have been found to contain extremely high levels of human-produced toxic and heavy metals, including cadmium, aluminum, chromium, lead, silver, mercury and titanium. ...the metals ultimately could jeopardize seafood, a main source of animal protein for about 1 billion people.
"You could make a fairly tight argument to say that it is the single greatest health threat that has ever faced the human species," Payne said. ...

• Human impacts from dams, reservoirs, irrigation and pollution threaten the water security of 5 billion humans and the survival of thousands of species worldwide, a study suggests. Some of the most serious threats are in the southeastern United States, including the Mississippi River.
"What made our jaws drop is that some of the highest threat levels in the world are in the United States and Europe,"...

www.dispatch.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

Great research and great thread!

It seems what was given to us to flourish, we will inevitably destroy.
In the name of 'progress'.
In the name of 'mankind'.

Bah...

In the name of GREED.


Truly sickening.

I believe that what's coming is exactly what is deserved.
We could not live peacefully on a perfect planet.

We had to let greed and money get in the way.


But, it is all in what one believes.


...and I believe it's a plan.
It's always been a plan.

Such a shame really to think that my niece and nephew won't get the chance to see the majestic Siberian Tiger in the wild, if at all makes me sad. Two hundred and fifty left now, and maybe the Bengal to follow. We really need to learn again how to be good stewards to this place we all call home.

And then we add in the ridiculous amounts of rain, causing flooding and landslides, and dams and containment areas to give out - like the one in Europe with the aluminum byproduct (all that poisonous red mud). All the sewage, pesticides, chemicals, and oils spread out all over the land, polluting everything.

What a mess we're in.

Why is it that so many always assume or jump to conclusions when things in the natural world are going wrong?

Everyone always seems to believe that the cause is, or must be Man-Made.

The human existence here doesn't even amount to the blink of an eye in the LIFEspan of this world.

We know there have been extremes in climate both cold and hot (far worse than anything we've experienced) , we know that there have been mass-extinctions and extinctions of species and life forms, and all of this happened over hundreds of millions of years before anything walked this planet that could be called "human"

Man in his divine arrogance assumes he can control and change the environment, while dismissing natural causes.

Just about everything in the OP, and follow-up post could also have a completely natural explanation.

Nature has not yet fully shown us what it is capable of.... Maybe we have been incredibly lucky to have inhabited this world during a relative calm period... Maybe things are going to change big time, with or without our man-made influences?

reply to post by soficrow


Money money money......Is what so much of it comes down to. I am not talking about the idea of money or the idea of fair exchanging of money for goods/services, but when the need for vialbility becomes trumped by the greed to get as rich/powerful as possible, our precious natural resources and animal co-inhabiters fall victim. The simple equation of available natural resources divided by current and forecasted demand = wastelands, imo. Then interject the toxic factor and it paints a dreadful picture.

I don't know what will ever change things other than truth rising to the top somehow, whether it be another civilization collapsing away as history repeats itself, or people collectively saying "enough."
One of the sad ironies too is the fact that we as consumers have much power to affect things, but at the same time, that power bestows some of the responsibility upon us, the same responsibility that we so often pass onto other entities.

I'm digging your threads soficrow, and share in your concerns for these things....

Peace,
spec

The polar bears. I know they would tare me apart in seconds but IV been watching documentaries about it getting worse every year. It is not easy to watch. The amount of body fat the females loose when suckling the cubs and the males eat the cubs. They don’t eat for up to six months then emerge to no ice then get stuck on the islands all summer because of no drift ice.

reply to post by Fractured.Facade

Just about everything in the OP, and follow-up post could also have a completely natural explanation.

From the source article quoted in the 2nd post, for example:

• Sperm whales, a top-of-the-food-chain predator and a fellow mammal, have been found to contain extremely high levels of human-produced toxic and heavy metals, including cadmium, aluminum, chromium, lead, silver, mercury and titanium. ...the metals ultimately could jeopardize seafood, a main source of animal protein for about 1 billion people.

"You could make a fairly tight argument to say that it is the single greatest health threat that has ever faced the human species," Payne said. ...

• Human impacts from dams, reservoirs, irrigation and pollution threaten the water security of 5 billion humans and the survival of thousands of species worldwide, a study suggests. Some of the most serious threats are in the southeastern United States, including the Mississippi River.

"What made our jaws drop is that some of the highest threat levels in the world are in the United States and Europe,"...

"Natural" explanation?

I don't think so.

reply to post by soficrow


Is it really?

Soficrow, I believe in "determinism" ... Maybe all of the recent events are natural and even man-made environmental influences are in fact a natural part of evolution. When nature determines that the human race no longer serves a purpose we too can and will be targeted for extinction, or at least a major population reduction, possibly through a very efficient mutated virus?

I don't believe we have a choice, nor that we could change course now if we wanted to... So whether you blame man for all of this or nature, in the end it will all have a purpose and whatever the outcome is, ultimately it will be by design.

Just like other species over millions of years that have come and gone, we too may face a similar fate... Millions of years after we are gone, maybe there will be little evidence left behind that we were even here....

Perhaps hundreds of millions of years from now, the sun itself will run out of fuel and expand, eliminating all life on this planet, and eventually it will expand enough to consume Earth itself..... and POOF! it was gone.

-The End-

reply to post by Fractured.Facade


As far as "determinism" goes, I think our actions serve towards "determining" direction - and I personally, choose the "determine" a different direction.

- sofi