To hear some tell, we have the ‘cleanest air and water’; but the EPA just essentially weakened Clean Water Act protections for wetlands and streams by redefining which bodies of water qualify for federal protection. Vox has a great explainer of the admin’s reasoning here, but this little graph is the bodies of water potentially affected:
But this is not the only news in water news in the US, because there’s also a ‘forever’ gift in the water, and no, it’s not diamonds; it’s much, much worse:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jan/22/us-drinking-water-contamination-forever-chemicals-pfas
These ‘forever chemicals’ – pfas – the stuff of Scotchguard, Teflon, and firefighting foam, are not ‘news’ to California residents:
https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/27/us/pfas-california-contamination-trnd/index.html
And military bases and the areas surrounding them are particularly affected:
https://www.ewg.org/research/toxic-forever-chemicals-detected-drinking-water-supplies-across-california#table
These ‘forever’ chemicals that will outlast us are also inside us, in increasing numbers. Or rather, we’re becoming increasingly more aware of our consumption (unwittingly or not) of them.
It truly is no wonder Mother Nature’s trying to kill us…we struck the first blows.
I really just wish a comet would hurry the whole process up
I really really want the end of humanity to be cosmic and senseless like that. I don’t want it to be human greed and stupidity.
not liking your odds, there…
Yes! Something spectacular and natural and completely out of our control and in spite of how much money and technology people think will save them.
…so what Iain Banks referred to as an “Out of Context Problem” then
“An Outside Context Problem was the sort of thing most civilisations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop.”
I kinda feel like if you think it’s ok to fuck up drinking water supplies then your orange ass should get to drink that water…& wash in it…& get all your clothes laundered in it…& you should have a lifetime ban on all bottled water…because it’s fine, right?
& all that evian money can go on regular deliveries of actual safe, clean, drinkable, non-toxic water to all the folks who couldn’t afford it & whose supply should be diverted to you & your idiot we’ll-be-dead-before-it-effects-us friends so you can suffer the consequences of your “improvements”…
I’d be willng to bet the only water he gets is from the ice in his diet coke. But yeah.
And I know none of this is funny ha-ha right now, but I am in fits trying to type ‘chlorine chicken’, so we can thank the IWT for that inedible little number.