Word: toxicants
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...them figured out and rounded up, they give you the slip. Get the lead out of gasoline, and it comes at you through aging pipes. Bury waste and toxins in landfills, and they seep into groundwater. Mercury, at least, we thought we understood. For all its toxic power, as long as we avoided certain kinds of fish in which contamination levels were particularly high, we'd be fine. And not even everyone had to be careful, just children and women of childbearing...
Mercury has to work hard to do all the damage it does. In its pure state, it is only moderately toxic because it passes quickly through the body, leaving little to be absorbed. Not so the mercury we pump into the skies. Smokestack mercury exists in either particle form--which falls relatively quickly back to earth--or aerosol form, which can travel anywhere around the globe. Either way, when it lands, trouble begins. On the ground or especially in the low-oxygen environment of the oceans, mercury is consumed by bacteria that add a bit of carbon to convert...
...been worried for some time that mercury's reach was greater than it seemed, particularly in the Northeast, which is downwind from the power plants of the Midwest and Canada. Mercury from those plants' smokestacks could find plenty of bacteria in water, leaves and sod to make the toxic conversion to methylmercury. Netting 178 species of songbirds and testing their blood and feathers, Evers found that all of them were indeed contaminated, some in concentrations exceeding 0.1 parts per million. That doesn't sound like much, but it's a lot higher than it ought...
...making an untimely visit to your parents' bedroom. For most American children, sex education begins just before puberty, but violence they can get from infancy in Tom and Jerry pain-fests on the Cartoon Network. Whatever the MPAA's argument, their raters must believe that kiss-kiss is more toxic than bang-bang, since four times as many films are rated NC17 for sex as for violence...
...areas that are hard to get to. The biggest pile is stuck in the middle of the refuge - and there aren't any roads leading to it. Cleanup crews can't bulldoze the marsh, because that would destroy the wetlands; they can't burn it, because of toxic fumes. People can't walk in the marsh, because the ground isn't solid (and they don't know what lies beneath the surface). "There's no telling what you'll step on," says refuge field representative Reuben LaBauve. "I don't know if a tetanus shot would do you any good...