Word: toxicants
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...shut down when dredging work stirred up mercury that had settled in the sediment. In neighboring Louisiana 35% of the state's oyster beds are closed because of sewage contamination. Says Oliver Houck, a professor of environmental law at Tulane: "These waters are nothing more than cocktails of highly toxic substances...
...Francisco Bay is also contaminated with copper, nickel, cadmium, mercury and other heavy metals from industrial discharges. Last year toxic discharges increased 23%. In Los Angeles urban runoff and sewage deposits have had a devastating impact on coastal ecosystems, notably in Santa Monica Bay, which gets occasional floods of partly processed wastes from a nearby sewage- treatment plant during heavy rainstorms. Off San Diego's Point Loma, a popular haunt of skin divers, the waters are so contaminated with sewage that undersea explorers run the risk of bacterial infection...
Such problems are growing because there are more homeless, more AIDS victims, more drug addicts, more prisoners, more garbage, more toxic waste. The result is budget-busting pressure for more services that many people do not want in their vicinity. But beyond the fiscal debate, there is a painful ethical dilemma for many communities: Who should bear the burden of the common good? As often as not, neighborhoods are rising up to resist responsibility, and in some cases are turning to violence. "Too often we assume that the human being can achieve a good life without attending to the collective...
Some argue that there is a difference between the dilemmas presented by a halfway house and a toxic-waste dump: one is a perceived social threat, the other more directly physical. But from an ethical point of view, there is little distinction, so long as society lawfully sanctions both treatment for drug abusers and manufacturing processes that create poisonous wastes. The problem remains: fewer and fewer communities acknowledge that they have any responsibility to share such common, unpleasant burdens. "The ultimate issue of community is, What do we owe other people?" says Dan Lewis, a Northwestern University urbanologist...
...exploration of Mars. The closest Jackson has come to finding a focus for his diffuse California campaign was to use environmental cancer hazards in the farmworker community of McFarland as a symbol of the causes that animate his passions. McFarland, Jackson declared, represents his concern for "the environment, toxic waste, safe food, clean water, health care, abandoned workers, safety ((and)) Mexican-Americans...