Word: toxication
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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...
...five years, at 200 locations around the U.S., the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has been studying mussels, oysters and bottom- dwelling fish, like flounder, that feed on the pollutant-rich sediment. These creatures, like canaries placed in a coal mine to detect toxic gases, serve as reliable indicators of the presence of some 50 contaminants. The news is not good. Coastal areas with dense populations and a long history of industrial discharge show the highest levels of pollution. Among the worst, according to Charles Ehler of NOAA: Boston Harbor, the Hudson River-Raritan estuary on the New Jersey coast...
Some kinds of algae contain toxic chemicals that are deadly to marine life. When carcasses of more than a dozen whales washed up on Cape Cod last fall, their deaths were attributed to paralytic shellfish poisoning that probably passed up the food chain through tainted mackerel consumed by the whales. Carpets of algae can turn square miles of water red, brown or yellow. Some scientists speculate that the account in Exodus 7: 20 of the Nile's indefinitely turning red may refer to a red tide...
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...