The ocean is still pretty - if you steer your yaught clear of the oily sections and swirling eddies of millions of tons of plastic garbage. But it is not healthy.
"I don't see any future for whale species except extinction. This not on anybody's radar, no government's radar anywhere, and I think it should be."
The canary in the coal mine has become the whale in the ocean. New information;
This is new information. But that it is "not on anybody's radar" is a tragic running reality.
American scientists who spent five years shooting nearly 1,000 sperm whales with tissue-sampling darts discovered stunningly high levels of toxic heavy metals in the animals, according to a report obtained Thursday.
That people like biologist Roger Payne, who have spent their lives learning about the oceans, can still be stunned by the acceleration of toxic saturation is startling in itself.
While we sleep and work and play, the gushers never stop.
"These contaminants, I think, are threatening the human food supply. They certainly are threatening the whales and the other animals that live in the ocean," he said.
Ultimately, he said, they could contaminate fish that are a primary source of animal protein for 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."
In that context, the health threat would be a staggering diminishment of humanity's food supply, the decimation of the food chain in the formerly endless oceans. But the health threat is perhaps more directly correlated to the same process of saturation in humans.
Payne said whales absorb the contaminants and passed them on to the next generation when a female nurses her calf. "What she's actually doing is dumping her lifetime accumulation of that fat-soluble stuff into her baby," he said, and each generation passes on more to the next.
And in people?
Their sharp decline in concentration [in the mother] over the course of breast-feeding, therefore, represents the movement of the accumulated toxins from mother to child. It signifies that during the intimate act of nursing, a burden of public poisons - insect killers, electrical insulating fluids, industrial solvents, and incinerator residues - is shifted from one generation to the tiny bodies of the next. - Susan Steingraber,, biologist, mother, author of Living Downstream
So that;
"American babies are born pre-polluted, their bodies laced with as many as 300 industrial compounds, pollutants, plastics, pesticides and other substances that threaten public health." - April 16, 2010, - Richard Wiles, Environmental Working Group
It is clear that the people of the world will not organize themselves or their governments or their economies around a desire to save the polar bears from global warming, and given everything that is taking place on our little spaceship, it is even understandable. People will not do that either for just the whales. But when they understand this cold reality: that it is never just the whales or bears, never just the pelicans or penguins, never just the people somewhere else, always our own and ourselves that we are gambling with, that we are truly one with all people and all life, perhaps then we will see the sea change in priorities and cooperation that is so sorely needed.
A little more or chemical saturation here: Chemical Gushers, not in the Gulf
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