The first thing I did, upon hearing about the Fukushima nuclear disaster, was to try to find out where weather patterns were hauling its toxicity.
It was difficult, finding this simple information. I'm a layman, so that explains some of it. But it was harder than it should have been, having navigated such waters previously for less important reasons. Finally, I realized the cloud was heading north, to Alaska, my home.
I felt like an idiot, but I called all my friends who had children, and asked them to find the iodide (not a scientist, don't remember the exact nomenclature!) I had figured out they needed and administer it immediately.
These friends ranged from scientists to fundamentalists and the crowd that just doesn't pay attention at all. Two thirds thought I was crazy. At least one family now has the iodide in their family store, because the next day I had to call and let them know that things had shifted and it was now all headed for the lower west coast.
For some reason, I thought this weather pattern shift and its importance to the US would be reported in the news, but it wasn't. Forget the fact that this made me look crazier than ever to my disbelieving friends - California is a major agricultural center!
Then, the news came that massive quantities of radioactive substances were either being released or were escaping to the ocean.
All my life, growing up in SE Alaska, I'd been told that the swimming was better than most people expected because "it's warmed by the Japanese current".
Has there been anything at all about the effect of massive radioactive release into the ocean from Japan? Where it will go, what it will do, how it will affect our food supply? We, who take much sustenance from the ocean today and throughout our cultural history?
Not a word.
And not a word about this, which few people consider: the half-life of radioactive material is in the thousands of years. Ever since they first began nuclear testing, the levels of radioactivity in our air, land and water has been ACCUMULATING. Hiroshima, Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Fukushima, and all the unreported releases of radioactivity that we darn well know have taken place here and around the world, has ACCUMULATED.
And you know what? I'm just a layman, but I want to know just where all that radiation has settled. Is it evenly distributed between the global atmosphere, the global oceans, the global land mass, the global biosphere? No one tells me, but I do know this: it accumulates more intensely at a very low part of the food chain in lichen in the north. Does it also flow more intensely toward plankton than to the concrete structures of industry?
I don't know. No one tells me.
Science needs a boost, a big boost.
We need baseline information, like how much radioactivity was in our water, our land, our air, our food supply - before all this crap started happening. We need a media that can hear them, because I know darned well that when Fukushima started up, there were thousands of scientists screaming, as I was : WHERE"S THE JET STREAM!
Our scientific community HAS failed us, because corporate media has arranged it.
OMG we are doomed.