- The green revolution was instigated as a result of the
efforts of Norman Borlaug, who, while accepting the Nobel peace prize in
1970, said: "The green revolution has won a temporary success in man's
war against hunger and deprivation; it has given man a breathing space.
If fully implemented, the revolution can provide sufficient food for sustenance
during the next three decades. But the frightening power of human reproduction
must also be curbed; otherwise the success of the green revolution will
be ephemeral only."
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- In October of 2011, the 7th billion human being will
land on this planet. From that threshold, humans will continue multiplying
by 1.0 billion every 13 years to reach more than 10 billion within 39 years
at the mid century. The ramifications stagger the mind of any thinking
American. This series will give you an idea of what our civilization faces.
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- The blockbuster movie, "Avatar", by the enigmatic
director James Cameron, touched a lot of environmental nerves across America
and hopefully, the planet. Moviegoers enjoyed an amazing futuristic world
with similar dramas playing out across America and around our globe in
2010.
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- His movie, set in 2154, depicted a planet named Pandora,
where the 10 foot tall, blue-colored aborigines named Na'vi, lived in perfect
harmony with the natural world. Unfortunately for them, their planet possessed
a rare mineral, "unobtainium" that military pirates, from a dying
planet called Earth, came to plunder.
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- Humans had so desecrated their planet Earth that it struggled
to maintain its environment to sustain life. Ironically, the human army
decided to trample the rights of the aborigines-by stealing the rare metal.
As one of the actors, Sigourney Weaver insisted that everything on Pandora
connected to a life 'energy' and to disrupt it would bring destruction
to all life.
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- Let's return to 1945 Earth where we see our own species
wreaking havoc with this planet for the past 50 years, starting with chemicals
and radioactive waste, nerve gas, mustard gas, nuclear reactors and bombs.
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- From Deep Sea News, ""The Army now admits that
it secretly dumped 64 million pounds of nerve and mustard agents into the
sea, along with 400,000 chemical-filled bombs, land mines and rockets and
more than 500 tons of radioactive waste - either tossed overboard or packed
into the holds of scuttled vessels. Hundreds of dolphins washed ashore
in Virginia and New Jersey shorelines in 1987 with burns similar to mustard
gas exposure. One marine-mammal specialist suspects Army-dumped chemical
weapons killed them." (Source: http://scienceblogs.com/deepseanews/2007/06/munitions_dumping_at_sea.php)
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- "We're drowning in a sea of garbage with a three
million ton waste dump twice the size of Texas floating 1,000 miles off
the West Coast called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch." Professor
Paul G. Miller, Colorado State University
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- On April 15, 1968, the SS Ralston, "Was packed with
301,000 155 pound bombs filled with mustard gas along with 1,500 containers
of 1 ton containers of Lewisite and scuttled in 13,542 feet of water. A
minimum of 48,000 containers of radioactive waste were dumped in the area
from the 1940s to 1974."
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- A National Public Radio report in 2009 showed that all
containers had corroded to release their contents into the Pacific Ocean.
The U.S. Army used similar dump sites off Florida, Massachusetts, Virginia,
Mississippi, Hawaii, South Carolina and Alaska-revealed millions of pounds
of nerve gas, mustard gas, munitions, Lewisite, phosgene and other deadly
chemicals jettisoned into the Atlantic and Pacific. Other countries jettisoned
their chemicals into the Indian, Arctic and Southern Oceans. (Source: "
A generation of indiscriminate dumping" 1944 to 1970, http://www.dailypress.com/media/acrobat/2005-10/20226301.pdf)
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- From, Our Dying Oceans, "What New York City and
surrounding municipalities are doing is similar to the stories of injury
to ocean ecology worldwide. Since 1987, barges carrying all of the sewage
sludge from New York City, two adjoining New York counties and six New
Jersey counties have dumped about 24,250 tons of wastes every day -that's
eight million tons a year- into the last place in the U.S. where ocean
dumping is still allowed, a 100-square-mile area of ocean located 106 miles
offshore of Cape May, New Jersey, called the 106 Deepwater Municipal Sludge
Site. The wastes include substantial amounts of industrial and household
toxic chemicals. A 1983 report by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration estimates the "area of influence" of toxic wastes
deposited at this dumpsite at 46,000 square miles. The area is a spawning
ground for about 200 species of fish, and is frequented by dolphins, whales
and turtles, some species of which are already considered to be endangered."
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- (Source: http://www.rainbowbody.net/Finalempire/FEchap6.htm)
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- Debbie Wynn, a Rhode Island fisherman's wife, told In
These Times newspaper: "My husband has been lobstering 17 years and
we've never seen anything like this. There's a yellow scum floating on
the surface 150 to 175 miles away from the dumpsite itself, and all the
shellfish have burn spots from exposure to heavy metals. I'm so scared.
The meat isn't contaminated, but these creatures can't survive without
their shells. And the pollution affects crabs and lobsters first, then
clams and scallops, then goes into the fish."
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- "Tilefish caught off New Jersey in 1988 were suffering
epidemics of fin rot and lesions. In the summer of 1987, an unexplained
virus killed over 1,000 plus of the 6,000 to 8,000 dolphins believed to
inhabit the waters north of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina. In November
and December of that year, about two dozen whales were found beached, mostly
near Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Eighty-five percent of ocean pollution originates
on land. The run-off of heavy metals from the continents into the oceans
now averages two and one half times the natural background level for mercury,
4x for manganese, 12x for zinc, 12x for copper, 12x for lead, 30x for antinomy,
and 80 times the background level for phosphorus. Toxic wastes have been
found in the deepest part of the ocean and in most ocean habitats."
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- The late Jacques Cousteau pointed out that there is already
DDT in the livers of the penguins of Antarctica and that while rivers and
semi-enclosed seas are in worse shape than the oceans today, that would
not long remain the case.
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- Even more disconcerting, I investigated ONLY the USA
dumping figures. If we look across the planet, we will find other horrific
problems such as "dead zones" from poisoned rivers.
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- For example, the Mississippi River, 2,552 miles long,
drains most of the middle of the United States. Today, it carries endless
thousands of chemicals from sewage, fertilizers, insecticides, herbicides,
used oil, acid rain, plastics and worse. At its mouth, you will find a
10,000 square mile dead zone. That means higher forms of sea life vacated
while only simple life forms continue-albeit contaminated beyond repair.
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- In the North Sea off Europe, one of the largest dead
zones spans 27,000 square miles, or, the size of North Carolina. Very
few creatures can exist in those toxic waters. A quick jaunt to the Ganges
of India and the Yangtze of China would uncover 24/7 sewage conveyor belts
emptying into the ocean. I traveled up the Yangtze to see it myself.
Time Magazine wrote a piece showing 95 percent of China's rivers suffer
such horrific contamination that the waters cannot be utilized for human
contact, agricultural or industrial use.
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- OUR OCEANS AS THE ULTIMATE HUMAN TOILET
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- When you add the 82,000 known chemicals created by humanity
in the past 100 years, and all of them end up in our oceans, is it any
wonder that the USDA tells pregnant women to limit their fish intake to
less than one serving a month? How about none at all?!
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- Nonetheless, garden stores sell "Roundup" to
kill your driveway weeds instead of pulling them out. We spray "Raid"
on termites and mosquitoes to kill them, but eventually, we kill our loved
ones with cancer. Over 200 million Americans breathe toxic air with every
breath in our cities. We eat toxic foods sprayed with chemicals from airplanes.
What the heck are we doing to ourselves just for the sake of adding millions
upon millions more humans to the USA and the planet?
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- The imminent author, Sandra Steingrabber, wrote, Living
Downstream that followed the cancer trail back to industrial pollution
not only in Illinois, but all over the country. Dow Chemical won't admit
it, but it dumped toxins into the Great Lakes for decades to poison the
fish and create birth defects in migrating birds. Kimberly Clark, the
paper people, dumped dioxins into the waters of Lake Michigan for decades.
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- Can you imagine what another 100 million people added
to the USA and another three billion added to the planet will add to our
chemicalized world?
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- As CBS anchor Katie Couric said recently, "Autism,
only 20 years ago, affected one child in 2,000. Today, it affects one child
in 160 children."
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- And, cancer rages as the number one killer around the
world. Can it be that our dumping all those chemicals into the "ultimate
human toilet", our oceans, has anything to do accelerating diseases
and neurological chaos within our ecological systems?
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- Maybe we might all like to move to planet Pandora to
get back to some kind of ecological sanity! Yes, clean water, clean
air, clean soil, clean food, clean oceans, and clean living!
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- Frosty Wooldridge has bicycled across six continents
- from the Arctic to the South Pole - as well as six times across the USA,
coast to coast and border to border. In 2005, he bicycled from the Arctic
Circle, Norway to Athens, Greece. He presents "The Coming Population
Crisis in America: and what you can do about it" to civic clubs, church
groups, high schools and colleges. He works to bring about sensible world
population balance at www.frostywooldridge.com He is the author of: America
on the Brink: The Next Added 100 Million Americans. Copies available: 1
888 280 7715
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