Part 5: Nuclear waste, neurological diseases, ground water poisoning, ocean dead zones, mustard gas dumping
The recent 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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
"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
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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