Clean Water Never - Salem-News.Com

(LAGUNA BEACH, Calif.) - For OMO, a pantheistic heathen and infidel, there’s only one sin: Matricide. If you don’t believe that we as a species, through our natural resource extraction techniques and their ultimate consequences, are NOT abusing and killing our Mother Earth, then stop right here. This column is not a path with heart for you.

I’ll spare you the time you could be watching NASCAR rednecks needlessly eat up more precious processed fuel, pollute the lungs of enthusiasts with pulverized brake linings and shredded tire particulates, going round and round getting about 1 mile to the gallon. Busy bodies. Very Busy. Going nowhere. (Kudos to Elvis Costello).

Guess you never got Gaia’s inter-planetary memo, huh? Maybe She is restructuring or down-sizing while you inhaled the fumes during the pit stops? Did you know that She invented recycling, and that She’s getting pretty mad and seems poised to recycle us as a species, go to dolphins, whales or simians next time round?

Ecosystem studies, if you didn’t get the same memo, are about the collective continuums, the connectivity, the inextricable web of habitat elements and relationships/interactions between plants, animals, natural resources and these resources sustainable state of being. There’s a good reason they call it the “Web of Life.” Think recent Hollywood release: “It’s Complicated.” You see, unlike the vacuous 2009 film, an insipid piece of forgetful fluff whose algorithms (role choices and dialogue) snoozed out the stoutest of film aficionados, we’re talking really complicated.

Puzzle pieces that appear disparate in distance, type, degree and substance are actually inter-related if one goes to a metaphorically higher analysis elevation. In the case of water, whether it’s cholera in Haiti after the earthquakes and hurricanes, or formerly pristine remote spots like Glacier Park in Montana where in a decade no glaciers will exist, where the ground and surface waters in the adjacent Flathead Valley are undrinkable, we’re seeing exponential changes, damages and degradations occurring too rapidly for the mind to grasp or for analysts to make explicitly intelligent comments about.

Yes, there are natural cycles, but our spreading presence has ramped up and negatively influenced every corner of the globe, uncharacteristic of the formerly slow, gradual Darwinian processes. Things are changing too fast and furious. Like a non-native invasive species of fauna, we’re pushing out into former wilderness, supplanting indigenous flora too. We’ve created our own cycles or exacerbated the negative aspects of natural ones.

Technologies that were legitimate are in our rear view mirrors, antiquated, lagging behind the increasing dispersion and degradation of water, it’s viability for human consumption or irrigation. A lot of merchandise publicized and sold to the naïve public have exaggerated claims, bogus “Clean Green” processes and consumer products that in reality increase distress in some other form or place in the chain. Things accumulate, so “less-polluting” still means pollution. The lesser of evils is still evil.

It’s as if we need an entirely new operating system for our species computers, start over from scratch, get rid of our old, inefficient worldview. There must be a healthy life beyond the Snow Leopard (APPLE) and Vista (MICROSOFT) systems. We need to dump (delete) preconceived notions (programs/applications/files) about technology as our intuited cavalry coming over the global ecosystem meltdown hill. We’re “Waiting for Godot,” sitting around anticipating some altruistic mad scientist in a basement lab or some profit-motivated corporation think tank to provide our planetary salvation.

Since we don’t seem interested in global population control, mostly due to the major world salvationist religions that sustain also antiquated moralities, this is species suicide and insanity---If it was a marketing campaign, you could perversely add Greek tragedy levels of patricide, fratricide and general suicide to the matricide. Only we’re taking everything else down with us, and resource cartels are simply marketing this re-arrangement of Titanic deck chairs as spin, as damage control public relation opportunities. Like we’re wealthy hostages, as if we can BUY our way out down the line.

Catch them in an honest moment if you could, and knowledgeable experts will admit that we are a culture that erroneously believes what technology destroys it can instantly reverse or remedy, mitigate (create nil or assuage side effects/impacts) in some way. For example, here, in Mr. Roger’s neighbor (America), where surfactant dispersants created more long-term eco-damage than the short-term they solved, can you say “Gulf Oil Spill”? I knew you could.

About 3% of the Earth’s water is fresh (potable) in some form (glaciers, polar ice, streams, lakes, aquifers), the other 97% is saline and non-potable (non-drinkable). I won’t go into the evils and downside/deficiencies of desalination, use your computer’s online search engine and you’ll discover how flawed, expensive and potentially damaging it is using the best available technologies.

This is similar to the 1st Law of Thermodynamics: There is a given volume of fresh water upon or under our planet’s surface, it is not infinite, not readily extractible or recoverable after recycling/reclamation. Only about 60% of the influent at waste treatment plants (the volumes of sewage sent to them) is safe for reusing. The rest gets dumped as partially contaminated refuse into our coastal waters, lakes and streams.

Nonetheless, desalination is a strategy-in-progress, a transitional method, and isn’t really the silver bullet, the ideal or complete magic wand we’d like it to be. This column is about specifically realistic, achievable, measurable, clean, non-toxic, healthy, and safe, non-hazardous water NOW, not a Pollyanna projection or some capitalist venture pipe dream. I do, however, wanna smoke what the privatization of water advocates, the desal proponents are puffing, I would like their bank account sums for MY retirement too.

Keep in the forefront of your brain-housing group that we take (sequester) the 3% readily available, use, waste and abuse it, then release some of it back into the world the worse for wear. Following the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, it enters an entropic phase, in this case a less accessible/feasible/usable one, mostly in a contaminated toxic state.

In the water world, several recent events and disclosures can be bundled together if viewed as a gestalt or totality, in a sense holistically. OMO will offer up a few, he’ll then connect the dots for readers as he believes Mother Nature is already doing subtly for us, the warnings signs are there. Maybe disconnect is more apropos because we’ve obviously gone self-destructively rogue in an adversarial sense on our home planet.

As everyone knows, most of the time whether it’s spousal cheating, child, drug and/or alcohol abuse, disasters (personal and public) go under if not outright unreported. That could mean the turning point for water may be already morphing into the vanishing one----As in all life forms vanishing. Our government admits so little culpability that we might be on the precipice of a two states world and not even know it: STARVE-nation and DEHYDRATE-nation.

As pointed out many times, OMO profoundly believes that the Taoist aphorism prevails: Don’t give someone fish, teach them to fish. So here’s your rod and reel, here’s your hat and lines, plus a raft disguised as a column.

Something to consider while educating yourself is pretty simple: We’re looking at a form of entropy, perhaps a form of the Law of Diminishing Returns here. That 3% is literally being gobbled up (imbibed or spread), but the volumes re-introduced for potable are diminishing. Less and less is available, meanwhile our population, our civilized, hence urbanized footprint expands epitomizing what Daniel Quinn summed up as a “TAKER” logos.

We continue to take more than we leave, a function of global consumerism and exponential population growth. As economists kid, we’re back to a Flat Earth, everybody is in the same lifeboat. If we had the will, a global birth control monitoring, regulating and enforcing element begs for introduction in conjunction with a global eco-version of capped land use, guaranteeing open space and limiting noxious emissions. WE are the next dodo bird, emphasis on the Homer Simpson dodo schtick.

For that matter, regarding ALL natural resources we are mining deeper, higher, more remotely and hazardously for humans, disasters in West Virginia, Chile and New Zealand poster children examples. Hydro-fracking is about as invasive and destructive as it gets with international conglomerate corporations searching for dinosaur fluids and flatulence (oil and gas). What they leave are piles of toxins, polluted streams, contaminated aquifers, gaseous pollution, and stripped vegetation, habitats eradicated indefinitely, and that’s just for starters.

ALL of our present resource-harvesting or extraction logistics involve shortsighted solutions, basically plundering our non-renewable ones to meet increasing demands. ALL ignore a simple biological construct: Carrying capacity. We may have passed the event horizon, the no turning back threshold from self-extirpation, I’m now hopeful we won’t exterminate the other species too.

Here are some headlines (in BOLD font) taken from the web, hyperlinks enumerated and given for further homework. I won’t need to include global warming factor, that’s been picked clean and kicked to death already. Global warming may or may not be true/actual or be a contributing factor, regardless it’s not integral or necessary to progress my discussion in this column.

I’ll make a brief comment in regular font about each news item for you to keep in mind when you open them up, hopefully facilitate the summation of this column. Open them up as you read (a bit distracting) or afterwards.

Most mariners see danger in icebergs. Ron Stamp
sees opportunity. He's on a mission to bottle and sell
rare iceberg water. (Iceberg Canada Corp. photo)

This is about a man and his corporation in Newfoundland who sees a fortune can be had by “mining” icebergs. A personal story of one native who is the Gordon Gekko of the Artic, where ecologists see the natural hydrologic processes he and his big bucks buddies see their retirement revenue model.

Put the water in a yuppie scum, fancy-schmancy designer glass bottle with a French label and you’re instantly rich. Isn’t that what life is about, getting personally wealthy?

Didn’t they teach this idiot about the hydrologic cycle? This iceberg thing is a fatally flawed strategy. It robs Peter (fresh water necessary to keep the oceans ph and mineral/salinity concentrations in balance) to pay Paul (give upscale consumers something to reflect their affluence at posh parties). Mother Nature requires ocean replenishment and fresh/saline water exchanges in and around the North and South Poles.

Estuaries, mixing zones, are good examples of more temperate climes. This partially explains why dams and impounding/diversion for sole human beneficial use of watercourse volumes are counter-intuitive. That’s why it’s called a closed redistribution cycle, you greedy profit venture dummies.

Risky business: A worker assembling a battery in
Old Delhi. As companies fail to collect used batteries
efficiently, more lead is getting recycled in the
informal sector, where tracking lead exposure effects
among workers is difficult. Maitreyee Handique/Mine

Cheap cars for millions, at $3,000 or less? Great idea, huh? Makes them affordable for the teeming masses, and they use guess what?

Petroleum for fuel and lubrication! Even if they were all-electric, the presently unsolvable problem is they all need batteries, small or large: Batteries that must go somewhere for disposal after their life span has ended or been in crashes, dumped along with the other trash into the emerging hazardous/electronic waste landfills required, or just cheaply mixed in with everything else.

Who in their right natural mind thinks India, China or other potential buyer nations have strict ecological protection laws?

These cheap cars belch hydrocarbons, and are built with a lot of plastic parts to reduce weight for better gas mileage.

And when the cars need disposal, think of millions of these things decomposing at landfills, sloughing pollutants into India’s already polluted aquifers, watercourses and contaminating their soil and air.

“Okanagan (British Columbia) professor warns against water pollution” [3]

Hans Schreier spoke about the need to
reduce the level of pollution for both
underground and surface water in B.C.
at the Building Sustainable Communities
conference in Kelowna on Tuesday.
Judie Steeves/Capital News

One Canadian professor’s take on sustainable development and the polluting by-products in British Columbia. My readers might want to re-read my column “Oil, Canada: Enbridge Sings Proudly” posted a while back. OMO will take on two (2) hilariously sick canards in a later column: Livable Cities and Sustainable Development. Both are oxymorons, ironically often proposed and championed by liberals and social ecologists who should know better.

In Houston, you can turn on your tap a little and read by the light, cut down on your electrical bills too. Brought to you by the military-industrial complex and subsequent vendors Eisenhower warned us about 50 years ago. And in case you’re already savvy, NO, nuclear is NOT the wave (length) of the future. Monolithic radiation systems, when failing even in small degrees, create monumentally catastrophic calamities. Think Chernobyl. They’re suggesting small units for your home: Hey, now family at home night featuring miniature mushroom clouds can be yours. Read the fine print on your receipt, a one-time purchase without a lifetime warranty. Go to the hyperlink provided below for the video.

Erin Brockovich, right, the legal clerk who
battled Pacific Gas & Electric Co. in the 90s
over groundwater contamination in the town
of Hinkley, meets with Roberta Walker at her
Hinkley home. The PG&E Pipeline Operations
in Hinkley was the source of toxic hexavalent
chromium that seeped into the town's water
supply. (Al Cuizon/Staff Photographer)

“Hinkley CA water tainted by chromium 6 spreading”
“Erin Brockovich returns to Hinkley” [5]

Déjà vu all over again as Yoga Berra would say, an unfortunate and gruesome twin to nearby hazardous Kettleman Hills Landfill. USEPA, miming Cleopatra who historically killed the messenger, the government officials appointed or elected to protect us bury their heads in the mounds of waste, and are definitely “in de Nile.”

This one is really bizarre. 7 confirmed dead within days, numerous skin injuries due to caustic chemical burning (acute, short-term 24 hour exposure) and still in progress illnesses (chronic) being reported from long-term exposure.

Worse, upon drying, the carcinogens have become airborne, broadcast throughout the region. Look at the concerned scientists and legitimate biologist’s comments, the online videos and graphs, the hydrology (adverse surface drainage impact) reports and analyses when revealed initially, then note how a few days later the various EU government agencies whitewashed or low-balled this.

Move along folks, nothing to see here, no significant dangers or impacts. One million cu. meters of sludge from an aluminum processing plant settling reservoir, heavy metals and toxins running pell-mell and everything’s okey dokey?

Groundwater (aquifers) depleted, surface water too polluted or dammed for agriculture and hydroelectric, thirsty demands by the tens of millions in the north around Beijing, they’re going to melt the snow for potable. Problems?

They’re keeping fresh water from completing its hydrologic cycle, restraining or lessening natural discharges into already dessicated streams. Goodbye riparian and aquatic biota. Almost forgot to mention, the lax air and water quality restrictions in China are renowned.

They’ll have to use enormous amounts of energy to filter and pre-treat the snowy fluids. It’s full of airborne and surface borne pollutants.

At the University
of Winnipeg,
biologist Eva Pip
has researched
the impact of
plastics on
Manitoba's lakes
and wildlife.
Photo: (CBC)

With all of that increasing pollution in Manitoba, Alberta and British Columbia, these Canadian provinces are the trifecta, apparently trying to play catch-up with other North American dead zones.

They learned at the feet of their historical predecessors: When you’ve seen one moose, one duck, one trout, one fern, one whatever, you’ve seen them all, right? Who needs wilderness or wild critters, humans should prevail, didn’t God give us dominion over them?

Meanwhile, soon there’ll be no domain but we’ll have our oxygen masks and be on a steady diet of “Soylent Green” (ourselves). Maybe Ted Turner was right---We’ll be at war, killing each other in significant numbers over water by 2025 and cannibals by 2040.

My father was born in Swakupmond, then German South-West Africa (now Namibia) over 100 years ago (1907), we have hundreds of relatives all over South Africa. He told me stories of the Kalahari Bushmen he met as a boy, indigenous nomadic tribal people who lived off of what the land provided (Leavers, not Takers). We can all see the real long-term ecological invoice for blood diamonds and mining in general by the usurping greedy Caucasians, those non-native Europeans who subjugated this entire continent. Around 10,000 years ago we as a species (albeit unconsciously and without foresight) chose to begin cultivating every square foot of arable land we could, thinking we’d conquer the planet. And we call this intelligent, this defines civilized, the culmination, the apotheosis of evolution?

About 60 miles as the crow flies and 1.5 hours drive inland and East of Kettleman Hills, why are the little people, the lower income ones always the ones getting screwed while government drags its feet, refuses or fails to enforce until this demographic shows up deformed and misshapen beyond statistical probabilities?

Criminal, culpable corporations throw millions of their ratepayers $$$ in the form of litigation and estoppels to ward off oppositional victims.

The victims? They bank on them to either drop out due to the stress (attrition), become too sick or dead to collect.

You betcha, all of you unbridled development and smarmy, arrogant urban planners who insist the over-population bubble will never burst the seams of capacity.

Genetically modified organisms? Sustainable? Livable? Ha Ha. As they say in poker when your opposition slams down a “royal flush” (little wastewater joke there, dear readers): “Read ‘em and weep” if you live in or around one of these still expanding megalopolis regions, soon to be contiguous and continuous.

If you didn’t know that you’re facing parched future shock, you should. You’re basically “tapped out” (sorry, couldn’t resist). OMO believes that this economy is the new reality.

Now it’ll happen (dystopia), it’ll just take a little longer because our population demands are still growing and the public is being duped.

If you believe in the Big Bang theory, after expansion comes the reverse, contraction, entropy-----Cosmological collapse. This IS the way the world ends, not with a bang but with dry lips and shriveled whimpering stomachs.

Right in OMO’s own native back yard, having grown up just south, on the coast (LA Harbor area) near Downey. We used to take our hot rods up there to Harvey’s Broiler/Drive-in, looking to drag race illegally in the industrial areas nearby because they were under-patrolled and ghost towns at night.

Gail’s chronicle is not some exaggerated Jeremiad but a horror story most don’t know about, a whistleblower fiasco now finally being heard. It’s been poorly circulated or understood by the media.

This incredibly brave lady, Gail Shephard (The Kaiser Papers), continues to battle in spite of what this converted facility has done to the bodies and lives of her and her fellow workers. Compare the before and after photos---If this still evolving tragedy doesn’t break your heart then you don’t have one. We use hero way too often, capriciously, this lady has more balls than 90% of the men I’ve met.

Gail and her Vietnam Vet (USMC) hubby have suffered to the nth power. They, like many of us at Salem-News.com and Veteran’s For Change, know that our government has ALWAYS believed in torture plus cruel and unusual punishment for its own citizens. I curse these bastards, shame on Kaiser, and shame on every SOB at every level of governmental oversight for this SUPERFUND site decontamination gone seriously awry. DD, SS (Different Day, Same S---t) as MCAS El Toro, Hunter’s Point and Camp Le Jeune.

“The horror” as Marlon Brando so aptly uttered in Apocalypse Now. The perchlorate from our bombs and ordinance (some remain buried or laying around unexploded) still persists, not to mention the residual effects of defoliants like Agent Orange, a member of the whimsically-named “Rainbow Herbicides” as if we were Dorothy and Todo back then. Maybe that explains how far up their respective asses the CIA and military commanders were, they were in OZ, skipping down the yellow goldbrick road. Brought to you by those happy-happy-happy lab dudes at DOW CHEMICALS, the makers of napalm, no surprise there. While at Camp Pendleton during USMC Advanced ITR we were shown in a convivial festive gathering how to make this “jello” in bulk by our troop handlers. It seemed fun, the effects of those big bags of admix weren’t fully explained. Just pour a 55 gallon drum about 2/3 full with gasoline, stir in the powder while watching the ladle get funky, and VOILA! We became Robert Duvall (as Colonel Kilgore in APOCALYPSE NOW).

US Army Air Calvary bragged “Death From Above,” unfortunately it was indiscriminate killing our own troops and Vietnamese civilians en masse, introducing chemicals into the soil and water that have long-term import. Using what are now known as Pollutants of Persistence (POP) for dilution and as more “effective dispersion” media, malathion and many household gardening products today still contain about 98% of these petroleum distillates as their main ingredient to both propel and make their product stick to leady foliage even through rain.

Ah, yes, napalm, love the smell of it in the morning, the scent of victory….. and don’t forget Agent Orange, creating this equal opportunity, level playing field dynamic duo. Apparently, napalm works better if you play Wagner’s “Flight of the Valkyries” while broadcasting it in wanton abundance. Hey, I’m Prussian, but Coppola captured the essence of the insanity in a lot of ways, many subtle, as a Stranger in a Strange Land, you’ve “grokked them in fullness.”

If your heart is still intact after reviewing Gail Shepard’s plight, you might want to finish the evisceration or sippuku, administer the self-inflicted coup de grace and read Vietnam-era Agent Orange victim Lesli Moore Dahlke’s tribulations as carried in the 11/20/2010 edition of Salem-News, ones that make Biblical figure Job’s pitiful in comparison. Hers are real and provable, persist to this day 40 years later. Cocktail palettes of toxicity get stored in the fat of our bodies and filtering organs, then release as carcinogenic drip feeds. It’s not IF, it’s WHEN you become symptomatic.

Compounding the residual impacts of the multiple Southeast Asian wars taking place over decades, it has been estimated that 220,000 tons of industrial waste is now being discharged by multinational industry into the Mekong Delta watershed each year. Once again, 3rd world nations or regions trying to catch up to their perceived consumerist-oriented competitors and rivals, destroying and mortgaging their country’s heritage, their own resources and ecosystems, their land and precious life-sustaining waters becoming useless. What and who we and the French didn’t kill, the Southeast Asians in a pique of suicide are doing to themselves.

“Water supply and sanitation in Latin America”
“Dirty Water: Global Pollution Problems Persist” [14]

Starting to get my drift, where we’re headed in every corner of the planet? Different continent, same myopic, failed natural resource extraction, use and management, the same resulting unsafe health conditions.

This is also important when considering Daniel Quinn’s theories, that somewhere around 10,000 years ago we actually “de-evolved,” that these tribal and nomadic foragers were LEAVERS who were shunted aside by TAKERS. The Leavers understood crop rotation, but instead rotated themselves to other environs. Ever wonder why the remote Andean tribes, or those in the Tunguska of Siberia live lots longer in spite of no access to nutritionists, schools, emergency hospitals, antibiotics, inoculations or doctors? Capitalism sometimes translates as fatal physical and psychological stress when your job, stocks and/or retirement package disappears.

We’re judgmental about places like Afghanistan, demean them and others like them as Stone Age, primitive or barbaric cultures when in fact they (like our own Native Americans) historically only used what was around them, had no need to lock up or control water and food as international commerce does in 2010. They had no use for money either, relied on bartering perishables instead. They didn’t have elitist, monolithic and unwieldy or fascist governance structure, their chiefs understood core community values protected all. Respect for the land and water, their humble place among the biota was their top priority. Leadership was usually a function of egalitarian wisdom, not theocracies, monarchies or labyrinth-like, complex bureaucracies. They didn’t create unlimited competition that robbed their climes or tribes of sustainability.

The oldest story ever told is the Sumerian allegory, the “Epic of Gilgamesh” written around 5,000 years ago, and embedded in it is an ecological and spiritually interesting cautionary tale. King Uruk not only wishes immortality and to be on par with the Gods but also wants in a fit of righteous hubris to force Mother Nature to do his bidding. He’s even willing to cut down every tree in the mountains to achieve his selfish goals, consequences be damned.

The Mesopotamian predecessor or equivalent to Noah, there’s (surprise) a big flood and Uruk finally has his epiphany, his realization that Man must live in harmony with Earth to survive, that he and the planet are mortal, death and decay are natural and part of life, one lesson is that we shouldn’t live in competitive and useless struggle. Sound familiar, a lot like humans now, maybe we haven’t really become civilized at all and those people in the Hindu Kush (Afghan mountains) aren’t so backward and deserving of scorn, are they? [15]

No, our planetary distress was foreseeable and might still be avoidable, it was never inevitable, in spite of what these money/power hungry religious zealots and alarmists vehemently assert. By increasing your fears and anxiety, they are extorting, leveraging or blackmailing your salvation on Earth right here, right now. The increasing commodification, the hypocritical selling of deeply felt spiritual yearnings as product, is scary.

So America, the one of Starbuck’s zombies and Pilates junkies, go do your western-style, bogus and privileged white collar yoga in your air-conditioned studio, wear those designer sweats manufactured by child labor overseas, stretch and meditate on your stock market portfolio, do some tai chi for aerobic spirituality and trendoid hipness, maybe martial arts to vent, go to your health club, go jog with friends and then shop till you drop for X-mas presents that gobble up even more of Earth’s non-renewable resources.

Go out and order dinner, a meal you won’t finish, a glass of water you’ll barely (if at all) touch (in new age yuppie-speak “hydrate”), much of what’s served is thrown out or poured down the drain while the homeless and disadvantaged, the least of you, suffer shortages due to your wasteful gluttony.

While you’re riding that stationary bike you could watch the 2009 documentary made by Chris Smith titled “Collapse.” It is a bizarre yet poignant look into the mindset and theories of Michael Ruppert who may or not be our petrochemical Cassandra. Ruppert is obviously experiencing a personal life crisis and meltdown himself, but his predictions about the dissolution, the collapse of “modern” civilization and economies is worth digestion. Or indigestion. [16]

FYI: If a project near you has some interesting enviro-aspect(s) that you think is/are worthy of Salem-News.com coverage and our readers attention, feel free to contact me with a very brief synopsis. Water-related “Blue Interventions” are my specialty!

His resumé is extensive, try an online GOOGLE search of his personal journey and historical accomplishments. His consultation fees are reasonable and if you've got a major project that alarms you, that needs creative intervention, then he's your man. His credentials and "CV" can be provided upon request.

Salem-News.com Top Stories

2025: Hope for the Best, Prepare for the Worst

Two Wars with No Way Out

No One Owns the Future

The Ugly Origins of Trump's America First Policy

A One-State Solution Could Transform the World

Comments Leave a comment on this story.

All comments and messages are approved by people and self promotional links or unacceptable comments are denied.

Anonymous December 6, 2010 1:03 pm (Pacific time)

Absolutely frightening...

Roger von Bütow December 6, 2010 11:34 am (Pacific time)

BREAKING NEWS:
Too late for this column is news that water quality samples from Mt. Everest showed incredible concentrations of arsenic and cadmium. They are present in both snow/ice samples and even in the soil. Multiple samples were taken at the upper elevations (over 16,000 feet) and scientists are assuming these contaminants migrate from China and/or India. Climbers melt and drink the snow! Here's the hyperlink:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19803-toxic-heavy-metals-reach-top-of-the-world.html

[Return to Top]