Daily Quick Read - October 4, 2019

Decades of Dying

Anaconda, Montana was never intended to be a garden spot.  It was conceived as a company town and for decades the massive copper smelter operation was the sole purpose for the town.  Of course, the operation was spewing poison over a wide area.  Poison that remains buried in the ground despite hundreds of millions in Superfund spending.

For years, grass wouldn’t grow on some parts of his two-acre property, and Bessie used to spend lots of time lying in the dirt in his yard, Hoolahan said. “I could fertilize, water, and just nothing would grow there,” he said. “The more I started to dig into it, the more concern I had.”

More than a century ago, farmers on the same Montana land noticed their horses getting ulcers where their noses brushed the ground to feed. They said their sheep mysteriously became ill, only to recover when they moved farther away from the copper smelter their community was built around. A federal appeals court agreed with one of the state’s biggest companies that the farmers were only exaggerating.

Today, Hoolahan’s yard and many of the former farmers’ properties are part of the largest Superfund complex in the country. The Environmental Protection Agency and Atlantic Richfield Co. have been working to clean it up for more than 35 years. Arco says it’s spent $450 million on cleanup efforts, and the EPA “has made substantial clean-up progress at the Anaconda Smelter Superfund site over the nearly four decades of work,” Chris Wardell, a spokesman for the agency, said in an email.

What the Frack

Water pollution, air pollution, noise pollution, habitat destruction, chemical contamination, species diversity reduction – all impacts of fracking.  The fossil fuel industry’s new tool to make profits and, by the way, destroy the environment.  I guess that’s just collateral damage to profit making.

And while many of the after-effects of fracking have grabbed headlines for years — such as contaminated drinking water, earthquakes and even flammable faucets — the consequences for wildlife have so far been left out of the national conversation.

But those consequences are very real for a vast suite of animals including mussels, birds, fish, caribou and even fleas, and they’re as varied as the species themselves. In some places wildlife pays the price when habitat is destroyed. Elsewhere the damage occurs when water is sucked away or polluted. Still other species can’t take the traffic, noise and dust that accompany extraction operations.

All this damage makes sense when you think about fracking’s outsized footprint.

“Studies show that there are multiple pathways to wildlife being harmed,” says ecologist Sandra Steingraber, a distinguished scholar in residence at Ithaca College who has worked for a decade compiling research on the health effects of fracking. “Biodiversity is a determinant of public health — without these wild animals doing ecosystem services for us, we can’t survive.”

More Toxins Please….

The article starts with Atlantic killifish, but soon moves on to rats, pigeons, coyotes and other animals that have managed to adapt to living in often toxic environments.  The ultimate goal is determining the evolutionary tools these animals employ to not only survive, but even thrive.

…upper Newark Bay is not devoid of life. Beneath its dull green surface teems a population of Atlantic killifish, a silvery topminnow that's common along the Eastern Seaboard. These fish are virtually indistinguishable from most other members of their species, save for their peculiar ability to thrive in conditions that are lethal to their kin. When killifish plucked from less polluted environments are exposed to dioxin levels like those in the bay, they either fail to reproduce or their offspring die before hatching; their cousins from Newark, by contrast, swim and breed happily in the noxious soup.

…When most adult killi­fish encounter dioxin, this receptor's signaling pathway revs to life in the hope of metabolizing the chemical invader. But try as it might, the protein can't break down the insidious substance. Instead of acting as a defense mechanism, the frustrated signaling pathway wreaks havoc during development—causing severe birth defects or death in embryos. “If you inappropriately activate this pathway when your organs are being developed, you're really hosed,” Whitehead says. But that ugly fate never befalls the Newark Bay killifish because their bodies are wise to dioxin's cunning; the genes that control their aryl hydrocarbon receptors, which have slightly different DNA sequences than those found in other killifish, lie dormant when confronted by the toxin.

Trust Us. We’ve Got This….   Right.

The plastics industry and their high volume customers continually tell us that they are developing improved plastic packaging that is more recyclable or compostable.  If that makes you feel good, then don’t read on.  The plastic industry is selling you a bill of goods so you won’t hold them or the companies that use their packaging accountable.

While these promises may sound good, a new report by Greenpeace USA explains they're not, and amount to little more than greenwashing. Titled "Throwing Away the Future: How Companies Still Have It Wrong on Plastic Pollution 'Solutions'," the report tells consumers to "be skeptical of the so-called solutions announced by multinational corporations to tackle the plastic pollution crisis."

As the report explains, recent research has shown that biodegradable and compostable plastics are not much better than conventional ones, failing to degrade sufficiently and continuing to cause harm to the natural environment. The switch to paper-based packaging over plastic may be better in some regards, but still drives deforestation when we need to be preserving the world's dwindling forests more than ever. The emphasis on recycling as a solution to plastic waste is similarly shortsighted. From the report:

"Recycling systems cannot keep up with the huge volume of plastic waste generated. Even in Germany, which has one of the highest recycling rates in the world based on collection, more than 60% of all plastic waste is burned, and only 38% recycled."

We’re Going to Need a Lot of These

One year after its initial deployment and after encountering several "unscheduled learning opportunities,” a Dutch designed and built ocean trash collection device has demonstrated the potential to collect plastic garbage that congregates in gyres in the world’s oceans.

The Netherlands-based nonprofit the Ocean Cleanup says its latest prototype was able to capture and hold debris ranging in size from huge, abandoned fishing gear, known as "ghost nets," to tiny microplastics as small as 1 millimeter.

"Today, I am very proud to share with you that we are now catching plastics," Ocean Cleanup founder and CEO Boyan Slat said at a news conference in Rotterdam.

The Ocean Cleanup system is a U-shaped barrier with a net-like skirt that hangs below the surface of the water. It moves with the current and collects faster moving plastics as they float by. Fish and other animals will be able to swim beneath it.

The new prototype added a parachute anchor to slow the system and increased the size of a cork line on top of the skirt to keep the plastic from washing over it.

It's been deployed in "The Great Pacific Garbage Patch" -- a concentration of trash located between Hawaii and California that's about double the size of Texas, or three times the size of France.

Ocean Cleanup plans to build a fleet of these devices, and predicts it will be able to reduce the size of the patch by half every five years.