In article ,
"FarmI" ask@itshall be given wrote:
I'm blaming my cancers on exposure to Agent Orange :-))
Years ago, when the Vietnam War was still going on (or the American War as
the Vietnamese call it), I was watching the news with my father one day when
there was some mention of Agent Orange. I asked Dad what it was and he said
"Blackberry Spray".
I had instant recall of the smell and feel of it from my childhood.
Blackberries are a noxious weed in Oz and local authorities used to come
around in big trucks with tankers of the trayback and spray the blackberries
in mid summer. Being country kids with no swimming pool anywhere around us,
a big pack of kids used to follow the truck as it spayed and we'd try to
outcompete each other to stand in the spray drift. It was nice and cool on
a hot summer's day.
Ah, yes, 2,4-D for civilians, but still contaminated with dioxin, one of
the persistant organic pollutants (POP). Like radiation before, at first
there was no appreciation for its consequences. Laughing children,
dancing in a contaminated mist. A modern version of going into the
gingerbread house. The thought gives me goose bumps. Excuse me while I
step up on my soap box for a moment.
The World Without Us (Paperback)
by Alan Weisman
http://www.amazon.com/World-Without-...2427905/ref=sr
_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1274206221&sr=1-1
At better libraries near you (and a real page turner).
POLYMERS ARE FOREVER / 151
Tokyo University geochemisr Hideshige Takada, who specialized in
EDCs‹endocrine-disrupting chemicals, or "gender benders"‹had been
on a gruesome mission to personally research exactly what evils
were leaching from garbage dumps all around Southeast Asia. Now he
was examining plastic pulled from the Sea of Japan and Tokyo Bay.
He reported that in the sea, nurdles (precursors to molded plastics)
and other plastic fragments acted both as magnets and as sponges for
resilient poisons like DDT and PCBs (including dioxin).
The use of aggressively toxic polychlorinated biphenyls‹PCBs‹to make
plastics more pliable had been banned since 1970; among other
hazards, PCBs were known to promote hormonal havoc such as
hermaphroditic fish and polar bears. Like time-release capsules,
pre-1970 plastic flotsam will gradually leak PCBs into the ocean for
centuries. But, as Takada also discovered, free-floating toxins from
all kinds of sources‹copy paper, automobile grease, coolant fluids,
old fluorescent tubes, and infamous discharges by General Electric
and Monsanto plants directly into streams and rivers‹readily stick
to the surfaces of free-floating plastic.
One study directly correlated ingested plastics with PCBs in the fat
tissue of puffins. The astonishing part was the amount. Takada aad
his colleagues found that plastic pellets that the birds ate
concentrate poisons to levels as high as 1 million times their
normal occurrence in seawater.
-----
The plastic will slowly degrade to smaller and smaller pieces, which
means that it will be ingested by smaller and smaller organism, who
will be consumed by predators with the toxins being concentrated in
their flesh.
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We have black berries as well. My memories of them are as cobblers. They
grow along the roadside, but I go into the forest to get mine, where
they are cleaner and don't get sprayed with the "poison du jour".
-----
"we'd try to outcompete each other to stand in the spray drift. It was
nice and cool on a hot summer's day."
If I think about that too long, I may have to go and join Shelly in his
bottle.
à ta santé
--
- Billy
"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the
merger of state and corporate power." - Benito Mussolini.
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/7/2/maude
http://english.aljazeera.net/video/m...515308172.html