Good discussion.

I think Tom's point about the elephant in the living room is essential. Water contamination is, for the most part, an INVISIBLE elephant in the living room. Thus, it's not as likely the public or government will seriously address it as they would someone they actually see picking up a live shell or throwing litter on the beach.

As I understand it, dioxins are the most toxic non-reactive compounds known. Yet they are not widely known by the public. From what I read (admittedly a decade ago) they are routinely dumped into the water as a by-product of bleaching paper. Would the public accept their writing paper or toilet paper if it was off-white if we knew about the long-term health risks from the bleaching process? I suspect the answer is: of course.

Again, the elephant in the living room (contamination) is invisible to the public if it involves the estuaries and the larval faunal they support. Those contaminants that are dumped into the river in the Appalachians and Piedmont of North Carolina eventually end up in the estuaries and in the ocean around but not directly on Emerald Isle and other barrier islands that the time-sharers enjoy--and that the developers enrich themselves on irrespective of long-term consequences.

I recommend reading Orrin Pilkey's "The Beaches are Moving: the Drowning of America's Shoreline." Pilkey's contention is somewhat controversial: people need to choose between saving the beaches and saving their shoreline real estate. He says that all the usual measures to stop the erosion of the shorelines are futile, expensive and also destructive. He also denounced federal underwriting of home owner's insurance in areas of high erosion. (I haven't followed any changes to policy since I read the book during the 1990s).

Here's one method of slowing the advance of the erosion that I haven't heard discussed: the construction of offshore artificial reefs. They would seem to me to provide shelter and habitat for more species without many destructive consequences. But I don't know.

I nominate contamination and the dogma of profit-motive-solves-all-problems and its offspring ideology, "cost/benefit analysis", as the Greatest Invisible Pachyderms of our time. We may today be witnessing the rapid squishing of most of our favorite planet under the sheer weight of this mighty behemoth.

Smile, you're at the circus!

David Kirsh




Most truths are so naked that people feel sorry for them and cover them up, at least a little bit. --
Edward R. Murrow

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