ENVIRONMENT - Please Save Our Great Lakes

From Abel Malcolm, posted in in alt.politics.usa 4/5/2010

And so the song goes: "Sweet dreams are made of these...Who am I to disagree? Travel the world and the seven seas..."

There are really more than 7 seas. In fact, well over a hundred bodies of water are referred to as seas, with the main ones listed in Wikipedia here.

There are only 5 oceans: The Atlantic Ocean, the Pacific Ocean, the Indian Ocean, the Southern Ocean and the Arctic Ocean.

What is the Aral sea? (URL Link with active-graphic of sea)

It is, or rather WAS, one of the hugest ones out there, in the Russia/ Uzbekistan region, in fact, it was the 4th largest sea in the world, back in 1950. But due to mismanagement and diversion and bad environmental policies, the sea level there started slowly sinking over the years, so that in just a few decades, from the 1960's until today, the end result is that the Aral sea has now completely disappeared.

But here's something that people don't realize, seas are a major depository of waste and pollution, and if the sea disappears, the pollution doesn't. That is why the area which once was the Aral sea, is now a large flat and desolate polluted land mass, and the people who live by it suffer from cancer and other diseases. The region's once prosperous fishing industry has been completely destroyed, bringing death, disease, massive unemployment and economic hardship.

The retreat of this sea has also caused local climate change, with summers becoming hotter and drier, and winters colder and longer.

As a historian once said, those who don't learn from history will be condemned to repeat it. We need to think about this. Most people have not even heard of the Aral sea. Yet, it disappeared in front of everyone's eyes, and was a long time in coming. It was an environmental catastrophe of Biblical proportions, like a disappeared civilization, but then if you ask people, they will tell you that they haven't even heard of the Aral sea.

71% of the earth's surface is made up of water, but very little of that water is actually drinking water, since the ocean water is much too salty to drink or to bathe or wash with or irrigate land with or what have you. Ocean water isn't good for much, but Lake water is, because it's pristine pure and usually comes right out of snow covered mountains melting down via rivers towards the lakes. Here, in the northern parts of the America, right by the Canadian border, in what is known as the Great Lakes region, we have a national treasure that constitutes the single largest freshwater resource on earth, thru a series of inter-connecting lakes, the main ones being: Lake Superior, Lake Michigan, Lake Huron, Lake Erie and Lake Ontario. These lakes also connect to the Atlantic Ocean via the St. Lawrence Seaway and the Great Lakes Waterway. They also connect to the Gulf of Mexico via the Illinois River and Mississippi River, and then there are other routes where the Great Lakes waters divert back into the seas.

At least 20% of the world's freshwater comes from here, the Great Lakes, directly benefiting such diverse States as Illinois, Michigan, New York, Wisconsin, Indiana, Minnesota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and even Canada. And like the Aral sea, the Great Lakes are also now starting to sink and slowly disappear, due to mismanagement and diversion and bad environmental policies. Make no mistake about it, what is being threatened here is the most delicious drinking water on earth, and a multi billion dollar fishing industry that employs millions of people, an invaluable source of irrigation for the farming industry, and many other industries, and commercial shipping and hydro-electric power and recreational tourism and scenic beauty and so on. Years of urban run off and sprawl and sewage disposal and toxic industrial effluent have also taken their toll. The biggest evidence of chemical pollution was witnessed in 1969, when the Cuyahoga river, leading into the Great Lakes, caught on fire due to a combination of oil, chemicals and trash floating on top of the river, industrial pollutants coming out of the city of Cleveland, Ohio. Think about all the pollution that these large bodies of water retain, and what will happen to them, as they sink into the ground, if the Great Lakes disappear some day.

In 1998, the Canadian government gave a company called the "Nova Group" permission to come to the Great Lakes and take hundreds of millions of gallons of water out of there and put them in bottles so they can re-sell the bottles to other countries for a huge profit.

But due to a large public outcry, that Canadian government rescinded the permission and the Nova Group was put out of business. In 2006, the United States Coast Guard wanted to designate an offshore coastline of up to 5 miles around the Great Lakes regions as a "permanent zone for live fire machine gun practice". Environmental studies indicate that there could end up being a dangerous accumulation of lead poisoning in the water. And due to a large public outcry, the Coast Guard scrapped the plan and said that they'll find another place to practice their shooting.

It pays to be vigilant. We should never tire of protecting our environment, and protecting our national treasures.