THE SIXTH EXTINCTION

THE SIXTH EXTINCTION

We modern day humans are the human equivalent of an asteroid strike.  We have fouled the atmosphere, acidified the oceans, deforested the rain forest and introduced invasive species around the world to the result that humankind will, at some point in the not so distant future, pay the price.

Excerpt from Los Angeles Times article: 
Ancestral Diet Gone Toxic

By Marla Cone

The arctic Inuit are being contaminated by pollution borne north by winds and concentrated as it travels up the food chain

About 200 hazardous compounds, which migrate from industrialized regions and accumulate in ocean-dwelling animals, have been detected in the inhabitants of the far north.

The bodies of Arctic people, particularly Greenland's Inuit, contain the highest human concentrations of industrial chemicals and pesticides found anywhere on Earth -- levels so extreme that the breast milk and tissues of some Greenlanders could be classified as hazardous waste.

1987, Dr. Eric Dewailly, an epidemiologist at Laval University in Quebec, was surveying contaminants in breast milk of mothers near the industrialized, heavily polluted Gulf of St. Lawrence when he met a midwife from Nunavik, the Arctic portion of Quebec province. She asked whether he wanted to gather milk samples from women there.

Dewailly reluctantly agreed, thinking it might be useful as "blanks," samples with nondetectable pollution levels.

A few months later, the first batch of samples from Nunavik -- glass vials holding a half-cup of milk from each of 24 women -- arrived by air mail at the lab in Quebec.   Dewailly soon got a phone call from the lab director. Something was wrong with the Arctic milk. The chemical concentrations were off the charts. The peaks overloaded the lab's equipment, running off the page. The technician thought the samples must have been tainted in transit.   Upon checking more breast milk, the scientists soon realized that the peaks were, in fact, accurate: The Arctic mothers had seven times more PCBs in their milk than mothers in Canada's biggest cities.

It is one thing to be ignorant; it is another to be Georgia Republican Paul Broun and head the House Science, Space and Technology Committee in Congress.    

What hope is there to avoid the Sixth Extenction?
the Ol'Buzzard