A Black Tide

Everyday the reports coming out of Japan seem a bit grimmer than before.

The country's nuclear and industrial safety agency, Nisa, said radioactive iodine-131 at 3,355 times the legal limit had been identified in the sea about 300 yards south of the plant, although officials have yet to determine how it got there...

More signs of serious radiation contamination in and near the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant were detected Thursday, with the latest data finding groundwater containing radioactive iodine 10,000 times the legal threshold...

Japanese officials have conceded that the battle to salvage four crippled reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant has been lost...

A nuclear expert has warned that it might be 100 years before melting fuel rods can be safely removed from Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant...

Think about this last snippet in terms of your own local community. Imagine seeing fire trucks headed downtown to the most prominent building and learning that firefighters expected to battle the blaze for the entirety of your AND your children's lives. The streets around the building would be blocked for 2 generations or more and life, as you know it, would never be the same!

This is one of the secrets that elected leaders and the mainstream media hope you don't recognize: Environmental calamities are not short-term affairs. While the media glare will shine bright for a while, once the cameras move on to other big stories, the people and local environment continue to suffer, sometimes, catastrophic loss.

A swath of Americans SHOULD understand this scenario all too well. Last year the bright lights were focused on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico as the country was gripped by the BP oil disaster. For over 2 months, we were treated to in-depth investigative reports 24/7. But the horrendous problems magically didn't vanish when the cameras moved on. The people in the Gulf region continue to wrestle with these myriad problems each and every day.

There have been a large number of reports -- most coming from the alternate press -- of people who have remained or gotten more sick since the well was capped. Reports continue to come in of black tides sweeping unto the shores. Of course, it's not just the human population that is suffering mightily.

The death toll from the Gulf of Mexico oil spill goes far beyond the animal corpses washing ashore, says a report that warns that whale and dolphin deaths may be 50 times higher than believed.

The report, by an international team of marine mammal specialists, estimates that for every corpse that washes ashore another 50 may never be found.

"When people present the raw carcass counts without any caveats, without any qualifiers, they are implying we have a 100 per cent carcass recovery rate when we don't have anything like that," says Rob Williams of the University of B.C. He is lead author of the report to be released Wednesday as the one-year anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon disaster approaches.

He and his colleagues take issue with recent reports that point to a carcass count of just over 100 whales, dolphins and porpoises as evidence of the modest environmental impact of the spill.

"The true death toll could be 50 times the number of carcasses recovered," they report in the journal Conservation Letters...

Technology can be a good thing. It has allowed human society to progress in directions few could have imagined in past generations. But with progress comes greater responsibility. When things don't work the way we expect them to -- as happens time and time again -- we threaten the lives of millions of species and life forms.

Our society has become so enamored with technology that we too often don't ask the most basic question: Do the anticipated benefits outweigh the hard to imagine costs if something goes wrong?