Cassi Creek: We can
run
The flooding
in Colorado has shut down many public services that are necessary for health
and safety of the citizens. Drinking
water, sanitation, and any other services are offline.
For those cities, towns, and rural dwellers not at risk of
washing away in the current floods, the risk of forest fire still remains
possible. To see the current
distribution of major fires, http://activefiremaps.fs.fed.us/
After fires
have been controlled and extinguished, the risk of land and mudslides is
greatly increased. Steep mountainsides,
denuded by fires, will reach saturation points and slide down hill with the
lethality of a carpet-bombing mission.
We are
currently dealing with increased ice cap melting in the Arctic and
Antarctic. The sea level rise that will
result from continued ice cap loss will flood many cities around the world.
There are also island chains that will become reefs as they are swamped by
rising sea levels.
In the search for profits by energy companies, the danger of
damaging aquifers looms large. Surface
streams and well water have been contaminated by toxic wastewater from fracking
sites. In some locations, injection of
high-pressure liquids has been linked to earthquakes. This has been recognized since deep well
disposal was first used at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal.
Solid waste
disposal by humans runs the gamut from landfills that are designed and managed
to minimize impact to individuals dumping whatever they wish to discard wherever
they happen to be. The families living
up valley from us discard fast food and beer containers in such amounts that we
fill about 3 33- gallon trash bags each season from a 0.3-mile county
road. Down valley below our property,
the problem is worse due to greater traffic.
This littering and dumping is a nationwide problem. We are a long way from solving it.
“We can run, run, run, but we can’t hide.”
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