The Pollution Of Our Water Is Not Stopping

[quintessentone]

My old behind has been doing a lot of reminiscing this week. I guess it is just more proof that I am really getting old, or that I have arrived.

When I saw this video again today, tears actually came to my eyes. I spent the majority of my childhood on the Chesapeake Bay and the St. Mary's river. It is heartbreaking to think that those simple joys of childhood that we experienced as children, will never be known to our future generations.

What are we willing to stand up for? We seem to not value anything or love anything any more.

More than three decades after the Clean Water Act was supposed to make America’s waters clean enough for swimming and fishing, two iconic waterways — the great coastal estuaries of Puget Sound and the Chesapeake Bay — remained in perilous condition. (Aired 2009) This journalism is made possible by viewers like you. Support your local PBS station here: http://www.pbs.org/donate. In this 2009 documentary, FRONTLINE correspondent Hedrick Smith examines why it’s so hard to keep our waters clean. Through interviews with scientists, environmental activists, corporate executives and average citizens impacted by the burgeoning pollution problem, Smith reveals that a growing environmental threat came not from the giant industrial polluters of old, but from chemicals in consumers' face creams, deodorants, prescription medicines and household cleaners that found their way into sewers, storm drains and eventually into America's waterways and drinking water.

There seems to be growing movements by climate activists and regular people in the way of lawsuits against companies and the government, who feel their right to life or the human right to a healthy environment is threatened not only by emissions from the fossil fuel companies but by governments not doing enough or not moving fast enough to mitigate issues.

https://knowablemagazine.org/article/soc...e-lawsuits

These types of movements are relatively new by activists and it seems that most lawsuits are rejected by the courts. I have a feeling the activists will get smarter, legally and provide more convincing empirical evidence, as they go and will win more lawsuits in the future. We all know how divided we all are on even admitting climate change is a direct result of human activity and the fossil fuel industry and other industries. It's a tough go, well changing anything societal or governmental is always a tough go.

So there is hope.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20211...ate-change