Why We Are All Canaries ....

In taking this photo yesterday at Long Pond, it occurred to me how fragile our world is. Without the sunshine, the pond looks vulnerable and dark. Spring has not yet sprung here in Wellfleet. It’s April Fools Day, but there really have been too many fools around to celebrate ... At 4 am, a European fool calls our B&B, waking me up. On television, the Libyan rebels ride shotgun on pickups and shoot at anything that moves. Outside my window, I can see the last bit of radioactive snow on the ground, and more radioactive rain is falling. Fools keep handing out permits for oil wells like the Deepwater Horizon. Can they be the same fools who insist on injecting toxic chemicals into shale deposits to extract natural gas but contaminate groundwater at the same time? Alice Shabecoff, not a fool, warns us today about nanoparticles, never tested but added to more and more consumer products. We are, indeed, the canaries in the mines. Read this excellent parable by Carolyn Raffensburger, another non-fool, at Science and Environmental Health Network and join me in saying, “Enough already!”