What sort of danger is there for the public when politics interferes with the dissemination of scientific data and information? What if it is in regards to Public Health, Public Safety? What if politics gets in the way of the actual scientific findings even coming out?
Or worse yet, what happens when the studies done by scientists are falsified?
That might be the case, for instance, in the study of the water that seeps through Yucca Mountain where the federal government will place tons of radioactive waste material.
Can you imagine the impact of the true data on that being tampered with? It is a harrowing, but all too believable, scenario to think that Inconvenient Truths are swept aside for political reasons. But what are the costs to you and I in the end? What happens, say, if the great aquifer of North America becomes contaminated with radioactive material? What happens to you and I, or our children, or the plants and the animals?
There are news stories almost every day about something unexplained plaguing populations of birds and animals. And when scientists find the culprits, or go looking for them, they often begin and end their search with contaminates that have entered land and waterways by human hands.
If we are at the top of the food chain, we are dumping our most toxic waste into the very chain we will eat from. That isn't 'shitting where you sleep' that is 'shitting where you eat', a foul image but one that is disgustingly true.
Today's Article on the Government regulating the information that comes from our own Publicly funded Scientists...and the information that is coming from their Peer Reviewers, which means every other Scientist in the Country.
Today's Article on 1000 dead Mallard Ducks found alongside ONE stream. They don't know what is causing it, but they suffered and died from lesions on the lung walls and hemorrhaging of the heart.
Today's Article about a Wisconsin hunter that found a deer with 7 legs and both female and male sex organs.
Today's Article about sloppy use of scientific data in regards to opening up areas of Grizzly habitat in Idaho and WA. Now a federal judge has slapped down the government agencies in question and sent them back to the drawing board on their assessment of impact.
Yesterday's Article about the extinction of an entire species of fresh water Dolphin in China. A species that was with us not so long ago. Many more marine and fresh water animals are where the Yangtze White Dolphin was just a few years ago, which is now so much more clearly meaning on the verge of extinction.
2 comments:
Quick!! Someone go find Al Gore!
...or at least someone like Gore.
The current situation on this front is indeed pretty bad now and is getting worse quick.
The shocking thing is a lot of this stuff just seems like a refusal to pay attention to common sense knowledge, like don't dump toxic waste into a city's ground water, that can be bad, mkay.
Post a Comment