What environmental catastophies in your area?

I live in a small tourist town on the west coast and so I can speak with people who live all over the country about this subject. Everyone I spoaken to knows their local environmental situations. Here the problems are many. The most obvious is cattle ranching. Cattle destroy the land by devouring everything in site which allows for erosion. They also compact the ground to the point where the trees die. The wineries in the backcountry suck all the water out of the ground, the water table lowers, and the creeks dry up prematurely, causing the animals to abandon their traditional areas. What's happening in your area?

Our water source is contaminated by radium. It's naturally occurring, so there's not much we can do about it. (We're a couple of picocuries over the limit.) The city has to either find a new source (deeper wells, etc.) or clean it up. Neither of these options will be cheap.

We sit just a couple of miles to the west of the subcontinental divide that determines who can tap Lake Michigan and who has to look elsewhere.

One is a current drought, and the other is smog.

Both caused by Republicans. They should be thrown out. They rolled back what worked for environmental issues here in Colorado.

Hawkeye-X

Karl Rove caused your drought! That bastard!

The greatest tragedy of the area is that it was put to the plough. It will never recover. Free range ranching might have worked if we'd followed the NA example. But instead we fenced in. Not good.

Sprawl of course is going to kill us - all of those individual houses with Blue grass sod lawns and climate control. Power, water, gas hogs all.... (Full disclosure: I live in a highly efficient doublewide and we use less than 3000 gallons of water a month and we have a buffalo grass lawn.)

And Rocky Flats.... 20 + years of weapons manufactury, now a wild life preserve because humans can't live there.

Politicat

Over fishing and crabbing are causing the famed blue crab, once so plentiful, to disappear.

Back in the early sixties they used to throw back all the females, now they don't. Back then you could catch crabs as big as two handspans across.

Although cleanup efforts during the 80's and 90's have improved water flowing from the Potomac River to the Bay, sludge waste from the cities and farm waste from chicken processing plants still effect the quality of the water in the Largest Estuary.

Another problem is the deer population - there are so many suburbs now there is no place for them to go.

I can't bear to visit home. Here in SC sprawl is overwhelming and probably the single biggest earth killer. We are doomed.

...that I live in Ann Arbor, MI and voters just overwhelmly approved a proposal for a 'greenbelt' around the city -- allowing the city to buy surrounding township property to protect it from sprawl and over-development.

The only opposition mounted was from our two (out of ten) Republican city council members and the builders' associations. Even the largest property management firm in town endorsed it.

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both "superfund" sites

I don't live in Jasper, but my father and brother do- and it's only 40 miles north of me, so I consider it my area. Anyway, Shrub has cut environmental funding so severely that there are 2 rather bad Superfund sites in Jasper where cleanup has been halted. Groundwater contamination is very likely if something isn't done in the near future.

http://www.texasobserver.org/showArticle.asp?ArticleID=1511

There are many other environmental problems in my are, since I live in SE Texas, otherwise known as Cancer Alley (the stretch of I-10 from Houston to Lake Charles). The petrochemical industry still reigns supreme, and does pretty much as they darn well please. But those 2 Superfund sites are so distressing because something was actually being done to improve the situation, and then Shrub came along...

A local salmon run was recently declared extinct; the King County Executive apparently let it slide into oblivion due to lack of interest. Whales have turned up dead on Washington's coast, and some predict that orcas will be extinct in Puget Sound before long. I believe spotted owls are doing worse than feared, too. Our corrupt mayor wants to develop Northgate shopping mall at the expense of more salmon streams.

Here's the biggest shocker: There are no environmentalists in Seattle! Like public education, all the "activists" appear to be operatives. Get a load of this: There's an organization called the League of EDUCACTION Voters which is headed by an extremely sleazy lawyer named LISA Macfarlane. There's another organization called the League of CONSERVATION Voters that's headed by a corporate attorney named ROSS Macfarlane. Would you believe they're a married couple?

And one day I was watching TV when I saw a brief ad featuring the guy who was in charge of the state's salmon restoration effort. It was William Ruckleshaus, from Richard Nixon's administration!!!

which is the Atlanta area is the pollution of our rivers and streams by toxic dumpings.

A continual climb up the charts in air pollution (48th in population, 17th in air pollution), every single stream in the county classified as impaired by the EPA and number 2 in the nation for urban sprawl.

The response? "That's the way it is, and WE LIKE IT!"

MBNA
Motiva
DuPont
Purdue
Salem Nuclear Power Plant

Cleveland has some of the worst air, largely due to automobile emissions, but particulates (<10 microns) cause lots of asthma.

Infested with Zebra Muscles that kill native species who do a better job cleaning the water, thus foreign algae takes over (when that shit dies it floats up on the shores and makes a stench you would NOT believe)
Historically low water levels caused by 15 or so years of mild winters (also kills algae)
Demands to export the fresh water to the plains and west

etc...

It absolutely disgusts me to see clear-cut forests around my town ... but hey! ... at least they won't burn!

They are not good for the environment or anyone really because of the erosion and pollution of the water table that clear cuts engender. The workers and local people know this better than anyone, yet it's their jobs at stake so they continue to vote for the lumber robber barons in political offices.

If our leaders only understood that to stop the lumber industry in their tracks they need to encourage alternative economies to employ the lumber and mill workers. Then you would see those very people turn against the same industries and run them and their corrupt politicians out of town.

caught in these lakes more than once a month. Pathetic. We have a Riverkeepers organization but, there's not many members.

It's one of the reasons I am a strong supporter of Kerry's. he has solutions and can hit the ground running on the environment because he already KNOWS the science.

second only to the white house.

The winery business is new. We don't have that many creeks anyway, but I haven't seen any of them affected yet. There is the same cattle/horse ranching erosion present here.

Unocal the big oil presence here has done tremendous damage. There are ghost neighborhoods in this and the adjoining county that Unocal was forced to buy so the residents could be moved out. No one lives there anymore. Recently they were forced to clean up one of our beaches and the adjoining town because of the toxic pollution of the oil company.

I don't know how this all will change with the new governor.

Ugly gashes in the earth that preceded environmental laws. Yellow creek water that will not support life. This is what happens when corporations are left unregulated.

...near the confluence of the Kansas and Missouri Rivers. The Missouri River, has been declared the nation's most endangered river, with the Kansas River, ranked No. 4.

Back in the 1950s and 1960s, my grandfather often took me fishing on the Kansas River west of Topeka.

radiation.org

and the entire chemical valley just to the west of charleston (WV)