RACHEL CARSON

RACHEL CARSON

SPACESHIP EARTH

"We travel together, passengers on a little spaceship, dependent upon its vulnerable reserves of air and soil, all committed for our safety to its security and peace; preserved from annihilation only by the care, the work, and, I will say, the love we give our fragile craft. We cannot maintain it half fortunate, half miserable, half confident, half despairing, half slave to the ancient enemies of man, half free in a liberation of resources undreamed of until this day. No craft, no crew can travel safely with such vast contradictions. On their resolution depends the survival of us all."

ADLAI STEVENSON, 1964

Tuesday, November 27, 2012

'RESONANCE' BRILLIANT NEW DOCO ON MICROWAVES: HUMAN & PLANETARY HEALTH IMPACTS

 OVER 4 BILLION MOBILE PHONE USERS TODAY
 4 BILLION BRAIN CANCER PATIENTS?
THE GEOMETRY OF TRANSMISSION
 THANKS TO NICOLA TESLA WE HAVE THIS
 5 MILLION OF THESE EXISTED A YEAR AGO
 SPECTRUM OF NON-IONIZING RADIATION
 GREED FOR RARE EARTH METALS, HIGHLY TOXIC WASTE
 HOW COOL IS THIS?
 AND THIS!  iPHONE AND SMARTPHONE USERS 
WILL HAVE NO PROBLEM BENDING OVER 
FOR THEIR MICROCHIP IMPLANT...
ESPECIALLY IF OBAMA SINGS A SONG ABOUT IT ON TV!
 AMBIENT MICROWAVE READING, 
FLINDERS ST. STATION, MELBOURNE CBD, 
32 MILLI-WATTS/SQ.M = 32,000 X BIOINITIATIVE SAFE LEVEL
WHERE YOU WANT TO BE:  
A READING OF ALMOST NOTHING, 
EVEN AT THE MICRO-WATT/SQ. M. LEVEL

This morning I received an email from James Russell, who sent me a link to watch his new documentary on the nature, health and ecological effects of microwaves and other artificial electromagnetic non-ionizing radiation.  

Interestingly, yesterday I recorded a second interview with Christina Consolo aka Radchick for her 'Nuked Radio' show in which we talked at length about this exact topic.  Because of my acute awareness of the gravity of the situation concerning human exposure to microwave radiation, and the fact that Christina and I were talking specifically about the importance of living or spending lots of time totally away from man-made electromagnetic energies...something that becoming harder and harder to do...plus the fact that I've been going around Melbourne in recent weeks with an electro-smog meter and have been astounded at what I found...because of this, I just watched this entire film and it is ABSOLUTELY FANTASTIC.  Extremely well made, extremely informative, a wealth of research and interviews with people I've never heard of before, and a brilliant introductory section explaining the history of our understanding of electromagnetic radiation and the concept of frequency, including a look at the work of Maxwell and Schumann.  

After a look at the negative health effects of these emanations on honey bees and other wild-life, the majority of the film examines the state-of-the-art knowledge on the severity of health effects on human beings, as well as looking closely at the nature of the global telecommunications industry. A very interesting segment towards the end describes the central role of melatonin in maintaining our health, and how artificial EME/RF-MW energies disrupt the nocturnal synthesis of melatonin, which is an extremely powerful anti-oxidant that scavenges the free radicals which are believed to the under-lying cause not only of cancer but many other diseases and negative health syndromes.  Ionizing radiation also creates free-radicals.  

Several times, the question is asked as to why the industry or concerned organizations have not done the research necessary to establish the 'safety' of these technologies. The answer is two-fold:  first, the industry is not interested in actual health effects and if they were, they would not want the public to know. It is not inconceivable that the 'industry' or higher-echelon components thereof are in fact interested in creating negative health effects in the human population. After all, a mobile phone is a diabolically ingenious way to get people to hold a microwave oven next to their brain.  Second, to understand fully the long-term implications for health, studies would really need to be conducted for 25 generations of humans, or around 500 years, according to Arnold Lehman, a genetic toxicologist who was a contemporary of Rachel Carson.

The message:  not only are we destroying our health through the use of technologies like wi-fii and mobile phones, we are living in a huge experiment whose outcome is totally unknown but based on what we DO know...the result cannot be in favour of the survival and well-being of life as we currently know her, human or non-human.  At this time, over 4 billion people use mobile phones, almost everyone is exposed to varying levels of these frequencies and energies, and a new 4G mobile phone network is being installed...WITH INCREASED POWER LEVELS AND ELEVATED 'SAFETY' LEVELS.

Under Robama 2.0 we are likely to see the large-scale implementation of the long-awaited micro-chip implant scenario. My guess is that the new 4G network will be used for these as well. And how bloody convenient will that be for all the iPhone and Smartphone socio-paths! 


Remember:  the whole country of Austria removed all wireless technologies from public schools four years ago.

I strongly recommend that you take the time to watch this HIGHLY SIGNIFICANT film.  Plus, you can down-load it for free, in varying file sizes.

MANY THANKS to James Russell and his crew for a fantastic effort to create awareness about an extremely urgent health and ecological issue...KEEP UP THE GREAT WORK.

RESONANCE:  BEINGS OF FREQUENCY   
Directed by James Russell

WATCH FULL FILM HERE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oS6FGzh3ygw

WATCH AND DOWN-LOAD HERE
'PUT YOUR PHONE DOWN' Video by Fog & Smog

RUSSIAN SCIENTISTS ACTIVATE ON GLOBAL MICROWAVE THREAT

FROM A POSTING OF TWO WEEKS AGO: (see meter readings in images above)

'I've been going around various parts of Melbourne over the past couple months with an electro-smog meter (thanks to my friend Simon :) and what I've found is VERY SCARY.  In general, out and about I was getting readings in the range of tens of thousandths of a milli-watt/square meter.  At one point I put the probe directly onto an active wi-fi modem/router and got an astounding 32 milli-watts/square meter.  This is, of course, on the order of 32,000 times higher than the 'normal' level.  These numbers didn't mean much until I started looking into it.  The organization with whom I was already familiar, who published the 'Bioinitiative Report' a couple years ago, basically concluded that the highest continuous safe exposure level to microwaves was around .001 milli-watts/square meter.  Therefore, this modem...which was typical...is emitting microwaves that are 32,000 times higher than the safe level.


In recent years we've been able to spend months at a time in locations either with no electricity at all or with power we generate using solar, which is low-voltage, and internet via cable instead of wi-fi...since we've given our bodies and systems lots of time in non-electric environments, it's like we've attained a new level of sensitivity to everything.  This is fantastic as long as you're in nature and not around artificial fields and energies and stuff, but when you are within range or surrounded by high levels of all this, it's like it seems way worse than it ever did before.  Maybe because of our increased sensitivity as well as that all the levels of everything are getting jacked up!

Now the REALLY scary part.  in going around Melbourne, I took a reading standing on the steps outside the Flinders St. station down-town near Federation Square...a place where tens of thousands of people pass through every day. For moments here and there I got the EXACT SAME READING as on the modem...an astounding 32 milli-watts/square meter.  I cannot imagine where this level of micro-waves would be coming from.  I have gotten higher readings but only when the meter was actually touching a mobile or smart-phone or usd 'dongle' thing that was in operation.  And the absolute highest continuous reading I got was on the order of around 10 milli-watts/square meter...this was at the Melbourne Central tram-stop.

'HOLES IN HEAVEN' Fantastic doco, introduction to HAARP, the world's largest micro-wave transmitter and 'ionospheric heater' that pumps tens of billions of watts into the outermost layer of the atmosphere. The ultimate use of these technologies is a global mind-control 'frequency fence' using low-level pulses of microwaves which entrain with the brains of entire human populations, to disrupt cognition and debilitate overall functions.  This is the vision of Zbigniew Brzezinski, top national security advisor to Robama.

'HOLES IN HEAVEN'



'THE TUBE' EXCELLENT DOCO ON PHYSIOLOGY OF TELEVISION, PETER ENTELL


"Hi There

I hope you are well. Sorry its taken a while to get this to you. As I am sure you can appreciate its been a bit busy. The film just won the Transmission award at the CPFF. A link to the film on Vimeo is below. And is free to view. I made the film to get a message out there so Anything you can do to get the film out there would be hugely appreciated.

Kindest regards
James"

EMAIL FROM INGRID DICKENSON, a researcher who is interviewed in this film: 
 
Dear Jeff
I agree with everything you say about the Hopi prophesy regarding our crimes against Mother Earth. To add to this are the crimes of an even more destructive nature which are so well suppressed that even many who care for Mother Earth are not informed. Please release this very important documentary on your site. It was initially intended to be shown on TV but for reasons made obvious during the documentary I doubt this will ever get the go-ahead.

Regards
Ingrid Dickenson

Sunday, November 11, 2012

MAUI'S DOLPHINS UNDER ATTACK: MY 'COMMENT' TO NEW ZEALAND DECISION-MAKING OFFICIALS

 Maui's dolphins under attack...
 Not only from fishing industry...
 But from global threats: seismic testing 
and military sonar & weapons testing

NOTE FROM JEFF:  This went out to around a hundred officials in the New Zealand government, all of the ministers and higher-level people in the Department of Conservation and Ministry for Primary Industries.  I'm getting this in just in the nick of time as the window closes today for public comment on the fate of the endangered Maui's dolphins, of whom only 50 or so are believed to remain. I am using this opportunity to get the threats from seismic testing and naval sonar and weapons testing onto the radar of these people.  Remaining natural resources should be left in the ground. There is no 'war on terror'...it's a war of aggression and greed on Mother Earth. In varying degrees, we are all soldiers in this war.  Extinction is forever...this includes us.

http://www.fish.govt.nz/en-nz/Consultations/Hector+and+Mauis+Dolphins+Threat+Management+Plan/default.htm

http://www.doc.govt.nz/getting-involved/consultations/current/threat-management-plan-review-for-mauis-dolphin/

http://www.doc.govt.nz/conservation/native-animals/marine-mammals/dolphins/mauis-dolphin/ 

THREATS TO WHALES & DOLPHINS

TO:  Hon. Ministers & Officials of NZ Govt., DOC & MPI
DATE:  12 November 2012

Today the window for public comments closes on decisions you will take concerning the well-being of the Maui’s and other dolphins with respect to the fishing industry.  This is a distillation from a conversation I had with acting Minister of Conservation Brian Sheppard last week.  In essence, as I understand, DOC is acting on behalf of the dolphins and MPI is acting on behalf of the fishing industry. I am speaking on behalf of the whales and dolphins themselves.

I want to take this opportunity to get some highly significant ideas and information onto the radar of decision-making leadership in New Zealand at a moment in time when enlightened thought and action could spell the difference between ‘business as usual’ and consequently increasing ecological devastation on one hand, and on the other a revisualization of what New Zealand really stands for, what your true values are as the people of a very wonderful and tremendously unique country.

I won’t go into great detail here, as I am more than happy to supply in-depth scientific information to support what I am telling you later.  My back-ground is in physical and biological science, and psychology.  I am also an artist, musician, writer, photographer, and film-maker. I’ve been traveling down under for many years and have come to know and love both Australia and New Zealand very well.  I was involved in communication research with dolphins in California in the 1980’s and ever since I’ve been on a mission to educate people not only about ‘who they are’ as fellow beings on this planet, but what the real global threats to their health and well-being actually are.

I have done several radio interviews in the last year about this, and have had articles published as well.  I do a lot of ‘information activism’ in this area, and my partner and I have begun work on what we are calling a ‘beyond film’ about the whales and dolphins.

A large number of ‘save the whales’ organizations are out there, some doing good things, many doing no more than capitalizing on public gullibility and love of cetaceans.  Almost without exception, none of these high-dollar and high-visibility organizations ever even mention these real global threats to whales and dolphins, those represented by the ever-growing presence of seismic testing for hydro-carbons and ubiquitous military technologies and activities, low-frequency naval sonar in particular, but including ‘war games’, weapons testing and ordnance disposal.  Seismic testing and naval sonar use almost identical technologies, towed-arrays of underwater transducers that emit extremely powerful blasts of sound. One blast, which can be on the order of 30,000 joules, can generate a shock-wave that can kill, maim or deafen literally thousands of cetaceans within a radius of tens or even hundreds of kilometers.

Conclusive evidence exists that for every stranding of whales and dolphins around New Zealand and elsewhere in the world, military and/or industrial activity was taking place in the same area at the same time.  The whales and dolphins of New Zealand are particularly at risk for two reasons:  1)  New Zealand is home to a greater variety and density of cetaceans than almost any other country, and 2) with changes in government attitudes to trans-national energy and mining companies in recent years, an explosion of military-industrial activity is taking place all over and around New Zealand, on land, in the air and in the ocean. In particular, the off-shore exploration and drilling activity off of Taranaki and Canterbury are particularly disturbing.


In addition, eating anything from the ocean anywhere in the world is becoming increasingly risky from a health perspective, not only because of the on-going global dispersion of radio-nuclides from Fukushima (on top of the pre-existing nuclear burden), but also because of high levels of contamination from a host of industrial substances, for example, heavy metals and POP's, or 'persistent organic pollutants' which act as endocrine-disruptors.

As I said, I am not asking you to take my word on this.  I will provide a few links below to highly relevant postings and films below, and if you’d like any more information, please feel free to contact me.

Once a species goes extinct, this is forever.  In the same way, once oil rigs are built, the structures and puncture-wounds in the Earth are not going away either.

The issue at stake is, do the government and people of Aotearoa really want oil-drilling rigs and mining sites throughout your beautiful land and oceans?  Sure there’s money to be made…for a few, not the many…but the power and beauty of the Earth is there for all to enjoy.  The whales and dolphins have been here FAR longer than anything calling itself ‘homo sapiens.’  What gives us the right to make their lives impossible in order to feed our greed for resources that are better off left in the ground where they belong?

The last time that Aotearoa was '100% Clean and Green' was before homo sapiens set foot there. It's been down-hill ever-since.

Thanks for your ear

Jeff Phillips
Halls Gap Victoria

'We Are Not Alone...Yet:  How We Are Waging War on a True 'Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence' Jeff Phillips  (a comprehensive introduction to the cetaceans, who they are and what the global threats to them are)

http://tutunui-wananga.blogspot.com.au/2012/08/we-are-not-aloneyet-how-we-are-waging.html

'Aihe Tohora Paikea Wananga'  The trailer to our 'beyond film' based on the article

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNFoL24pK3c
'Peru Dolphin Strandings:  Repeat of New Zealand Scenario' Jeff Phillips

http://tutunui-wananga.blogspot.com.au/2012/02/peru-dolphin-strandings-exact-repeat-of.html

StrandedNoMore...the single best source of accurate scientific information about what is happening with whales and dolphins around the world

'The Rarest Beaked Whale in the World:  What is Entirely Missing in Every Media Report' (NZ DOC mistakenly identifies extremely rare whales and kills them without even attempting resuce operations)
http://strandednomore.wordpress.com/2012/11/09/the-rarest-beaked-whale-in-the-world-what-is-entirely-missing-in-every-media-report/

North Andaman Island’s and New Zealand’s Mass Strandings Both Have Anthropogenic Noise Connection


http://strandednomore.wordpress.com/2012/10/25/north-andaman-islands-and-new-zealands-mass-strandings-both-have-anthropogenic-noise-connection/

Over-fishing Puts 80% of Chinese Fishermen Towards Bankruptcy "The use of trawl and set nets – both very damaging to ecosystems – is common in China."

http://www.chinadialogue.net/books/5221/en

Three extremely powerful documentaries by Anthro-media in Germany

'Sounds of the Seas' (about naval sonar and cetaceans)

http://www.anthro-media.com/projects/nature/01.html

A film about seismic testing's danger to cetaceans

http://www.anthro-media.com/projects/nature/06.html
'The Struggle for Oil' (about the global petroleum scenario and 'abiogenic' petroleum)

http://www.anthro-media.com/projects/future/01.html

Rosalind Peterson LIVE Report: US NAVY Massacre 11.7 Million Marine Mammals at stake! (Ms. Peterson left the State Government of California to pursue environmental education and activism)

POSTER:  MARINE MAMMALS OF NEW ZEALAND 
(down-load)

http://www.doc.govt.nz/documents/.../marine-mammals/marine-mammal-p...


"New Zealand Under Attack:  'Think Globally...Kill Locally' " Jeff Phillips

http://rachels-carson-of-today.blogspot.com.au/2012/05/new-zealand-under-attack-think-globally.html


Monday, October 22, 2012

FUKUSHIMA AND BEYOND: THE GLOBAL NUCLEAR SCENARIO IS NOT A HOAX

 A PARTICLE OF PLUTONIUM
 "NOW THAT WE'VE JUST NUKED JAPAN, 
LET ME INTRODUCE 'THE PEACEFUL ATOM'..."
 OVER 2000 ATMOSPHERIC DETONATIONS
 THE ATOMIC BOMB WAS USED...
IN ORDER TO STUDY ITS EFFECTS 
ON LIVE HUMAN POPULATIONS
 TELEVISION AND ALL-THINGS-NUCLEAR 
WERE PRODUCTS OF GENERAL ELECTRIC. 
TV'S MAIN PURPOSE WAS TO SELL 
THE 'COLD WAR' AND THE 'PEACEFUL ATOM'.
 SELLAFIELD UK
 THE POWER OF THE STARS IS
NOT FOR HUMAN TAMPERING
 FUKUSHIMA HAS ONLY JUST BEGUN TO GIVE
 DECAY INCREASES THE POWER OF DEATH
 THIS IS FROM OVER 15 YEARS AGO
 THIS REPRESENTS LESS THAN HALF 
OF ALL EXISTING REACTORS
 THE NORTHERN HEMISPHERE IS VASTLY MORE 
CONTAMINATED THAN THE SOUTHERN HEMISPHERE
 DU, or 'DEPLETED URANIUM' IN USE NOW MORE THAN EVER
 ALMOST ALL BABIES BORN IN IRAQ NOW ARE DEFORMED, 
THIS COULD BE THE GLOBAL NORM IN THE NEAR FUTURE
 "YOU CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING...WHERE WOULD YOU PUT IT?" 
Comedian Steven Wright
 A TRUE CAUSE FOR CELEBRATION! 
LET'S GO MURDER SOME MARINE MAMMALS FOR FUN!
 THE U.S. NAVY IS THE SINGLE LARGEST 
NUCLEAR ENTITY ON THE PLANET
 THE WORLD'S OCEAN HAS BEEN A DUMPING GROUND 
FOR ALL-THINGS-NUCLEAR SINCE 1945
 EATING ANYTHING FROM THE OCEAN IS INSANE
 THE INDIGENOUS PEOPLE OF THE SEA...FAR MORE TRULY 'HUMAN' 
THAN WE'VE BEEN FOR A VERY LONG TIME. IN OUR INSANITY WE SOMEHOW THINK THAT FUKUSHIMA IS HAVING NO EFFECT ON CETACEANS...OR US.
 "IF WE DIG PRECIOUS THINGS FROM THE LAND, 
WE WILL INVITE DISASTER."

HOPI PROPHECY
 BUT IT'S SAFE, RIGHT?


NOTE FROM JEFF:  How bizarre this all is...and how stupid. So what's the deal...'the spent fuel pools are ok so now EVERYTHING IS FINE?' Anyone with a true sense of nuclear reality would say, 'Well, we're lucky in a way that is WASN'T true...now all we have to worry about is ALL THE OTHER NUCLEAR SUBSTANCES that have already been released.'  Not many people have ANY idea of how diabolical the whole scenario actually is.  And they DON'T WANT TO KNOW. Since Fukushima I have taken it on myself first to educate myself then to share with my network of friends the horrific reality of the global nuclear scenario. It is truly beyond belief not only that this could have come into existence in the first place, but worse, that it has metastasized so fantastically yet remains invisible and unacknowledged by the vast majority of beings calling themselves 'human.' Since March 2011 I have spent hundreds of valuable hours on this, putting many creative projects on the back-burner, stressing my relationship, and occasionally sending myself into a state of spiritual agony.  All-things-nuclear are here to stay, and they will be here far longer than we will. What we focus our energy and attention on grows stronger; creating awareness about the nuclear scenario is absolutely essential for understanding that it has only come about through deliberate human choice.  It makes no sense to talk about 'higher consciousness' while we are STILL CHOOSING TO CREATE ALL THINGS NUCLEAR.

"Regardless of this recent ‘information anomaly’, the situation with Fukushima remains beyond critical in terms of the massive on-going release of synthetic radio-nuclides into the planetary biosphere."

 "The electricity consumed by a typical light bulb results in the creation of thousands of lethal doses of plutonium alone...a typical one mega-watt reactor produces approximately 500 pounds of plutonium per year...the 400+ civilian reactors alone world-wide would produce around 92,000 kgs of plutonium per year. This equals 92 trillion lethal doses of plutonium being created per year. This is on-going and doesn’t even begin to include what already exists. The number of lethal doses of plutonium that currently exist might be on the order of 10 to the 15th power. And this is JUST plutonium."

FUKUSHIMA AND BEYOND: 

THE GLOBAL NUCLEAR SCENARIO IS NO HOAX

Hey there! I’m not apologizing for disseminating what appears to be an inaccurate report about spent fuel pools at Fukushima.  And anyone criticizing me is totally missing the point about the whole thing:  few people are able even to grasp the real nature of what has already been happening since the whole Fukushima thing started last year, and what the existence of ‘all things nuclear’ actually means for life on this planet.

Anyone with a true sense of ‘nuclear reality’ understands that HUMANITY AND MOTHER EARTH ARE AT A PERMANENT ‘RED ALERT’ LEVEL in terms of all-things-nuclear and have been since 1945.

Activist Mike Leonardi questioned me about this being a ‘hoax’ and my reply was that “it really doesn't matter if this recent thing is a 'hoax' or not...it's really totally insane because of WHAT'S ALREADY HAPPENED AND HAPPENING IS SO FAR BEYOND ANYONE'S COMPREHENSION and almost no one wants to think about it.  I am sending a third follow-up posting on all this now...did you not read the second posting in which I say that I don't know if it's a hoax or not...but that it really doesn't matter?  ALL THE NUCLEAR POISON IS STILL THERE and NOTHING ANY ANTI-NUCLEAR ACTIVIST CAN DO...INCLUDING YOU...CAN DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT.  Even shutting down every reactor today and disarming all nuclear warheads is not going to make any difference in terms of what has been unleashed on this planet. Humans are stuck with the spiritual consequences and karma of what we've done and allowed to take place.”

Regardless of the current status of the spent fuel pools…and can ANYONE honestly tell me that THEY know for sure what this is???...I have not been there in person, thankfully, so I do not have first-hand information…so, like most people, I have relied on what I believe to be credible information…regardless of this recent ‘information anomaly’, the situation with Fukushima remains beyond critical in terms of the massive on-going release of synthetic radio-nuclides into the planetary biosphere.

More importantly, since Fukushima, I have tried to educate myself about the reality of the overall global nuclear scenario, beginning from the mining of uranium, the Manhattan Project, atomic bombs, nuclear reactors and high-level waste, the deployment of DU (‘depleted uranium’), the insanity of using a technology that creates astronomical quantities of the deadliest substances in the known universe simply to boil water to generate electricity that would not even be needed if people lived intelligently and of building reactor sites on major fault lines.

This is really scary territory to try to explore…the more I learn, the scarier it all becomes.  Scariest of all is tha most people would prefer not even to think about it, yet the global nuclear scenario would have to be THE single greatest threat to the long-term health and survival to life as we know her on this planet.

Because of the gravity of this threat and the urgency of the situation, I continue to put a massive amount of effort into sharing valid information with people who might care to keep it on their radar.

It doesn’t matter if the remaining spent fuel pools exploded or not…Fukushima is already the hugest ecological catastrophe in the history of civilization and is by no means over.

Think about it:  several hundred similar reactor sites exist around the world, each of which is generating massive quantities of the most deadly substances known to exist.  Where is it all going?  It’s all just going to sit there until it eventually breaches its containment which will happen sooner or later.

I highly recommend that you read this:


https://globalradiologicalcatastrophe.wordpress.com/2012/05/28/hot-legacy-the-world-without-us-alan-weisman-chap-15/

“…used nuclear fuel, some of it decades old, languishes in holding tanks. Oddly, it is up to a million times more radioactive than when it was fresh. While in the reactor, it began mutating into elements heavier than enriched uranium, such as isotopes of plutonium and americium…At WIPP…the U.S. Department’ of Energy is legally required to dissuade anyone from coming too close for the next 10,000 years. After discussing the fact that human languages mutate so fast that they’re almost unrecognizable after 500 or 600 years, it was decided to post warnings in seven of them anyway, plus pictures…Since Palo Verde opened in 1986, its used fuel has been accumulating, because there’s nowhere else to take it. In plants everywhere, spent fuel ponds have been re-racked to squeeze in thousands of more fuel assemblies. Together, the world’s 441 functioning nuclear plants annually produce almost 13,000 tons of high-level nuclear scrap…”


Weisman fails to mention the several hundred other reactors used by the military for weapons production, research and development, and propulsion of sea vessels. The U.S. Navy operates several hundred reactors and is the single largest nuclear entity on the planet.

Of the almost 2000 synthetic radio-nuclides produced by fission reactors, the single most dangerous one we need to be concerned about is
plutonium. 


Last week I visited an exhibit about Hiroshima and Nagasaki at a Melbourne art gallery. It was very misleading because it gave three false impressions:  1) that these two events are the only time that 'nuclear weapons' have been used in history, 2) that 'nuclear weapons' per se are the only 'nuclear danger' that exists in the world of today, and 3) that if we 'disarm' the nuclear weapons we will be safe and sound.  Sorry, but the reality is VERY different.


http://geo-terrorism.blogspot.com.au/2012/01/nu-flir-2012-1-increasing-frequency-of_23.html

'Nuclear war' is nothing new and actually began with the Trinity test in 1945, and has continued unabated ever since. According to Dr. Tedd Weymann, any practice or process that spreads ionising radiation into the biosphere is in fact ‘nuclear war’ and includes the 2000+ atmospheric detonations, hundreds or thousands of under-ground and submarine detonations; the effects and side-effects of the nuclear reactor/weapons industry, with its astronomical quantities of mining tailings and high-level wastes, consisting of close to 2000 synthetic radio-nuclides not occurring in nature, many with half-lives on the order of thousands of years or more, many with 'daughter-products' equally dangerous and long-lived, and all of them posing extreme health threats to biological life. These waste products, the most deadly substances known to exist in the known universe, are sitting in rusty drums at the bottom of oceans, buried in holes, wells and trenches around the world, stored at leaky facilities on-site at every reactor that exists (maybe as many 600 in the world). Countless nuclear “accidents” have occurred as well, not all of which we know anything about; we think of Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and most recently Fukushima, not to mention those involving submarines, bombs, missiles, and satellites; but many dozens more have happened. Many of these disasters may not have been “accidental” or “natural”, in the same way that the hundreds of thousands of kilograms of DU (‘depleted uranium’, a euphemism for radioactive wastes including high-level actinides manufactured into bullets and artillery shells for use by NATO forces) were not “accidentally” deployed all over the world.


Then there's the approximately 19,000 'actual' nuclear bombs and war-heads owned by a handful of 'nuclear states'...weapons that were 'made to be used' according to the founders of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

This is the legacy of 'the peaceful atom.'

We tend to forget…or maybe never realized that…all things nuclear are weapons per se…against biological life. Companies like General Electric, for example (who had co-existing directors in America and Nazi Germany) designed and built nuclear reactors, nuclear weapons, and television, the “atomic bomb of the mind.” The connection between these twin technologies has been brilliantly documented by Joyce Nelson in her book The Perfect Machine: TV in the Nuclear Age. From its inception, television was used as a way of indoctrinating the public to accept all things nuclear as safe and clean and to 'manufacture consent' for the 'cold war.'

From the beginning as well, reactors and their spent fuel pools have been regarded as “terrorist targets.” Translation of double-speak: reactors were designed to be blown up in order to disperse radio-nuclides as efficiently as possible. Hence, their strategic locations close to major population centres and/or directly on major fault lines. ALL of this constitutes “nuclear war”, although we tend to think of it only in terms of pyro-technic displays like Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 

'Nuclear war' actually began as soon as we started to dig out radium and uranium from sacred indigenous lands; it is the fulfillment of our collective karma from pretending to ‘live’ in an ‘industrial civilization’ based on raping the Earth to stand where we are now..."

FREE DOWN-LOAD: TWO BOOKS THAT WILL TELL YOU LITERALLY ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW TO UNDERSTAND WHAT 'RADIATION' IS, HOW IT HURTS YOU, AND WHAT THE LONG-TERM HEALTH EFFECTS ARE FOR BIOLOGICAL LIFE

Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment, Drs. Nesterenko and Yablokov


http://www.nukefree.org/now-free-download-chernobyl-consequences-catastrophe-people-environment

The Code Killers, Ace Hoffman


http://newamericamedia.org/2012/03/the-world-is-powerless-against-fukushima-fallout.php


"The World is Powerless Against Fukushima Fallout"

"An accurate reckoning of the danger to public health worldwide is not being discussed because governments are powerless against the nuclear monstrosity they created...Considering the 33-year half-life of cesium, far more people worldwide can be expected to die horribly due to the fallout of Fukushima rather than in any nuclear war with Iran or North Korea...Nearly every nuclear plant in the Pacific region has reached the limit of its spent fuel rod capacity, meaning these time bombs are fully loaded and ready to blow...Even when the cesium and strontium threats diminish, the possibility of mass extinction will remain for as long as humankind can muddle along. The chunks of uranium blasted into seawater around Fukushima have a half-life of 700,000 years."


http://geo-terrorism.blogspot.com.au/2011/05/geo-terrorism-update-nuclear.html


"Many people are choosing to believe that the radioactive substances falling out in America are harmless. Imagine how grotesquely inconvenient it would be to realize that you are being bombarded by unprecedented levels of alpha-emitting particles of dust laden with THE most deadly substances known to man, including plutonium, as well over 1000 other radioactive isotopes, each potentially dangerous and each decaying into equally dangerous “daughter” products, and to be forced to act on this awareness. What WOULD people do? Awareness of this kind would tend to force a quantum shift in consciousness and life-orientation for most people. Veeeeery inconvenient to the status quo. Very much simpler just to “wag the isotope” and be convinced that it’s all “harmless.”

The total amount of radioactive materials released into the biosphere since 1945 greatly exceeds what would have been released in an actual “nuclear war” where bombs were exploded. Calculations could be done, but I would guess that a high per centage of the total nuclear arsenals of the U.S. and Russia would have to be detonated in order to release the levels of radiation that now exist in the biosphere. Any single reactor facility contains and is producing enough highly radioactive materials to produce thousands, if not tens or hundreds of thousands of nuclear bombs; over 1000 reactors exist globally.

Dr. Helen Caldicott is one of my heroes and every person on this planet, particularly the people of Australia, needs to take heed of everything she is telling us right now. She relates that a typical one mega-watt reactor produces approximately 500 pounds of plutonium per year. Some simple calculations reveal that at this rate, the generation of 4400 watts of electricity produces one gram, or one million lethal doses of plutonium. At this same rate, 227 lethal doses of plutonium are produced for every watt of electricity generated. The electricity consumed by a typical light bulb results in the creation of thousands of lethal doses of plutonium alone, not to mention over 1000 other highly dangerous substances.

With this same information we can calculate that the 400+ civilian reactors alone world-wide would produce around 92,000 kgs of plutonium per year. This equals 92 trillion lethal doses of plutonium being created per year. This is on-going and doesn’t even begin to include what already exists. The number of lethal doses of plutonium that currently exist might be on the order of 10 to the 15th power. And this is JUST plutonium; over a thousand other extremely dangerous radio-nuclides come into being during fission reactions, many with extended half-lives. We currently possess enough plutonium to kill every person on Earth tens of thousands of times. Homo sapiens must be REALLY SERIOUS about the suicide thing. And THIS is the reality of how “safe and clean” nuclear power actually is: global poly-google-cide as a result of boiling water to generate electricity, most of which is not only totally wasted but was never necessary to begin with. Humans lived for millions of years without electricity.

Other scientists estimate that the 2000+ atmospheric nuclear tests released radiation equivalent to approximately 40,000 Hiroshima blasts. Dr. Tedd Weyman told me that the Hiroshima blast released approximately 1.4 million Curies of radiation; therefore, atmospheric testing has released approximately 56 billion Curies. Journalist Bob Nichols relates that so far, Fukushima has released 2000 Hiroshimas of radiation, which would be equivalent to 5% of all radiation released from atmospheric testing. By mid-April, when Nichols wrote this, Fukushima had in six weeks already released 5% of the total radiation of all atmospheric testing conducted on the Earth since 1945. These numbers can be misleading, as the lethality/toxicity of the unprecedented release of plutonium is not represented.


As members of the human race we are EACH responsible for what our species is doing; whether any of us care of not is another matter.
 
LOOK AT THESE VIDEOS OF PACIFIC OCEAN CONTAMINATION...but these are SAFE LEVELS OF RADIATION, RIGHT?  So everything is OK, after all.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LL7j_RRSTh0&feature=related

OK, enough said. Relax, it was all just a silly hoax...go back to your television and video games, your fluoride and microwaves, your GE potatos, GM meat and MSG junk-food.  No worries, mate!

And be sure to vote for Mitrack Obamney because THIS REALLY MATTERS.

Thursday, October 11, 2012

'FRACKING RACHEL CARSON' 50th Anniversary of 'Silent Spring' Sandra Steingraber

RACHEL CARSON
HER FOURTH BOOK IGNITED A GLOBAL AWARENESS MOVEMENT
ON HAWK MOUNTAIN
'FRACKING' = HYDRAULIC FRACTURING
FRACKING INJECTS DOZENS OF HIGHLY CARCINOGENIC CHEMICALS
 INTO GROUND WATER AQUIFERS
HALLIBURTON IS DIRECTED BY DICK CHENEY, 9/11 & 'GEO-TERRORISM' MASTER-MIND
RACHEL THE NATURE PHOTOGRAPHER
IN APPALACHIAN MOUNTAINS


'The Fracking of Rachel Carson' Sandra Steingraber



Dr. Theo Colborn, co-author Our Stolen Future, on health effects of water contamination by fracking chemicals


'Through a Narrow Window', Chapter 13 of Silent Spring (excerpts) 


Silent Spring full text pdf free down-load


1. Rachel Carson, the ecologist who kicked the hornet’s nest, wrote a book that needed no subtitle. Published fifty years ago this September, Silent Spring rocketed to the top of the bestseller list, prompted a meeting with the president’s science advisers, occasioned congressional hearings, and circled her neck with medals of honor. It also let loose swarms of invective from the pesticide industry. Throughout it all, Carson remained calm. Friends and foes alike praised her graceful comportment and gentle voice. Also, her stylish suits and trim figure. Nevertheless, her various publicity photos (with microscope; in the woods; outside her summer cottage in Maine; at home in Maryland) look as if the same thought bubble hovers above them all:

2. In the later portraits, Carson was dying of breast cancer. It was a diagnosis she hid out of fear that her enemies in industry would use her medical situation to attack her scientific objectivity and, most especially, her carefully constructed argument about the role that petrochemicals (especially pesticides) played in the story of human cancer. But behind her unflappable public composure, Carson’s private writings reveal how much physical anguish she endured. Bone metastases. Radiation burns. Angina. Knowing this, you can imagine her patience running out during the interminable photo shoots. The wretched wig hot and itchy under the lights. The stabbing pains (cervical vertebrae splintered with tumors) that would not, would not relent. 

3. In the iconic Hawk Mountain photo, Rachel Carson is truly beautiful. Her smile looks natural rather than forced. Posed on a rocky summit, she is wearing a badass leather jacket and wields a pair of leather-strapped binoculars. So armed, she scans the horizon. At her feet, the whole of Berks County, Pennsylvania, unfurls, forest and valley, field and mountain, like a verse from a Pete Seeger song.

4. Hawk Mountain, along the Appalachian flyway, is an officially designated refuge for raptors. As with so many sanctuaries, it started out as a hunting ground with bounties. By the mid-1930s, it had become the spot in Pennsylvania to witness the annual fall migration of hawks. Rachel Carson loved it here. She wrote about her experiences in a never-finished, never-published essay titled “Road of the Hawks.” According to biographer Linda Lear—who gathered the fragments into the collection Lost Woods: The Discovered Writing of Rachel Carson—the essay is notable not only for its careful analysis of bird behavior and knowledge of geology but also because Carson traced the origin of her airy lookout to Paleozoic marine organisms.

5.
And always in these Appalachian highlands there are reminders of those ancient seas that more than once lay over all this land . . . these whitened limestone rocks on which I am sitting . . . were formed under that Paleozoic ocean, of the myriad tiny skeletons of creatures that drifted in its waters. Now I lie back with half closed eyes and try to realize that I am at the bottom of another ocean—an ocean of air on which the hawks are sailing.
6. She sat on a mountaintop and thought about oceans. 

7. The marine inhabitants of the ancient seas that once overlay Appalachia transformed, when they died, into gaseous bubbles of methane. Pressed under the accumulated weight of silt sifting down from nearby mountains, the seafloor solidified into what’s now called the Marcellus Shale, a layer of bedrock that’s located under thousands of feet of what we would call the earth, but the mining industry calls overburden: the material that lies between the surface and an area of economic interest. To extract methane bubbles from the area of economic interest, the natural gas industry is now blowing up the state of Pennsylvania.

8. High-volume, slickwater, horizontal hydrofracking would be considered a crime if the requirements of the Safe Drinking Water Act, which regulates underground chemical injections, pertained. 

9. But they don’t. In 2005, fracking was granted specific exemptions from the Safe Drinking Water Act. Fracking is also exempt from key provisions within the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act. Chemicals used in drilling and fracking operations can be claimed as trade secrets; public release of their identity is not mandated by federal right-to-know provisions. The Environmental Protection Agency has limited jurisdiction over fracking.

10. The Environmental Protection Agency credits Silent Spring for its existence.

11. You can think of fracking as a hostage exchange program. A drill bit opens a hole a mile deep, turns sideways, and then, like a robotic mole, tunnels horizontally through the shale bedrock for another mile or more. The hole is lined with steel pipe and cement. To initiate the fracturing process, explosives are sent down it. Then, fresh water (millions of gallons per well) is injected under high pressure to further break up the shale and shoot acids, biocides, friction reducers, and sand grains deep into the cracks. Trapped for 400 million years, the gas is now free to flow through the propped-open fractures up to the surface, where it is condensed, compressed, and sent to market via a network of pipelines. The water remains behind.

12. Within the rumply state of Pennsylvania is a place called Triple Divide, where three adjacent springs feed the watersheds of three mighty rivers: the Allegheny (which flows west to the Mississippi River); the Susquehanna (which flows east to Chesapeake Bay); and the Genesee (which flows north to Lake Ontario). This area of Pennsylvania—which is the sixth most populous state in the union, which sits upwind and upstream from the eleventh most populous state of New Jersey and the third most populous state of New York—lies in the heart of the ongoing fracking boom in the eastern U.S. According to the Pennsylvania Land Trust Association, drillers in the Marcellus Shale amassed 1,614 violations of state oil and gas laws between January 2008 and August 2010. In one incident, a well blowout near the Punxsutawney Hunting Club in Clearfield County sent 35,000 gallons of toxic effluent into a state forest over the course of sixteen hours. Campers were evacuated.

13. Rachel Carson was born on May 27, 1907, and grew up on the outskirts of Springdale, sixteen miles from Pittsburgh. Her lifelong devotion to the sea began as a small child when she discovered, on a rocky hillside near her family’s farm, a fossilized shell. A sea creature in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania.

14. Actually, only some of the frack water stays behind in the shale. The rest, now mixed with brine and radioactivity, shoots up to the surface with the gas. Finding a safe place to dispose of this toxic flowback is an unsolved problem. Sometimes, the waste from drilling is just dumped on the ground. That’s illegal, but it happens. Sometimes the waste is dumped down other holes. In 2010, 200,000 gallons were poured down an abandoned well on the edge of Allegheny National Forest. Much of the flowback fluid is trucked to northeast Ohio, where it is forced, under pressure, into permeable rock via deep injection wells. This practice, the Ohio Department of Natural Resources has concluded, is the likely cause of the unusual swarm of earthquakes that shook northeast Ohio in 2011.

15. Most of the state’s fracking operations are set to take place in Pennsylvania’s forests. To be precise, 64 percent of Pennsylvania gas wells are to be drilled in forested land, which includes state forests and natural areas. For each well pad sited in a forested area, an average of nine acres of habitat are destroyed, says The Nature Conservancy’s Pennsylvania chapter (each well pad can accommodate up to six wells). The total direct and indirect impact is thirty acres of forest for each well pad. This does not include acreage lost to pipelines. On average, each well pad requires 1.65 miles of gathering pipelines, which carry the gas to a network of larger transporting pipelines.

16. Somewhere between 60,000 and 100,000 wells are planned for Pennsylvania, to be built over the next few decades. The Nature Conservancy forecasts the destruction of 360,000 to 900,000 acres of interior forest habitat due to pipeline right-of-ways alone. 

17. They are fracking Allegheny County.

18. They are sizing up Berks County, too.

19. Berks Gas Truth is a grassroots antifracking organization that focuses on human rights. The group is fond of quoting Article 1, Section 27, of the Pennsylvania Constitution:
The people have a right to clean air, pure water, and to the preservation of the natural, scenic, historic, and esthetic values of the environment. Pennsylvania’s public natural resources are the common property of all the people, including generations yet to come. As trustee of these resources, the Commonweath shall conserve and maintain them for the benefit of all the people.
20. Carson had a lot to say about human rights. In Silent Spring:
If the Bill of Rights contains no guarantee that a citizen shall be secure against lethal poisons distributed either by private individuals or by public officials, it is surely only because our forefathers, despite their considerable wisdom and foresight, could conceive of no such problem.
In congressional testimony (June 1963):
[I assert] the right of the citizen to be secure in his own home against the intrusions of poisons applied by other persons. I speak not as a lawyer but as a biologist and as a human being, but I strongly feel that this is or should be one of the basic human rights.
From her final speech (San Francisco, October 1963): 
Underlying all of these problems of introducing contamination into our world is the question of moral responsibility. . . . [T]he threat is infinitely greater to the generations unborn; to those who have no voice in the decisions of today, and that fact alone makes our responsibility a heavy one.
21. Human rights were not always Carson’s focus. Indeed, her bestselling trilogy of books about the sea—Under the Sea Wind (1941), The Sea Around UsThe Edge of the Sea (1955)—gives an adventurous account of a world in which the human race scarcely appears. If we the readers could visualize the oceanic world below the waves—full of communities of interacting creatures that possessed agency and distinct personalities—we might, the author believed, experience wonder and humility. And wonder and humility, said Carson, “do not exist side by side with a lust for destruction.” By contrast, the book she longed to begin at the time of her death was going to be all about environmental destruction—and the human rights violations that occur as a result. To halt the growing contamination of the oceans, to counteract a culture of conquest and annihilation, required more than humility, Carson had come to believe. It called for confrontation and witness. Nevertheless, she was also, at the time of her death, working on a book-length expansion of an essay titled “Help Your Child to Wonder.” (1951)

22. The Springdale where Rachel Carson lived as a child was no preindustrial, Romantic garden. The stench of the local glue factory was horrible. By the time she left for graduate school at Johns Hopkins in 1929, two coal-burning power plants flanked the town and were plainly contaminating both the river and the air. “The memory of the defilement industrial pollution brought,” said Linda Lear, would remain with Carson for the rest of her life.

23. To honor Carson (and promote tourism), the Springdale Team of Active Residents coined a new slogan for the town: Where Green Was Born.
 
24. According to a 2010 investigation by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, residents of Springdale have higher than average rates of death from lung cancers and heart ailments linked to air pollution. Quoted in the article, the then-director of the Rachel Carson Homestead Association, Patricia DeMarco, said, “We’re in a black hole here, where companies put out pollution and take in profits while the costs to our air and water quality are borne by the public.” DeMarco characterized Springdale residents as being quick to accept pollution as normal. 

25. Silent Spring predated the nation’s cancer registry program, which came into being under Richard Nixon and mandated that all states track cancer incidence within their populations. Without registry data—and the information about the changing rates of cancer they provide—Carson was left with only case studies and mortality data to work with. She also lacked sophisticated geographic information systems (GIS) and computer mapping programs that can generate visually compelling pictures of potential cancer clusters and other spatial patterns for statistical analysis. In 1960, there were no right-to-know laws, pesticide registries, or Toxics Release Inventories. There were no statewide women’s breast cancer groups that monitor public and academic research. Carson painstakingly pieced together the evidence available to her—reports of farmers with bone marrow degeneration, sheep with nasal tumors, spray-gun-toting housewives with leukemia—and concluded that cancer was striking the general population with increasing frequency. She believed that she was seeing the early signs of an epidemic in slow motion. She was especially concerned with the apparent rise in cancers among children. And she was right.

26. April 2012 was a silent spring in Pennsylvania. Funds for a statewide heath registry—which would track illnesses in residents who live near drilling and fracking operations—were quietly removed from the state budget. At the same time, a new state law, Act 13, went into effect, which allows a physician in Pennsylvania access to proprietary chemical information for purposes of treating a possibly exposed patient—but only if he or she signs a confidentiality agreement. Confounded, Pennsylvania doctors began asking questions. Does that mean no contacting the public health department? What about talking to reporters or writing up case studies for the New England Journal of Medicine? Can a physician who signs the nondisclosure agreement (in order to treat a patient) and then issues an alert to the community at large (in order to fulfill an ethical obligation to prevent harm) be sued for breach of contract? The president of the Pennsylvania Medical Society registered her objections, to which Pennsylvania Speaker of the House Sam Smith furiously counter-objected. Denying that Act 13 constitutes a medical gag order, Smith’s spokesman accused objecting doctors of yelling fire in a crowded theater.

27. Still waiting for the Pennsylvania Medical Society to point out that, verily, the theater is burning. 

28. Rachel Carson was diagnosed with breast cancer in April 1960, although she would not find out until the following December. Her physician did not tell her the results of the biopsy. Her cancer rapidly metastasized. With her next surgeon, she insisted on full disclosure. She knew the news would not be good. Nevertheless, she wrote to him in February 1963, “I still believe in the old Churchillian determination to fight each battle as it comes. (‘We will fight on the beaches—’ etc.)”

29. In 2011, Chesapeake Energy, a top producer of natural gas, was a corporate sponsor of the Pennsylvania Breast Cancer Coalition. In response to questions about possible conflicts of interest, the coalition’s executive director Heather Hibshman said, “I’m not a scientist. I’m not a researcher. I run a nonprofit. I’m going to leave it at that.” Hibshman also said that she was unaware of any correlations between fracking and breast cancer.

30. Fracking for the cure. 

31. In Silent Spring, Rachel Carson pointed out that pesticides were rapidly rolled out after World War II not because of some unmet pest-control need (like, say, farmers suddenly overrun with bugs and weeds). Rather, abundant leftover stockpiles from wartime use were in need of a domestic market. And so, with the help of Madison Avenue, one was created. DDT, a military weapon, was thus repurposed for domestic use without any premarket testing for safety. An abundance of former military planes that could be cheaply converted into spray planes—and an abundance of former military pilots who loved to fly them—helped seal the deal.

32. In March 2012, it was announced that the town of Monaca, in Beaver County, Pennsylvania (twenty-eight miles northwest of Pittsburgh), would be the site for a massive new ethylene cracker facility—the first in Appalachia—that will create chemical feedstocks for the plastics industry out of the other hydrocarbons that come up with the gas when Marcellus Shale is fracked. Most notably, ethane. This plant is being rolled out not because of some unmet need for more plastic. Rather, it is being built to solve a disposal problem for the energy industry and—of course—to create jobs. Petrochemical crackers are notorious air polluters, and the air of Beaver County, Pennsylvania, already exceeds legal limits for ground-level ozone (smog) and fine particles, which is the very sort of pollution that crackers create. Michael Krancer, Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection secretary, is not worried. “The plant will be state-of-the-art and built by a world-wide, world-class, environmentally responsible company.” 

33. That company would be Shell Oil.

34. The biggest repository for plastic waste is the ocean. It was Captain Charles Moore who discovered, in 1999, that the mass of plastic fragments in the central Pacific now outweighs the zooplankton by a factor of six. Sunlight and wave action break the fragments into smaller and smaller bits, but no one knows how small the bits can become or how long they last. It’s possible that some common plastics never degrade in the ocean. It’s possible that these plastic particles absorb organic toxicants. It’s certain that plastic particles are consumed by marine organisms, including the fish that are then consumed by us. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the best way for individuals to address the problem of plastic waste in our oceans is to use less and recycle more. Blocking a convoy of fracking trucks is not on its list of recommended actions.

35. Rachel Carson’s final speech, “The Pollution of Our Environment,” was delivered six months before her death. By then, her pelvis was pocked with tumors and she walked with great difficulty. To her audience, a convocation of 1,500 physicians and medical professionals, she asked why. Why, in the face of overwhelming evidence of human harm, do we continue to pollute? Why do we pretend that alternatives to defilement and risk do not exist, even when other courses of action are available to us? Or, to use Carson’s framing, why do we behave “not like people guided by scientific knowledge, but more like the proverbial bad housekeeper who sweeps dirt under the rug in the hope of getting it out of sight”?

36. Says Businessweek, “The preferred way to dispose of the brine and fracking fluid . . . is to pump it out of sight, out of mind into deep, cavernous wells.” At last count, Ohio, with its permeable bedrock, has 176 such wells into which 511 million gallons of flowback waste have been injected. 

37. To her audience of doctors, an ailing Rachel Carson offered three explanations for our collective reluctance to give up on poisonous technologies. First, she said, we wait too long to evaluate the risks. Once a new technology is deployed and a vast economic and political commitment has been made, dislodging it becomes impossible.

38. Second, we fail to acknowledge that nature invariably has its own (unpredictable) way with harmful pollutants. Because ecosystems are dynamic, chemicals released into the environment do not stay where they are put, nor do they remain in their original form. Instead, they are transported, metabolized, concentrated, oxidized, methylated, and otherwise reassembled. They enter cycles and pathways. They are sent up food chains and passed down generations. Look, said Carson (who delivered her remarks while seated), the earth is alive. And living things interact with their environments. There are no compartments. 

39. Third, we act as though the evidence for harm in other animals does not apply to us even though we share biological ancestry and are thus clearly susceptible to damage from the same forces. This, in spite of the fact that “it would be hard to find any person of education who would deny the facts of evolution.” 

40. Oh, Rachel.

41. No comprehensive study on the human or animal health impacts of fracking has ever been conducted. However, using a case study approach, veterinarian Michelle Bamberger and Cornell biochemist Robert Oswald have been studying the impact of gas drilling on livestock, horses, pets, wildlife, and people who live in the gaslands of Pennsylvania. Nondisclosure agreements, trade secrets, litigation, and a general atmosphere of intimidation make their investigation difficult. So far, as described in a paper published in the environmental policy journal New Solutions, the team has documented widespread evidence of health and reproductive problems. In cattle exposed to fracking fluid: stillborn calves, cleft palates, milk contamination, death.

42. In cats and dogs: seizures, stillbirths, fur loss, vomiting. 

43. In humans: headaches, rashes, nosebleeds, vomiting.

44. In a private letter, Rachel Carson suggested another explanation for the prevalence of pollution. Scientists are cowards. Especially scientists who work in government agencies. The ones who are privy to the disconnect between the state of the scientific evidence and the policies that ignore that evidence. The ones who stay silent when they should be blowing whistles. 

45. Rachel Carson died in Silver Spring, Maryland, on April 14, 1964. Cause of death: breast cancer and heart disease. She was fifty-six.

46. In May 2012, Stephen Cleghorn, a farmer, scattered the ashes of his wife, Lucinda—who died of lung cancer—on their farm in Reynoldsville, Pennsylvania, which is in Jefferson County. The ceremony was unusual. It included a press conference, during which Cleghorn announced that, with this deposition of ash, he was hereby consecrating his land and declaring it off-limits to fracking in perpetuity. From here on out, the widower averred, “surface rights” (a concept whereby ownership of the surface land is separated from the mineral rights below) would refer to the rights of all beings whose lives are sustained at the surface and depend upon the clear, clean water that runs upon and below it:
May she who was tender and close and loving of me—now made dust and distant from me by cancerous death—come now in these ashes to declare this farm forever inviolate of shale gas drilling or any other attack upon it as a living system. Here now she declares a new right of love on the surface and below this farm that no gas drill will ever penetrate.
The goats bore witness.

47. We will fight on the beaches—etc.

48. In February 2012, Berks Gas Truth brought financial analyst Deborah Rogers to the Episcopal Church in Kutztown, Pennsylvania. Rogers lives in Fort Worth, Texas, and serves on the Advisory Council for the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. To her audience in Kutztown, Rogers argued that the economic fundamentals of shale gas were shaky. Gas reserves were smaller than projected, life spans of producing wells shorter. The leasing frenzy and subsequent speculation had produced financial bubbles. She pointed out that solar panels on a tract of land the same size as a well pad would generate electricity for twice as long as a shale gas well would bring methane up from bedrock. Rogers also noted that 94 percent of the gas wells in the Barnett Shale play in Texas emit benzene. Three months after Rogers’s lecture, researchers from the Colorado School of Public Health found elevated benzene levels in the ambient outdoor air of communities located near drilling and fracking operations in rural western Colorado. For residents living close to wells, benzene levels were high enough, according to the authors, to create acute and chronic health effects.

49. Memo to the Pennsylvania Breast Cancer Coalition: it’s been known for some time that benzene exposure causes leukemia and birth defects. As for a link between benzene and breast cancer, that possibility was affirmed by the Institute of Medicine in December 2011.

50.
If, having endured much, we have at last asserted our “right to know,” and if, knowing, we have concluded that we are being asked to take senseless and frightening risks, then we should no longer accept the counsel of those who tell us that we must fill our world with poisonous chemicals; we should look about and see what other course is open to us.
               —Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

Sandra Steingraber narrates a slide show about the fracking of Rachel Carson’s homeground at http://www.orionmagazine.org/fracking. This article was made possible by generous support from the Park Foundation.