Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy.
There are more than 450 dead zones around the world.
Roughly 7,000 square miles 8,000 square miles off Louisiana is dead.
Dead because there’s not enough oxygen to sustain fish or fauna. Dead because oxygen-devouring algae are over-nourished with run-off fertilizer!
Treehugger reports:
The short version is that commercial fertilizer and animal manure in nine states—Illinois, Iowa, Indiana, Missouri, Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio and Mississippi—causes 70% of the problem, but it’s really specific places within these states.
And well water is dying too. Forty three million Americans – 15 percent of the population — use drinking water from private wells.
The USGS sampled 48 states and found nitrate is contaminating four percent of the wells, particularly in the Corn Belt and the Central Valley of California.
Our well water is dirtied with as many as 219 contaminants including pesticides, volatile organic compounds and fertilizers.
A first-ever national survey found flame retardant – polybrominated diphenyl ethers – in the U.S. coastal zone and Great Lakes which damages the liver and thyroid and neurological development.
Streams too have been wasted and we may not eat live well unless we stop passing the problem downstream…
Currently the Clean Water Restoration Act (S. 787) would reverse the cavalier Bush-era errors that washed away rules for intermittent streams and isolated wetlands, an important vitalization of government that’s critical for both water and the health of our soil.