Right now, we’re all watching to see if BP’s latest efforts to plug the oil spill will succeed. We don’t know how many gallons of crude have been released into the Gulf of Mexico or how extensive the damage will be, but it’s safe to say that coastal waters will be suffering the effects of this disaster for some time. The Deepwater Horizon spill isn’t the first manmade environmental catastrophe, and unfortunately, it won’t be the last.
Even more unfortunately, not all environmental catastrophes happen all at once, like Chernobyl or Union Carbide. Some build for decades, and even though we know exactly how to stop them, lack of outrage or lack of funds allows them to continue. These potential disasters are looming all across the globe, getting ready to become tomorrow’s headline news.
1. Guiyu, China: The E-waste Capital of the World
Located in the rural Guangdong Province, the village of Guiyu has become the world’s largest repository of e-waste, including cell phones, computer components, and all varieties of other gadgets. About 5,500 trash-related businesses in the area reportedly dismantle up to 1.5 million pounds of waste per year. The inhabitants of the city work to extract small amounts of valuable metals from the detritus, a process that is messy, dangerous, and toxic. After years of burning plastic, boiling the trash, and etching circuitry with acid, the soil is contaminated with lead and other metals, and the water is full of toxic sludge and factory runoff. Wells have become unusable, and potable water has become scarce. According to reports, the poisonous conditions in the village have led to elevated rates of cancer and miscarriages, and up to 80 percent of the children in the town suffer from elevated levels of lead in their blood. The United States (where up to 80 percent of the e-waste comes from) is the only nation that has not ratified the United Nations treaty banning the exporting of hazardous wastes to developing countries.
2. Sharks Fished Toward Extinction
Despite what Jaws would have us believe, sharks pose virtually no danger to humans. However, populations of shark species are dwindling all over the world, with disastrous consequences for marine ecosystems. Some sharks are caught as bycatch in commercial fishing nets, but up to 75 million sharks per year are killed in the process known as “finning,” where the shark’s fins are sliced off for sale in Asia and the body is tossed back into the ocean to drown.
Marine biologists at Dalhousie University in Canada have estimated that populations of some shark species have plummeted 97 percent since the 1980s. As the apex predator of the ocean, sharks control the food chain, and in North Carolina, unregulated mid-level predators have already decimated scallop and bivalve populations, collapsing fisheries. In the Caribbean, the proliferation of predator fish, such as grouper, has resulted in shrinking numbers of herbivorous fish, along with dying coral reefs without filter-feeders to cleanse the water. Sharks now represent the greatest percentage of endangered marine species.
Health Top Tips Nutrition Love Lifestyle Happiness Weight Loss3. The Earth’s Most Polluted River
On the island of Java near the Indonesian capital of Jakarta, the Citarum River supports up to 30 million people, but years of chemicals dumped by textile factories, garbage from villages, and human waste have rendered it one of the world’s most polluted waterways. Although the water in the Citarum is laden with heavy metals and toxic chemicals, it’s still used for drinking, bathing, cleaning, watering crops, and cooking, and it’s the main water source for Jakarta. Too contaminated to support fish populations, poor former fishermen have instead begun trolling through the trash-strewn waters looking for recyclable plastic to sell.
4. The Shrinking Aral Sea
In the 1920s, Soviet politicians decided to divert the two rivers that feed the Aral Sea—a saltwater lake located between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan—in order to irrigate the desert to produce cotton. Since the ’60s, what was once the world’s fourth-largest lake has lost about 80 percent of its volume. A booming fishing industry vanished as the sea shrank and became saltier, leaving residents unemployed and without a fresh water source. The salty, chemical-ridden dust exposed by the drying water blows all over the region—sometimes as far away as Scandinavia—and is blamed for serious public health problems such as drug-resistant tuberculosis, cancer, liver disease, eye problems, anemia, kidney disease, shortened life expectancy, and increased maternal mortality. The dust storms have also resulted in longer, colder winters and hotter, dryer summers, while making it impossible to grow other crops in the area. In 2005, a dam was constructed to try to route water back into the sea to save the region; while the Northern branch of the sea is expected to grow, many scientists believe that the southern part of the sea will be lost forever.
5. Somalia’s Sea of Toxic Waste
Since the government of Somalia collapsed in 1991, many other nations and private companies have taken advantage of the lawlessness in the country’s coastal waters to not only fish illegally but also to dump their waste. After the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, barrels of toxic waste washed ashore and broke open, littering the coastline with radioactive uranium waste, medical waste, chemicals, heavy metals, and all matter of other hazardous materials. The waste blew inland, causing residents of coastal villages to develop respiratory infections, skin infections, mouth ulcers, and even radiation sickness. The UN envoy for Somalia has repeatedly insisted that it’s significantly cheaper for unscrupulous companies and nations to simply abandon their trash in the unregulated waters off of the coast than to dispose of them properly; the dumping continues to this day. The United Nations Environmental Programme asserts that some Somali “pirates” are merely a makeshift Coast Guard, trying to expel illegal and unregulated fishing boats and trash vessels from Somali waters. The result of the dumping (as well as overfishing) is that the coastline has been ravaged and the waters poisoned, eliminating legitimate fishing jobs and driving the people of the nation deeper into poverty.
Sadly, these are not the only environmental crises in progress today. Chinese coal fires belching carbon, detergents contaminating fresh water, and mountaintop removal mining are all ongoing and very real threats to our environment and our way of life. No matter how often we hear about mining tragedies or oil spills here in the United States, the problem of environmental degradation—especially in countries without laws to prevent it—is truly a global one.