One of the things we face in modern times with the media is the sin of omission. Let me give you an example of what I am speaking about. Fukushima, the nuclear plant in Japan which was overrun by the ocean a couple of years ago is either just as dangerous today or even more and yet we hardly hear anything about it. It’s radioactive pollution is pouring out into the ocean and just recently there was finally an article about how radioactive material which has melted inside the plants reactor is contaminating everything. We thought Chernobyl was bad when it blew up and sprayed its radioactive contents into the air, but Fukushima is far more deadly and since it is hardly ever mentioned there doesn’t seem to be much of an outcry about it. The Japanese should be doing everything humanly possible to prevent this pollution and yet here we are years later and it is still going on and spreading everywhere. It is a human disaster of untold proportions and while we may not realize it today, it is damaging the genes of future generations.

When we look at Chernobyl we find a ghost city where human habitation has been removed. I don’t know if the disaster happening in the Ukraine had anything to do with the tiny leaks which are still present in the cement covered reactor building, but I have a feeling if the reactor would still be part of Russia proper more work would have been done on it, but I could be wrong. In any case it was a level VII event which is the maximum classification on the international nuclear event scale. The only other nuclear accident with this classification is the Fukushima disaster. There are countries which have huge amounts of land which cannot be used, because of contamination from many different sources. The reason nuclear contamination is so bad is the fact it spreads far out of the boundaries of the country it happens in.

When the Soviet Union split up 1991 some of the newly independent countries which were part of it had large portions of land which were contaminated as did Russia itself. Vast areas of the Russian landscape were contaminated by polluted air and water, such as the ones in Dnepropetrovsk-Donets and Kuznets where coal mining took place and metallurgical studies took place. There is an area near the Kazak border which not only has polluted air and water, but which is contaminated with radioactivity near the city of Kyshtym. Some of this contamination has drifted over borders and an example of this is northern Scandinavia’s contamination. It has been said if one were to add up all the contaminated areas just in Russia alone they would be larger than the area of the United States.

Speaking of the United States we are not without our own contamination problems and it seems as if more water is being contaminated every day making it hard for people to conduct their daily lives. The EPA has estimated there are 3,500 chemical spills each year and there are also Superfund sites which contained major long-term damage and cost millions of dollars to clean. The love Canal district of Niagara Falls was turned into a ghost town when the pollution was discovered. There are so many instances where businesses have left contaminated areas. One business, Grumman was located on Long Island in New York and it left contamination which seeped into the aquifer which supplies the drinking water to many people on Long Island. There is a constant battle going on right now trying to get the company to clean the aquifer which contains a plume of contamination which is drifting westward. The population also wants to hold the U.S. Navy responsible since they worked with Grumman. So far this has been an unsuccessful endeavor and the plume just keeps moving along.

I haven’t been able to find the exact amount of land which is unusable because of pollution in the United States, but I think it is probably a lot more than we suspect. As we get into more exotic materials the types of pollution increase. Whoever would’ve thought a plastic bottle or plastic bag would pose such a problem to the human race and yet they are polluting on a scale unimaginable a few years ago.

When we examine places which were used as practice target areas for the military we find incredible amounts of pollution. Much of it is from lead and some of it is radioactive, because the military uses expended uranium in some of it shells. We found out the damage these expended shells can cause just by laying around and contaminating an area with radioactivity when we used them in Iraq. We happily contaminated many places there. There is just so much that contaminates. Take cigarettes for an example, we may have finally learned the error of our ways with them when we learned not only do they contaminate the smoker, but anybody else in the area and also they contaminate rooms and such where smokers have stayed even after the smokers are long gone.

Many of the things we use around our homes are contaminants. How many times have you seen a warning on a spray can you use to clean your bathtub? Some of them state you must open a window before using and make sure the area is well ventilated. Many household products including cleaners, paints and solvents, items which keep your lawn green, automotive products, pool chemicals and even health and beauty aids can be very dangerous and pollute. In the old days we didn’t realize how dangerous some of these products were and I remember painters washing themselves down with turpentine to get the paint off their skin. This was because paint was oil-based and you couldn’t just wash it off with soap and water like you can today.

It is very important for us to realize how dangerous pollution can be and to punish those who pollute while taking care not to get contaminated ourselves. In the future, this century may be looked at as one of the most contaminated ones in our history, but hopefully it may get to be known as the one where we cleaned up our environment.