Better Planet » fresh water

Aliens Wreak Havoc on Great Lakes Economy

Benjamin Nugent — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 22:33:10 +0000

If you’re a yellow perch or a walleye, native to the Great Lakes, the last fifty years have been something out of War of the Worlds, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Earth Girls Are Easy et al. Strange alien species fiercer than their American and Canadian counterparts, like the Eurasian ruffe, have been arriving out of nowhere, taking your food, ruining your habitat. If you’re a smallmouth bass, the distinctly unattractive round goby, pictured below, eats your egg nests. As a result, humans in the area are suffering about $200 million worth of ecological damage every year, a new study says.

This is a matter of ocean vessels accidentally dragging species from far away into the lakes through their ballast water. A big chunk of the estimated annual loss, $123.6 million, comes from the loss of recreational fishing money—those hobbyists love the bass.

Which brings us to tourism as an important economic argument enviros can deploy. People don’t come to your lake if all it has in it is fugly nest-eaters like this guy, and people don’t come to your lake if it has toxic sludge in it.

Those “green-collar jobs” everbody’s talking about?

In a sense we’ve already got a lot of them. Despite fuel procies, tourism continues to be one of the biggest industries in places like my own California. Fine, argue that a fish doesn’t matter as much as a fisherman’s job, or an owl doesn’t matter as much as a logger’s job, but by that logic a tour guide’s job or a waiter’s job surely count for something.

Image: flickr/milesizz

The Stealthy Health Crisis Caused by Plastics

Amos Zeeberg (Discover Web Editor) — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 00:22:39 +0000

One of the most interesting—and most spooky—elements of DISCOVER’s very timely feature on plastics was Jill Neimark’s point about how the hormonelike chemicals in plastics can cause health problems that aren’t necessarily detectable.

“But the modus operandi of hormone-mimicking chemicals is different from that of typical toxins. In fact, they are not toxins in the strict sense of the word because they behave like ordinary hormonal signals … Whatever the impact of plastics exposure, the effects are not easy to isolate. There are no babies rendered obviously deformed, as with thalidomide … As Swan admits: ‘The baby boys in our study were not freaks. They did not look abnormal. We’re talking about small changes you won’t find unless you look carefully.’”

During the current media firestorm over plastics (kicked off by Canada’s proposal to ban bisphenol A from use in baby bottles), we’re seeing more of this insidious, hard-to-detect form of poisoning. For instance, ScienceBlogger Angry Toxicologist points out a recent study that found that “PFOS (the chemical that used to be the prime ingredient in Scotchgard) suppresses the immune system” of people even at the levels typically found within people’s bodies—and with no detectable level of toxicity. So if the study’s correct, many people could be getting sick from this chemical without it ever getting diagnosed.

No wonder biologist Frederick vom Saal called plastics “the global warming of biology and human health.”