Nutrient runoff deforming frogs
The growing number of deformed frogs in recent years is caused at least partly by runoff from farming and ranching, new research indicates.
Nitrogen and phosphorous in the runoff fuel a cycle that results in a parasitic infection of tadpoles, resulting in loss of legs, extra legs or other deformities, according to researchers led by Pieter Johnson of the University of Colorado, Boulder.
Pond snails that feed on algae whose growth has been stimulated by the chemical runoff are eaten by birds which excrete the parasites, which in turn infect frog tadpoles causing cysts and deformations on the host frog. Photo at link.
I posted on this previously, but this article gets into much more detail, Blowing the Top Off Mountaintop Mining
Mining companies clear forests from mountaintops, dynamite the peaks, excavate buried coal, and dump the waste into nearby valleys. It’s cheaper and more efficient than old-fashioned mining, but the effects of mountaintop removal — or MTR — are devastating.
In just two decades, hundreds of mountaintops, more than a thousand miles of stream, and hundreds of square miles of forests have been obliterated by the practice. Opponents say the pollution is also dangerous to people who live in the region.
“There is no place on earth like this place, and it’s being destroyed,” says Bonds, the outreach coordinator for Coal River Mountain Watch, an anti-MTR activist group. “They call West Virginia ‘almost heaven,’ and it is, until the coal industry bombs your home.”
Activists have fought a losing legal battle against MTR. First they claimed the practice violated Clean Water Act rules against dumping waste in waterways. But in 2002, the Bush administration rewrote or “clarified” the rule, so that MTR debris wouldn’t be classified as waste.
[ ]…According to the Environmental Protection Agency, MTR destroyed more than 1,200 miles of Appalachia’s streams and 7 percent of its forests between 1985 and 2001. Approximately 800 square miles of mountains were leveled.
What can you say when someone says with a straight face that waste isn’t waste. Or when someone says they’ve looked at all the ways to protect the streams and blowing up mountains is the best way. It defies all common sense. There is a better way. The pro-MRI folks don’t seem to be measuring the wider and long term costs and consequences of what they’re doing. It’s the environmental equivalent of blowing up your house to keep warm.
