Red-spotted Purple (Limenitis arthemis astyanax)
Ice Age National Scientific Reserve Unit, Wisconsin, USA
2019-06-29 _F2A8851aaa
“The Prime Minister of #Iceland, Katrín Jakobsdóttir, is hopeful that the upcoming leadership summit of the Council of Europe will produce some positive developments on the matter of ecocide.
Jakobsdóttir expressed her optimism in the Icelandic parliament during a discussion responding to a parliamentary inquiry on the matter of ecocide from MP Andrés Ingi Jónsson of the Pirate Party on 20 March 2023.
Read the full story here:
“ICELAND HOPEFUL FOR RESULTS ON RECOGNITION OF ECOCIDE AT UPCOMING COUNCIL OF EUROPE SUMMIT”
NB. The CouncilofEurope Conseildel'Europe Summit of Heads of State and Government will be held in #Reykjavík, Iceland, 16–17 May 2023. It will be chaired by Iceland and brings together heads of state and governments from the Council’s 46 member states. An ecocide resolution was submitted to the parliament of Iceland on 22 March 2022, calling for support for an international crime of ecocide as well as national ecocide legislation. It enjoyed cross party support from four out of the eight parties in parliament, and was referred to the government on 16 June 2022.
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“American Democracy is not worth saving, and is not Democracy”
[however clear efforts to make whatever this mess we do have WORSE, should be vehemently opposed] https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=10230202707999732&set=a.4642510108832
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DDT in the Water off Los Angeles, CA:
“"First it was the eerie images of barrels leaking on the seafloor not far from Catalina Island. Then the shocking realization that the nation’s largest manufacturer of DDT had once used the ocean as a huge dumping ground — and that as many as half a million barrels of its acid waste had been poured straight into the water.
Now, scientists have discovered that much of the DDT — which had been dumped largely in the 1940s and ‘50s — never broke down. The chemical remains in its most potent form in startlingly high concentrations, spread across a wide swath of seafloor larger than the city of San Francisco.
“We still see original DDT on the seafloor from 50, 60, 70 years ago, which tells us that it’s not breaking down the way that [we] once thought it should,” said UC Santa Barbara scientist David Valentine, who shared these preliminary findings Thursday during a research update with more than 90 people working on the issue. “And what we’re seeing now is that there is DDT that has ended up all over the place, not just within this tight little circle on a map that we referred to as Dumpsite Two.”
These revelations confirm some of the science community’s deepest concerns — and further complicate efforts to understand DDT’s toxic and insidious legacy in California. Public calls for action have intensified since The Times reported in 2020 that dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, banned in 1972, is still haunting the marine environment today. Significant amounts of DDT-related compounds continue to accumulate in California condors and local dolphin populations, and a recent study linked the presence of this once-popular pesticide to an aggressive cancer in sea lions.
With a $5.6-million research boost from Congress, at the urging of Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), numerous federal, state and local agencies have since joined with scientists and environmental nonprofits to figure out the extent of the contamination lurking 3,000 feet underwater. (Another $5.2 million, overseen by California and USC Sea Grant, will be distributed this summer to kick off another 18 months of research.)
The findings so far have been one stunning development after another. A preliminary sonar-mapping effort led by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography identified at least 70,000 debris-like objects on the seafloor.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, after combing through thousands of pages of old records, discovered that other toxic chemicals — as well as millions of tons of oil drilling waste — had also been dumped decades ago by other companies in more than a dozen areas off the Southern California coast.
“When the DDT was disposed, it is highly likely that other materials — either from the tanks on the barges, or barrels being pushed over the side of the barges — would have been disposed at the same time,” said John Lyons, acting deputy director of the EPA’s Region 9 Superfund Division. He noted that the new science being shared this week is critical to answering one of the agency’s most burning questions: “Is the contamination moving? And is it moving in a way that threatens the marine environment or human health?”
In recent months, Valentine, whose research team had first brought this decades-old issue back into the public consciousness, has been mapping and collecting samples of the seafloor between the Los Angeles coast and Catalina." Snip”
“History of DDT ocean dumping off L.A. coast even worse than expected, EPA finds”
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“This is Fascism, SVB Bailout Edition”
“The very bankers who sank the banking system in 2008 were handed trillions in public largesse to cover their losses, but the system of Wall Street provision of credit to fuel capitalism was never reconsidered. As then Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner put it, ‘the US doesn’t do nationalization (of banks).’”
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