I hate to pierce my rosy Liverpool bubble but I feel that two pieces I read this week do need a wider readership than just me…..
One is an article in last months’ Townsend Letter detailing the on-going disaster potential of the tsunami-damaged Fukishima nuclear plant in Japan. They also quote the comments of radiation physics professor Ernest Sternglass of the University of Pittsburg School of Medicine on the health risks associated with nuclear power.
The second is an article in the Australian Newcastle Herald about yachtsman Ivan McFadden who regularly sails the seas between Australia and Japan and then across the Pacific to San Francisco. He reports that in the ten years that he has been sailing to Japan the seabirds and the fish have all but totally disappeared thanks to the industrial size trawlers searching for tuna and ‘disposing’ of the hundreds of tons of other fish they catch on the way.
Not only have the fish and the seabirds disappeared but their place, on the voyage from Osaka to California, has been taken by garbage, much of it swept out to sea from Japan by the tsunami that wreaked such havoc at Fukishima.
On a more cheerful note – before you all cancel your subscriptions to my blog because it is so depressing – I just love Thomas Heatherwick’s designs for a garden bridge over the Thames from the Temple to just beyond Waterloo Bridge. Backed by the campaigning skills of a very effluorescent Joanna Lumley and already into its first phase of planning, the Garden Bridge Trust hopes that it will be completed by 2017 and that it will be funded by donations from ordinary Londoners. For more see this article in today’s Independent.
20th November. With reference to the ‘Oceans are broken’ piece above, see this sad story in the Guardian last March – only just seen a link to it:
Sperm whale found dead on Spanish southern coast had swallowed 17kg of plastic waste dumped by greenhouses supplying produce to UK