Toxins and Me!

The fact that there are toxins in our environment is a familiar topic to me, and if you've ever read Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, she'll beat you over the head with the idea; however, there's a difference between reading a technical book that gives you so many details and measurements that you lose the big picture, and just thinking and talking about toxins in our environment. Its crazy to think about, they're literally everywhere! I really care that there are so many toxins that I can't even go to the river and pull out a fish and know that i'm safe in eating it. Our community is dealing with the repercussions of mining waste from the beginnings of the Gold Rush. That's over 150 years of heavy toxins leaching into our environment; however, they're getting into our environment more than they should be because mining waste has not been properly cleaned up. There are still open mines and acid mine drainage into our rivers, not to mention all of the rock waste that we crush up and re-use -- releasing even more toxins (asbestos) than we need to in our environment. I definitely think that we should clean these toxins, their biomagnification just endangers us even more the longer we go without cleaning them up. Its becoming a bigger problem than it needs to be because we're ignorant and lazy. Unfortunately in our society, things have to be toxic to the point that they have very dangerous affects before we take notice and act upon them, in an ideal world, we'd take care of things right away; however, alot of times we sadly don't know things are too toxic until they have negative repercussions. Cleaning up these toxic mine wastes, we can store it in big drums deep in the mountains, like they do with nuclear waste. This is expensive, however, do the costs outweigh the health and environmental benefits? The abandoned mines should be reinforced so that they don't cave in--whether this is practical or not i'm not sure--but it would reduce the yearly accidents and cave ins. We can avoid adding more toxins to our environment by being more aware of the simple things-- re-using containers rather than using ziploc bags and all the toxins used to make plastics. We need to educate ourselves, all of us, and slowly as we all become aware of doing the little things to reduce toxins in our environment, we can make bigger strides.