Saturday, August 02, 2008

Salty tears for the Ocean

I love the ocean. Tidepooling, boogie boarding, snorkeling, even sand between my toes and crusty sea salty hair, I love it all! So when I read articles like this it wakes up the activist in me. I already have blogged about the floating graveyard of plastic in the Pacific Ocean... here is some bad news for the Gulf of Mexico, a dead zone created by agricultural runoff in the Mississippi River.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/30/AR2008073002943.html?hpid=topnews

2 comments:

Zina said...

The link is too long to fit in your column width, so it's not working. This sounds similar though to the information from a book (or maybe it was an article) my sister read that is all about beef (sorry, I can't remember the title of the book,) which is really stomach-turning and discouraging. Basically, if they would let cattle graze (which is their natural diet) instead of forcing them to eat corn, it would be a lot healthier for the cattle, the environment, and for all of us (the cattle get sick on corn, so they have to have LOTS of antibiotics to keep them healthy, which ends up in our water supply.) It is all a pretty gruesome problem with a very simple solution -- but one that would be VERY hard to implement, now that the corn farmers are used to providing for the cattle and the cattle farmers are used to being able to keep cattle on a smaller plot of land, etc.

Oh and the reason this ties in is that grazing cattle would have their wastes spread far and wide and rejoining the soil -- rather than going in condensed form into the Gulf.

Erin said...

Hi Ash! How are the Christensons doing? :) I miss all of you guys!