Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
conservationists. An international ranking of environmental performance
puts the United States at the bottom of the Group of 8 industrialized
nations and thirty-ninth among the 149 countries on the list.
3
The
top ten countries, in this order, were Switzerland, Sweden, Norway,
Finland, Austria, France, Latvia, Costa Rica, Colombia, and New
Zealand.
The water we drink should, ideally, contain almost nothing but hydro-
gen and oxygen, the way it was when humans fi rst entered the planetary
scene a couple of hundred thousand years ago. We continue to pour
poisons into our surface water supply and inject them below ground into
our aquifers. The effect of this cocktail of noxious chemicals on human
biochemistry is uncertain, but suspicion is growing that a signifi cant part
of current human metabolic maladies and hospitalizations results from
them.
4
Not only are there poisonous artifi cial chemicals in the water we
drink, but we have them in our homes in containers under the sink and
in the furniture and carpets, and we slather them on ourselves and our
children's bodies to ward off bugs and solar radiation.
The infrastructure that supports our way of life has been crumbling
for decades, an unheralded fact that is only now appearing in the form
of electrical blackouts in major cities. The lack of electrical transmis-
sion lines is delaying the integration of wind power into the national
grid. The nation's underground constructions are in even worse shape.
Underground water pipes break regularly, water losses are substantial,
water shortages are spreading, and these problems are a continuing
and worsening problem in America's cities.
The diffi culty and long-term impossibility of living in the southern
Mississippi River delta region and the adjacent Gulf Coast was forcefully
brought home by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005, yet the clear
message to abandon the area as unprotectable and unsustainable was
lost on most Americans. Rising sea levels caused by global warming and
only indirectly related to hurricanes are making small Pacifi c islands and
low-lying parts of the world's coastlines progressively uninhabitable.
America's outlandishly large production of garbage is one of the few
things for which the United States is not admired by the planet's 7 billion
people who do not live there. Our per capita trash production compared
to other industrialized nations is a graphic illustration of how wasteful
our society is.
America's soil is increasingly lost to the ocean through stream runoff
because of poor agricultural practices. These practices have also made
our crops much less nourishing than they used to be, and the commercial
