Mobile and the Alabama Gulf Coast have been singled out as a national hot spot for mercury pollution. The amount of mercury falling on the people down there is 2 to 5 times greater that what falls over most of the eastern United States. The mercury is put into the air by coal-burning electrical facilities. It is rained out and once on the ground it goes into the water and into fish. From the fish it goes into humans. So, to follow the cycle, what begins as air pollution becomes water pollution, which pollutes the food chain.
You can read the reports, study the mercury levels in micrograms, relate industrial out put to rainfall and calculate how much actually gets into your system if you want to get the nuts and bolts of the report.
Or you can go to a whole host of environmental Web sites to find out how the Bush administration has changed the Clean Air Act and made much of the mercury pollution permissible under federal regulations.
But last week, just after the report was released, Wilma Subra — advocate for environmental justice and recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant — explained what mercury pollution means in human terms. Speaking to members of the U. S. Commission on Civil Rights, she told of hundreds of premature deaths and more than 70,000 workdays lost yearly. Children, who are exposed through their mother’s milk and through eating contaminated fish themselves, experience impaired memory, vision and motor function. Adults that ingest mercury have fertility problems, high blood pressure and heart disease.
This is what we must not forget.
When standards are relaxed or unenforced people suffer. But it’s not enough to simply enforce the regulations. We expect the EPA, ADEM and all the other departments charged with protecting and managing our environment to be activists on our behalf.
Something is wrong when 44 states and territories have issued fish consumption advisories for mercury. Seventeen of these states have issued mercury advisories for every body of water within their boundaries. And our own Gulf Coast is a “hot spot” of this pollution.
Something is badly wrong.
