Like a drunk at a bounteous dinner party, we have gotten up to dance on the periodic table and stomped hard on nature's self-tidying machinery...one element at a time.
Perhaps it would be more fitting to compare human-caused destruction of the environent as being like a maniacal serial killer who works to have a theme to the string of murders he commits. When we saw that our chlorinated and fluorinated and chloro-flouro-anything from refrigerants and crude pesticide and plastic manufacturing were erasing nature's UV shield and depositing persistent carcinogens in every bloodstream we curtailed their deployment. For 40 years science has been telling us in ever louder terms that our sloth in leaving carbon in the air had gotten ahead of nature's ability to put it back in the ground...and would cook us sooner or later. No meaningful response on that front has materialized. Today's news tells us the next pile of corpses will have "Nitrogen" as the note left by the culprit. We will pin the note on those vast and growing zones of "dead" water off our coasts. Sulfur might be next or was that the real story in acid rain?
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