Within a few years after Colonel (He wasn’t a real colonel) Edwin Drake drilled the first oil well in Titusville, Pennsylvania, in 1859, an oil boom hit the area that includes Wild Cat Hollow (from which we get “wild catters”) and the boom town Oil City. If you go to the museum in Titusville, you will see, in addition to a film on the discovery and models of the technology used to extract petroleum, a number of black-and-white photos and daguerreotypes of the region. Those photos show a nineteenth-century landscape denuded of its trees and covered in a “forest” of derricks. The derrick forest floor is black with oil. Oil Creek was polluted. By today’s US EPA standards, the place was unsuitable for human habitation.
Ninety to 100 years after the environmental devastation of the Titusville area, the United States devastated Bikini Island and five other Marshall Islands with 67 nuclear explosions, leaving those islands dangerously radioactive and uninhabitable. The gamma radiation impregnated into the islands by the atomic blasts registered far beyond the 100 millirem/year considered as a safe upper limit for human exposure, making the islands unsuitable for habitation.
In the decades following the oil boom, the Titusville/Oil City region changed. Oil-consuming bacteria did their job. Rains did theirs. Streams did theirs. Plants did theirs. And some people did theirs. Today, the area is once again forested by trees rather than by derricks. Oil Creek is far more water than petroleum as it empties into the Allegheny River. Happy little bunnies and frolicking deer run through the woods (Okay, this is a bit too Disney a description). Really. There are forests that show few signs of any boom and accompanying devastation except for an occasional rusting old portable rig covered by vegetation. Hunters hunt. Campers camp. Kids roam. The area is habitable. The local refinery keeps pollutants in check according to US EPA regulations.
Recent measurements of the Marshall Islands affected by nuclear blasts have shown a surprisingly analogous recovery. Five of the six islands, according to a report in Science* that were once too dangerous for humans now have a millirem count less than 40 per year. By comparison, the granite of Central Park in New York gives a background millirem count at the EPA’s upper safe limit of 100. Seems that, except for Bikini Island, which still reads 184 millirem/year, those other islands are once again habitable.
This is not an argument for devastating an environment by denuding, polluting, and blasting. It’s partly a note that sometimes we do cry like Chicken Little that the end of the world is upon us. Also and demonstrably, Nature can heal deep physical wounds in the absence of awareness, but humans cannot heal social ones in the presence of consciousness. Obviously, we don’t live long enough to mimic Nature’s unintentional healing, but given the choice to make our human “world” habitable both physically and socially, we invariably seem to choose renewable destruction.
*Patrick Monahan, June 6, 2016. Science online at http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/06/some-us-nuke-testing-sites-are-now-less-radioactive-central-park
Ninety to 100 years after the environmental devastation of the Titusville area, the United States devastated Bikini Island and five other Marshall Islands with 67 nuclear explosions, leaving those islands dangerously radioactive and uninhabitable. The gamma radiation impregnated into the islands by the atomic blasts registered far beyond the 100 millirem/year considered as a safe upper limit for human exposure, making the islands unsuitable for habitation.
In the decades following the oil boom, the Titusville/Oil City region changed. Oil-consuming bacteria did their job. Rains did theirs. Streams did theirs. Plants did theirs. And some people did theirs. Today, the area is once again forested by trees rather than by derricks. Oil Creek is far more water than petroleum as it empties into the Allegheny River. Happy little bunnies and frolicking deer run through the woods (Okay, this is a bit too Disney a description). Really. There are forests that show few signs of any boom and accompanying devastation except for an occasional rusting old portable rig covered by vegetation. Hunters hunt. Campers camp. Kids roam. The area is habitable. The local refinery keeps pollutants in check according to US EPA regulations.
Recent measurements of the Marshall Islands affected by nuclear blasts have shown a surprisingly analogous recovery. Five of the six islands, according to a report in Science* that were once too dangerous for humans now have a millirem count less than 40 per year. By comparison, the granite of Central Park in New York gives a background millirem count at the EPA’s upper safe limit of 100. Seems that, except for Bikini Island, which still reads 184 millirem/year, those other islands are once again habitable.
This is not an argument for devastating an environment by denuding, polluting, and blasting. It’s partly a note that sometimes we do cry like Chicken Little that the end of the world is upon us. Also and demonstrably, Nature can heal deep physical wounds in the absence of awareness, but humans cannot heal social ones in the presence of consciousness. Obviously, we don’t live long enough to mimic Nature’s unintentional healing, but given the choice to make our human “world” habitable both physically and socially, we invariably seem to choose renewable destruction.
*Patrick Monahan, June 6, 2016. Science online at http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/06/some-us-nuke-testing-sites-are-now-less-radioactive-central-park
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