USES WATER RESPONSIBLY PRACTICES FLOOD CONTROL SAFELY DISPOSES OF GARBAGE PROTECTS THE SOIL PRACTICES ENERGY CONSERVATION TRIES TO STOP GLOBAL WARMING WORKS TO END AIR POLLUTION TAKES STEPS TO SAVE OZONE LAYER SAFELY STORES NUCLEAR WASTE OVERALL EVALUATION B- C B C D D B A- C- C AMERICA’S ENVIRONMENTAL REPORT CARD ARE WE MAKING THE GRADE? Harvey Blatt America’s Environmental Report Card © Reprinted with permission of King Features Syndicate. Harvey Blatt The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England America’s Environmental Report Card Are We Making the Grade? ©2005 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or informa- tion storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. MIT Press books may be purchased at special quantity discounts for business or sales promotional use. For information, please e-mail special_sales@mitpress .mit.edu or write to Special Sales Department, The MIT Press, 5 Cambridge Cen- ter, Cambridge, MA 02142. This book was set in Sabon by Graphic Composition, Inc. Printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Blatt, Harvey. America’s environmental report card : are we making the grade? / Harvey Blatt. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-262-02572-8 (alk. paper) 1. United States—Environmental conditions. 2. Pollution—United States. I. Title. GE150.B58 2004 363.7'00973—dc22 2004040261 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Preface vii Introduction ix 1Water: Is There Enough and Is It Drinkable? 1 2 Floods: Too Much Water 33 3 Garbage: The Smelly Mountain 51 4 Soil, Crops, and Food 71 5 Energy Supplies 95 6 Global Warming: The Climate Is Changing 127 7 Air Pollution and Your Lungs 155 8 Skin Cancer and the Ozone Hole 177 9Nuclear-Waste Disposal: Not in My Backyard 195 Conclusion 219 Appendix A: Sustainable Energy Coalition 239 Notes 247 Additional Readings 261 Index 271 Contents 1 10 [...]... agreement called the Colorado River Compact divided the river into an upper and a lower part Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and New Mexico were to share the water of the upper part of the drainage area, and Nevada, Arizona, and California were to share the lower-basin water The users of each part were allocated 7.5 million acre-feet per year, half the average yearly flow of 15 million acre-feet In 1922 the yearly... Colorado River The first thing they noticed was that the river was no longer there Somebody had removed the Colorado River —Edward Abbey, The Monkey Wrench Gang The dry channel at the southern end of the Colorado River is perhaps the prime example of surface-water scarcity produced by human activities (figure 1.2) The river originates in western Colorado, then flows through southeastern Utah and along the boundary... (1 in 700, between 0.1 and 0.2 percent)? The public, on the other hand, commonly interprets risk in a very personal way, depending on whether they believe that they or their families are exposed If you live along the Mississippi River, floods are a continual environmental concern for you and your family (about 110 people are killed each year) But if you reside in Nevada, the storage by the federal government... see the nationwide annual saving A cost-free way to cut use of shower water is to step into the shower, wet yourself, turn off the water, soap yourself, and then rinse the water-sweat-dirt mixture from your beautiful frame Three minutes of running shower water are enough to accomplish the body-cleaning job, be your body large or small Keep in mind that in addition to the greatly increased use of showers... to the U.S Geological Survey, the water in 47 percent of city wells contains toxic organic compounds In rural areas, 14 percent of wells contain these chemicals Over a person’s lifetime, ingestion of these chemicals has adverse health effects such as cancer and reproductive problems • Let’s look at these factors in our national hydrocide to see why we have them and what we might do to remedy them The. .. pores, but the pores must also be interconnected (the amount of interconnection is called the permeability) so the water in the rock can move toward the wells that have been drilled into it How much water can we expect to get from a suitable rock? Nearly all aquifers are layered rocks that are tens to hundreds of feet thick They are miles to tens or even hundreds of miles in length and width However, it... about 5 percent of the total groundwater resource has been used up, but water levels have declined 30 to 60 feet in large areas of Texas Wells must be deepened and the energy cost to pump the water to the surface increases to the point where farming becomes uneconomical In northeast Texas the area under irrigation dropped by one-third between 1974 and 1989 because irrigation from the Ogallala no longer... and at the fringes of the United States be controlled? The world is getting warmer and more humid, in part because of the carbon dioxide we continually pump into our air The United States produces 21 percent of the fossil-fuel-related carbon dioxide entering the air each year How can we stop this change in our climate? The answer is clear Stop burning coal and oil, the sources of nearly all the carbon... Americans, there are a lot more of us taking showers In 1900 there were only 76 million of us; today we are 295 million And the amount of water that falls on the 50 states has increased only slightly (5–10 percent) during the last hundred years (a result of global warming) Toilets Although the first flush toilet was developed more than 3,000 years ago, the concept seems to have been lost over the millennia,... that public water supplies are not always safe Forests were believed to be so abundant that they were thought of as indestructible and were decimated to provide clear areas for farming and wood for houses and factories Who thought that tree cutting increased flooding? The record-setting disastrous floods that hit the Midwestern part of the country in 1993 drew our attention to the need for costly disaster . EVALUATION B- C B C D D B A- C- C AMERICA’S ENVIRONMENTAL REPORT CARD ARE WE MAKING THE GRADE? Harvey Blatt America’s Environmental Report Card © Reprinted with permission of King Features Syndicate. Harvey Blatt The MIT Press Cambridge,. and the other heat-trapping gases emitted from our factories and cars. Chapter 7 is concerned with another result of the sources of en- x Introduction ergy we use, the filth in the air we breathe in 700, between 0.1 and 0.2 percent)? The public, on the other hand, commonly interprets risk in a very per- sonal way, depending on whether they believe that they or their families are exposed.