There is a hint of concern in Big Sugar's impermeable facade, in its attempt to fend off news and facts related to sugar's responsibility for mercury contamination of the Everglades.
In a recent New York Times story, Mark Bittman writes about the impoverished places created through the industrial production of tomatoes in the Everglades Agricultural Area. But the biggest contributors to the landscape's poverty and pollution: the sugar barons who extract billions in private profit while illegally polluting Florida waterways.
One, in the Palm Beach Post, decried "fear-mongering" on mercury by Karl Wickstrom; founder and publisher of Florida Sportman. Wickstrom has written for decades about the imposition of billions in costs on our bays and estuaries by the sugar barons. In the Palm Beach Post, he wrote, "The mercury threats to humans and wildlife are actually astounding, notwithstanding the Pollution Establishment's lobbying to ignore the situation."
To which, the sugar baron responds, "I feel compelled to correct the record". Then he does nothing of the sort. The sugar baron writes that if there were a problem with human health impacts in the Everglades, then the people who live there-- the Miccosukee Tribe-- would have complained and the EPA would have intervened. Never mind, either the Tribe's penchant for secrecy or the sugar industry's multi-decadal toying with the EPA's mandate to regulate its pollution.
The sugar baron then trots out standard misdirection: that mercury pollution is everywhere and anyhow it has been reduced over time in the Everglades. What the sugar baron ignores is science and fact. That is standard operating procedure: tying up Everglades restoration and imposing billions of costs on taxpayers while the last billions in profits are extracted through its polluting ways.
I'm hoping the sugar billionaires will make this compact with the people of Florida: they will agree to feed their families from fish taken from their polluting canals and solve the question of "fear mongering" once and for all.
2 comments:
I was told in a South Water Management district course a few years that the metho-mercury level in the Everglades was the highest found in the entire world. That is the bioavailable mercury - the worst kind because it builds in toxicity as it travels up the food chain.
Wow! "The metho-mercury level in the Everglades is THE HIGHEST IN THE WORLD" !!
So THAT'S why many of us are advised not to eat the fish we produce, and why the panthers are dying out filled with mercury! The heck with the threats supposedly posed by mercury teeth fillings!
AND WHAT'S EPA, DEP DOING ABOUT mercury in everything emanating from the Everglades?
And what about the Miccosukee Indians who are trapped nearby this toxic sludge? Anybody care?
What the heck does Big Sugar use mercury for in its sugar production? Bet there's a better substitute.
We are daily pounded by the money-grubbing corporations that steal from us and then poison us. This is mounting evidence to JUST VOTE OUT THE ROBBER-BARON REPUBLICANS as fast as possible.
Wnat YOUR grandchildren born with brain damage? Then, do Nohting.
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