Towheeblog

How many different ways can we humans find to poison our planet? This week’s “Living on Earth” radio program was a veritable menu of toxicity. Fracking for gas is releasing long-lived radioactive isotopes into streams and groundwater. Oh goody.
There is now evidence that the current increase in rates of autism may be linked to maternal exposure to pesticides. Pass the unwashed strawberries, please.
To top it off, a class of pesticices introduced after 1984 (good year, huh?) is increasingly being linked to the dying of bee colonies. Neo-nicitinoids.
Not to worry, anything we can’t poison, we can kill in other ways.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is proposing to slaughter cormorants in the lower Columbia River, to preserve all those salmon for human fisherman. After all, those are our fish, right? Some religions say God gave us dominion right? Those greedy cormorants have a lot of nerve! Here’s Portland Audubon’s take on the pending cormorant
slaughter. Up to 16,000 cormorants could be killed at the largest Double-crested Cormorant colony on the Pacific Coast. How is the Corps then going to keep alien cormorants from sneaking across the border when the locals are killed off? Don’t they know cormorants can fly? Time for birders to speak up.