'The eels were climbing out of the water to die'

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• Hacker News
• European eel: critically endangered
  by pvaldes
• It’s not surprising. The people voting for these regulation cuts spend their whole lives in air conditioned boxes (be it their mass built houses, their massive cars, or the office), and their idea of nature is a well manicured golf course. the people they vote on only care about enriching themselves and their corporate donors.

  at some point we’ll be living in a dust bowl eating barely nutritious food and people will think “man, how could the liberals have done this to us?”

  by laweijfmvo
• Also in the toxic sludge lake department, a mini documentary on Geamăna, Romania:

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIR8vd-bi8I

  by andai
• Not particularly relevant, but do the younger generations these days know about Captain Planet? It's kind of wild that that strong ethos on TV feels missing. Or at least, I have no idea what similar type shows there would be.

  I hear problems like this and I think of that Ministry for the Future answer. The strong no, in the most absolute terms.

  by jauntywundrkind
• The burden of proof seems backwards; how about we maintain list of approved safe materials and their threasholds?
  by clcaev
• Cases like this are exactly why every populist claim of "cost savings through deregulation" should be met with a healthy dose of skepticism, always.

  Not only were many environmental regulations "written in blood" (and are well justified by observed damages before they existed), the average citizen would typically gain little from scrapping them. Allowing some industrialized chicken farm to dump their waste into the next river is not gonna make your eggs that much cheaper. "Socialize (external) costs, privatize gains" is often the actual play instead.

  by myrmidon
• Christ. What a quote. And how depressing it all is. The poor family...

  > Eels are pretty hardy, says Alistair; they can even travel over land if they need to. To see them gasping and dying on the banks was heartbreaking. “It was apocalyptic.”

  > The results found unusually high levels of heavy metals, ammonia levels that were “well outside acceptable limits for any freshwater life” and nitrogen levels that were “toxic to all aquatic life”.

  It's quite a long article that deals with many problems the UK has regarding environmental protection, illegal waste dumping and so on. The lack of care and amount of damage is just shocking.

  I really recommend a read.

  by ShadowOfThePit
• The one sentence in that long article that identifies the heart of the problem:

  "It’s so expensive to dispose of waste legally that many people attempt to do it illegally."

  This is one of those things where we just have to collectively bite the bullet and make it easy and cheap to dispose of things properly. Otherwise you get people dumping toxic waste in storm drains, throwing old tires and appliances in ravines, mixing dangerous contaminants into regular trash, or just putting their trash in other people's bins.

  Where I am it costs $20 to properly dispose of an old can of paint. It costs about the same to dispose of any electronic item that has a screen. Even regular household garbage has to be put in special bags that cost about $2/each. All of this is a counterincentive to people disposing of their waste properly. And every few years the local waste manangement bureaucracy raises the rates.

  Just build it into the base taxes that everyone pays. Make it "free" and easy for people to do the right thing.

  by SoftTalker