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Thread: RECOVERY

  1. #1

    RECOVERY

    Hi,

    I found this story very cheery this Sunday ...

    Surely depends how you look at it though: One of those "glass is half empty/half full things" (or in Zen Buddhist terms "what glass"?)

    Even if we humans mess our little corner up, the universe will keep on keepin' on ... quickly recover, brush off the scar like a child's scratch (dare I say "heal"?) ...

    ... and since that is just us, and we're just that ... well, I find it all surprisingly hopeful. All things are impermanent ... yet still, yet still ...

    Something wild is happening on Christmas Island, once ground zero for nuclear test explosions ...

    Between 1957 and 1962, this former British colony in the equatorial Pacific played involuntary host to 30 nuclear explosions conducted by the British and U.S. militaries....

    What can be found in abundance, however, is nature. In the intervening decades since the era of nuclear-weapons testing, the natural world has quietly rebounded. Today, Christmas Island, Bikini Atoll and other Cold War proving grounds, like Monte Bello north of Perth, Australia, constitute some of the most ecologically intact corners of the world, emitting not radiation but a peculiar allure; it's atomic tourism with a naturalist spin.

    Marine biologists diving at Bikini have returned with glowing reports. Inspecting a mile-wide crater left by a hydrogen bomb that exploded with a force 1,000 times greater than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, researchers recently found the lagoon to be 80 percent covered by thriving corals, with some species growing into huge, treelike formations.

    Karen Koltes, a coral specialist with the U.S. Department of the Interior, says reefs around places like Bikini "are among the few examples left in the world of what an ecosystem looks like absent human presence and exploitation." (Unintentionally pouring on the irony, scientists will sometimes employ the word "pristine.")

    http://www.salon.com/env/feature/2008/0 ... as_island/
    Gassho, Jundo

    PS - I recommend too this book and documentary on a similar theme ...

    http://www.theworldwithoutus.com/
    http://www.worldwithoutus.com/about_book.html

    PPS - This connects very well with Sunday's "Sit-a-Long" on the blog, which will be at the High-Energy Particle Collider located a 15 minute bicycle ride from Treeleaf Tsukuba (where they send stuff crashing into stuff at near the speed of light) ... They say it is very safe ...


  2. #2

  3. #3

    Re: RECOVERY

    Huge coral? Reminds me of plants and gigantism in the wake of Chernobyl:

    http://www.chernobyl.in.ua/en/red_forest/1

    (also a wiki article about same)

    G, Ann

  4. #4

    Re: RECOVERY

    Thanks Jundo, it brings a sense of comfort to know that recovery can occur in spite of us. Unfortunately there are too few “canaries in a cage” to grab our attention and warn us of loss that has occurred just within a generation. So much is out of view and out of mind. I have been diving for over 50 years and it is indescribable the loss I have witnessed in this short time span. Bays choked with algae, fed on sewage, wastelands of DDT laden silt covering the ocean floor near outflow from agricultural lands, vast kelp beds that are the nursery and shelter for thousands of species, and serve as an effective carbon sink reduced to small remnant patches. One generation….. out of site, out of mind, out of existence…. Aloha. :cry:

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