I posted the Love Canal article along with an article on the
African toxic waste trade (“Africa, NGOs, and the International Toxic Waste
Trade”), and asked the question “In your opinion are environmental hazards
something we should be concerned about on a daily basis?” These were the responses I got:
1.
Yes, because there are many environmental
problems today and it is a problem for our society. If we are suffering the
consequences from problems that occurred in the past, I don’t want the future
generations to suffer for the problems we are creating now. We only have one
earth and we need to take care of it J
hehe.
2.
Yes. It
deals with health concerns and issues that everyone should know about.
3.
Maybe not on a daily basis, but something we
should keep in mind, because it’s dangerous and it concerns a lot of people,
even if they aren’t people directly around us.
4.
Yep. We
live on the earth on a daily basis, don’t we?
5.
We are trashing the Earth and it is coming back
to haunt us. Surprise, surprise. Time to start thinking about this more often.
6.
Depends on where you live. Some places have to think about environmental
hazards all of the time, because they are affected by them all of the time. Hope I don’t live in a place where I should
be worried about that all of the time!
7.
I think we should be concerned about them
because we use lots of chemicals every day that could be hurting us.
8.
We should be concerned about these issues,
because there are almost certainly many environmental hazards that go on each
day that we know nothing about, but that we will regret tomorrow.
9.
It’s important to remember the possibility of
environmental hazards because we are responsible for them, so we are
responsible for cleaning them up. It’s
important that we have rules and regulations to protect things like this from
happening so frequently in the future.
10. If
we think about these things on a daily basis, then maybe we will be able to
stop them from happening, so I would say yes, we should remember them.
Do you believe that environmental crises affect you/your
family today?
Certainly. From bad air to toxic chemicals, we are
constantly exposed to harmful, human-induced environmental problems that can
cause sickness, cancer, and a variety of bad consequences. A lot of consequences of our daily actions
probably aren’t even recognized today—I wonder what we are doing today that will
make our kids look back and question our intelligence.
Based on the impact environmental tragedies affect you/your
family how likely are you to take action against disasters like this one?
Well, I’m a
public health major, and I might be going into Environmental Health, so I’d say
that’s one pretty good way I’d be addressing these issues. My future family will be very knowledgeable
and concerned about these issues, because I will make them beJ. My current family would probably try to avoid
some chemicals and keep knowledgeable on issues, but I’m not sure they would
know how to do much more than that. I’m
sure more direct, acute contact with such issues would trigger a more involved
response, but until that were to happen, I don’t think they (or most other
American families) would be very involved in fighting the issue.
Why should we care about something that happened over 30
years ago?
Were this
only a problem of the past, we could afford to stop caring about it. However, environmental toxins aren’t a
problem of the past—they are a problem that continues to affect people
throughout the world. If we think we’ve
solved it (like the example of the Basel Convention in the article I found,
which has helped but certainly not stopped international toxic waste trade), we
leave ourselves vulnerable to the consequences the problem brings us. We have not overcome this problem, and we won’t
unless we realize that it is very much a relevant, modern issue.
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