If you’re looking for pollution, you’re in luck. It’s everywhere. Pollution is present in the air in the form of carbon dioxide that causes climatological chaos, CFCs and methane that destroy the protective ozone layer, sulfur dioxide that causes acid rain and smog, not to mention all the other chemicals that contribute to respiratory ailments and cancers. You’ll find it in the soil, deposited as it falls from the air and lingering for decades after being applied to croplands or washed into the silt of riverbeds in North America’s most seemingly pristine estuaries. Pollution is also found in the water, making ground-level pollution mobile, taking raw discharge from factories and sewage plants. That’s just to name a few – you simply can’t get away from it.
Once it was reasonable (though naive) to think that the skies and ocean were large enough to dilute anything human beings could collectively throw at it. However, the Earth has been shown to be an effectively closed system that can no longer handle the number of people or the polluting waste that we toss out.
