The Greatest Single Threat to Humanity

September 23, 1979

When I scanned the above negative this weekend, I only knew that it was taken sometime in the latter '70s on what I thought was a previous Earth Day. A little cursory research however revealed it was taken on the date above- and I must say I'm somewhat gobsmacked to discover exactly what I was doing for 1/500 of a second some thirty three years ago when I was all of twenty four years old. Actually, it was an anti-nuke concert/rally (in response to Three Mile Island) celebrated on undeveloped landfill, around what is currently called Nelson A. Rockefeller Park west of Tribeca in NYC.

I was going to comment on the current ecological mess our planet is in, particularly what mass media is not reporting about the BP gulf area fiasco, that is certainly scary enough- until I read the article below which almost makes our current overall ecological peril seem like the proverbial cakewalk. This is the other shoe waiting to drop, dangling over all our heads and making the Sword of Damocles seem like an inoffensive pin prick. Basically, we're talking about the end of the world as we know it, not in song, not metaphorically, but in actual lives lost, unless we're able to do something about it (which we have not been able to thus far)- and there's a 98% chance of this sword falling within... 3 years!

If you ever bother to read anything via this damn blog- make sure this is it:

"It is important for the public to understand that reactors that have been operating for decades, such as those at the Fukushima-Dai-Ichi site have generated some of the largest concentrations of radioactivity on the planet.

Many of our readers might find it difficult to appreciate the actual meaning of the figure, yet we can grasp what 85 times more Cesium-137 than the Chernobyl would mean. It would destroy the world environment and our civilization."