• cheery_coffee@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    I don’t think that’s better.

    All the stuff from older generations is still there. That’s the lesson, not “well they were fine”. It’s “this stuff is going to plague humans for hundreds of years, be careful”

    In northern Ontario they dumped mining tailings into lakes, thinking the water works absorb it and eventually it would get buried by sediment. It turns out that natural minerals in the water continuously pull the arsenic out of the sediment and back into the water, making it impossible for the ecosystem to recover, even after 100 years the chemicals are still there. It’s a perpetual process.