Mary Anne: Women who may ever become pregnant are warned away from eating the fish caught in the river because of the level of PCBs found in the fish. There's a link in that article to the EPA's Hudson River site, for background and fairly current (March 2001) data on the problem.

The river's not dead, but it ain't too healthy for those at the top end of the food chain.



Frank: That's because we are still semi-bad boys when it comes to dumping industrial waste. I 'll bet it would be fine if we stopped the ongoing pollution.



And, we should, by god, stop. My position is the greeny weenies underestimate the ability of the earth to recover.





Me: Very long term, the Earth could recover form just about anything. It's the phenomenon of concentration in the food chain that makes the fish in the Hudson toxic now, and the physical-chemistry properties of PCBs that keep them present on the river bottom. Remember: the primary use for PCBs was as a coolant fluid in electrical transformers - that's why there's so much in the Hudson, from the GE plant(s). They were meant not to degrade, and they're dense and viscous. The goop must be mechanically dredged from the river and incinerated to get rid of it. Patience alone, waiting for the Hudson to flush itself - even if not another molecule of polychlorinated biphenyls is ever released - will not make the fish safe to eat in Beth's lifetime, nor her childrens'.

And besides the Hudson there's the Rhine, Rhone, Danube, Tiber, Volga, Yangtse, Thames, Liffey, Mersey, Mississippi, Chesapeake, Rio Grande, Ganges...

Then there's the problem of: where does it go? The ocean, of course - we plumbing engineers have a saying: shit flows downhill. So just what *is* the carrying capacity of the world's oceans for various long-lived toxic substances? What's the transport rate from the estuaries, across the submerged continental shelf - where most of the life is, especially the life we feed from - to the truly benthic depths? How much more harm does the goop do in transit, and does it really become harmless on the deep sea floor?

Y'know that saw that goes: "Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day - teach a man to fish, and you feed him for life"? What do we feed our grandchildren, when we must teach our children not to fish?

E' (remembering Soylent Green)