Inside The Most Dangerous Place On The Planet, Fukushima Exclusion Zone

[hunter]

3. For the most dangerous place on the planet, it looks very peaceful.

Sadly, people are much more dangerous than nuclear waste.

I'd rather live in Fukushima than any place populated by violent people. Maybe it's not a good place to raise children, but my kids are grown.

So far as man-made chemical toxins, there are many places that are far, far worse than Fukushima, places heavily contaminated with mutagens and carcinogens that have a half-life of FOREVER. A toxin is a toxin, radioactive or not.

From my perspective high-energy industrial civilization and overpopulation is the problem, and Fukushima is just another industrial accident of many, and not an especially deadly one.

Yet another expensive mess to clean up.

The ongoing catastrophe of fossil fuel use (including f--cking "natural" gas) will kill this world civilization as it is killing people now, so I suppose the problem is self-limiting.

A million years from now there will be nothing left of us but a curious layer of trash in the geologic record.

That makes me an optimist. (Blame my formal training as an evolutionary biologist.) No matter how bad a mess of the world we humans make, no matter ninety percent of all species go extinct, then ours will most certainly be among them. Once we are gone life on earth will begin diversifying again.

The planet has suffered disruptive exponentially growing innovative species before, and will do so again.

I would like to save what's left of the natural world we now enjoy, but I can't even convince people in my own family that automobiles and jetliners and suburban homes with central air conditioning are gifts of the devil.