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Minamata is a disease that started to spread throughout Japan in 1956. The government came out and said it was caused by the consumption of fish and shellfish that was contaminated by methylmercury. This is significant to the environmental act because Japan set extra measures to ensure that the environment is safe to live in. They started measuring the amount of methylmercury in the water. They also make the companies responsible for any diseases pay for their medical care.
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Silent Spring is a book published by Rachel Carson in 1962. The book explained the dangers that insecticides have affecting bird populations. Her book brought awareness to the public. It’s considered one of the leading things to start the environmental movement that helped start the Environmental Protection Agency, as well as banning DDT (The dangerous stuff in insecticides).
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The Stockholm Conference was a United Nations General Assembly that took place in 1971. This was the first conference to talk about environmental protection.
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In 1973 the government started the Endangered Species Act to prevent endangered plants and animals from going extinct. This includes the preservation of their habitats too. This also makes it illegal to take these species.
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The Love canal was a place for factories to dump their chemical waste. A school was built on a portion of the land and the chemical waste seeped into the soil. More women had miscarriages and/or children with disabilities because of his. Residents began protesting, eventually being told to evacuate because of the dangerous chemicals. This caught the attention of congress, nothing ever came of it.
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In 1984, a chemical plant released methyl isocyanate gases. Over 20,000 people died from this incident. To this day people in India are still protesting and the government hasn’t changed much to provide cleaner water.
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1986, Chernobyl was a nuclear power plant in Ukraine that malfunction. One of the reactors had a steam explosion- it was said to be flawed by design. This explosion killed 2 workers and 28 other people died from confirmed radiation poisoning. Over 150,000 residents near this power plant were told to evacuate. After this event occurred, Eastern Europe worked to design safer nuclear plants.
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The Montreal Protocol is an environmental agreement made in 1987. The ozone layer was opening because of chlorofluorocarbons. Chlorofluorocarbons were found in many products including solvents and aerosol spray. To heal our o-zone layer they replaced chlorofluorocarbons with hydrochlorofluorocarbons, a healthier alternative.
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The Kyoto protocol was an agreement (targeted mostly at larger countries) in 1997 to reduce the amount of CO2 and greenhouse gasses emitted into the environment in Kyoto Japan. Though this was later replaced by the Paris Climate agreement, this pushed countries to use less CO2 and greenhouse gases.
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The film An Inconvenient Truth is a documentary about the effects that global warming will have. Besides being described as overexaggerated by some, it’s said to be very accurate besides that. This movie won an award and brought awareness of recent changes due to global warming and what we can do to slow down this process.
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