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The Panama Canal
"Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary. In his new role, Bunau-Varilla negotiated the Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty of 1903, which provided the United States with a 10-mile wide strip of land for the canal."
"The Panama Canal was built to shorten the distance that ships had to travel to pass between the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean." -
The Great Smog of 52
"When a thick fog engulfed London from December 5 to December 9, 1952, it mixed with black smoke emitted from homes and factories to create a deadly smog."
"This smog killed approximately 12,000 people and shocked the world into starting the environmental movement." -
The Shrinking of the Aral Sea
(No specific date.)
"In the early 1960s,the Soviet government decided the two rivers that fed the Aral Sea, the Amu Darya in the south and the Syr Darya in the east, would be diverted to irrigate the desert, in an attempt to grow rice, melons, cereals, and cotton."
"From 1960 to 1998, the sea's surface area shrank by about 60%, and its volume by 80%." -
1st Earth Day
"Industry belched out smoke and sludge with little fear of legal consequences or bad press. Air pollution was commonly accepted as the smell of prosperity. “Environment” was a word that appeared more often in spelling bees than on the evening news."
"The idea came to Earth Day founder Gaylord Nelson, then a U.S. Senator from Wisconsin, after witnessing the ravages of the 1969 massive oil spill in Santa Barbara, California." -
Environmental Protection Agency
"Houghton Mifflin best seller. This exhaustively researched, carefully reasoned, and beautifully written attack on the indiscriminate use of pesticides was not exactly light reading. Yet it attracted immediate attention and wound up causing a revolution in public opinion."
"Environmentalism gained strength as a movement dedicated to ending--and if possible--reversing this decline." -
Tragedy of the Commons
(There wasn't a specific date when this was published.) "Fish populations in the oceans have been decimated because people have interpreted the “freedom of the seas” to include an unlimited right to fish them." "Some of the common pastures of old England were protected from ruin by the tradition of stinting—limiting each herdsman to a fixed number of animals (not necessarily the same for all)." -
The Bhopal Disaster
"Released at least 30 tons of a highly toxic gas called methyl isocyanate, as well as a number of other poisonous gases."
"The pesticide plant was surrounded by shanty towns, leading to more than 600,000 people being exposed to the deadly gas cloud that night. The gases stayed low to the ground, causing victims throats and eyes to burn, inducing nausea, and many deaths." -
The Chernobyl Nuclear Explosion
"The overpressure caused the 1000 t cover plate of the reactor to become partially detached, rupturing the fuel channels and jamming all the control rods, which by that time were only halfway down."
"Two workers died as a result of these explosions. The graphite (about a quarter of the 1200 tonnes of it was estimated to have been ejected) and fuel became incandescent and started a number of firesf, causing the main release of radioactivity into the environment." -
The Three Gorges Dam
(Another date that was not specified.)
"The Three Gorges Dam is the largest hydroelectric dam in the world."
"The $25 billion project is being internationally funded by companies, export credit agencies, and banks from Canada, Switzerland, Germany, France, Sweden, and Brazil." -
Baia Mare Cyanide Spill
"The polluted waters eventually reached the Tisza and then the Danube, killing large numbers of fish in Hungary and Yugoslavia."
"The spill has been called the worst environmental disaster in Europe since the Chernobyl disaster." -
"An Inconvenient Truth"
Since the film's release, An Inconvenient Truth has been credited for raising international public awareness of climate change and reenergizing the environmental movement. Aimed at alerting the public to an increasing "planetary emergency" due to global warming, and shows re-enacted incidents from his life story which influenced his concerns about environmental issues.
