Blum, Deborah. "A Rising Tide of Contaminants." Well A Rising Tide of Contaminants Comments. The New York Times, 25 Sept. 2014. Web. 30 Sept. 2014.
I read the article A Rising Tide of Contaminants. This article is about chemicals and compounds contaminating the environment. One part of the article tells how the Zumbro River in Minnesota is contaminated with pharmaceutical drugs, pesticides, caffeine, and other chemicals. Scientists are not sure what these chemicals do to fish and other organisms. The article goes on to talk about our country’s policy concerning the environment and chemicals. ”Out of the millions of chemical compounds that we know about, thousands have been tested and there are very few that show important health effects” Dr. Gerald L. Schnoor said in an interview. “The law does require the Environmental Protection Agency to maintain an inventory of registered industrial compounds that may be toxic, but it does not require advance safety testing of those materials. Of the some 84.000 compounds registered, only a fraction have ever been fully tested for health effects on humans.” “There are approximately 15,000 new chemicals and biological sequences registered every day.”
I picked this article because it allowed me to see that the U.S. is not taking care of the environment as much as I thought we were. This article shows how the U.S. needs to look at chemicals and see if they are safe. This also shows that citizens should think about how they dump their chemicals and prescriptions so that they are not polluting the water.
I think the article was a little too scientific. I didn’t understand everything they were trying to say, but thought that it was an important article. I think that they should have said what could happen to the rivers if contamination is not properly dealt with.
posted for D. Judkins
I read Drew Judkin's response to the article, "A Rising Tide of Contaminants by Blum Deborah. Although his response was a bit short he was able to come across many important, and informative points. For example he tells us that the Zumbro River in Minnesota is contaminated with pharmaceutical drugs, pesticides, caffeine, and other chemicals. This was in fact in the very beginning of his article and when I read this, he had me totally engaged and I was intrigued to hear what he had to say next. His response continues to flow with immense detail and thought. Toward the end, he mentions that the US is not doing a lot to stop the contaminating of the planet. This surprised me because I thought the US was doing more to help this cause. Drew was able to capture the main point of the article he read, which in my opinion is the most important aspect of any critique. The article he chose sends an important message to everyone which is another reason why it was a good article to choose to write about. Overall, Drew did a nice job on critiquing and talking about this article. However, there are a few things I think he could have done better. To start off, Drew was too factual. He took too much of what was in the article and stuck it in his response, rather than giving a fact or two and then supporting those facts with something original he had to say. Another piece of Drew's response that I thought he could work on was his descriptiveness. He did not do the best job of describing what sorts of contaminants there are around the world and who is being harmed by them etc.
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