( by "E"; December 22, 2005)
This groove contains samples & paraphrases upon the pen of the signatories of the Contstitutional Congress.

 In as much as humankind may have thus far survived the blights they have unleashed on this earth as condensed in the following Particles which surmise some of the worst of our doing, I hereby intimate that these Particles & the misunderstanding &/or ignorance that brought them to bear on our life support systems form the nucleus of an insipid DeathCULTure Consciousness that can not only destroy humankind but also the survival chances of all biological entities on this lone & only known planet capable of supporting complex biological organisms.
 Not limited to corporate/ industrial age destructions upon the planet, this document forms an introduction to a history of all human manufactured ecological destruction, which includes warfare & disasters wrought by entities guided by glust rather than an ethical conscience.

  This is a rather grim collection is presented here to spur progressive change before a point of no return is breached. Ignoring human blight is the opposite of what will make the human processes that create it a mentality of the past.

This is a call not to arms, but to brains. Turn off the ‘reality’ TV & tune into reality while you still have one. The omnipresent availability of ESCAPISM accessible in our ever-present mediaCULTure is blight in itself as it constantly distracts the masses from facing their threats & reacting to them in a meaningful way. Having to react often indicates a loosing strategy, because one is being acted upon rather than being the protagonist who takes planned action with the contingencies of acting consciously acknowledged & prepared for. This is having a vision. An intelligent species should guide itself into the vision of a future it creates for itself. It has been written.. “Without vision the people perish.”

The Particles of this Bill Of Blights are listed by the following ranking: Blights that can be changed for the better by immediately possible actions by individuals are listed first. Those that would take more substantial & costly long-term changes in mass infrastructure are listed later.

Particle I
“The Meatism” blight & the environmental cost of factory farming enough meat to fulfill the blood – lust of the American ‘meat - centric’ diet alone is staggering in terms of deforestation, land & water pollution. The ‘lungs’ of the planet are being razed to fulfill a demand that is fortunately killing off those who engage in it by stopping their hearts & giving them premature death. Unfortunately this slow death doesn’t come fast enough to save the biosphere from a disproportionate amount of destruction.

Therefore meat is murder three ways (animal murder, human suicide & a weapon of mass destruction by way of it’s environmental cost to all). See Conscious Consumers’ article “Escape From The Planet Of The Cows” for more details. Add in the medical expense required to care for those who eat themselves into vascular congestion & this blight takes another exponential leap in terms of cost to humankind.

Who among you has risen, hunted, killed or slaughtered even one of the animals you have taken into your body as if you had right to?
Healing this blight does not require extreme measures or a wholesale shift to vegetarianism. The S2 SmallShifts concept turns the tides here as well as with most human manufactured blight.

Particle II
Better Living Through Chemistry?
The chemical blights are widespread, various & often have long term & unknown effects that can’t accurately be quantified in terms of the extent of their destructive capabilities. Some of the world’s worst & ongoing ecological blights come to us courtesy of the chemical industry. Chemical blights extend & have effects in every Particle of this Bill Of Blights.
Notable Disasters:
The Aral Sea which is currently considered the world's worst disaster gives some evidence of the destructive staying power of chemicals.
The devastated region around the Aral Sea is severely polluted by pesticides & fertilizers, which local farmers use on their cotton crops.
Where the water has retreated because of a complete mismanagement of the water which should naturally be flowing to fill the Aral Sea, are vast stretches of desert laden with a toxic mix of chemical residues washed down over the decades from the farms upstream.

Better living through chemistry, right? Better living for whom? Once again can’t only blame industry since consumers support them by buying their stuff. However, would we buy if we weren’t systematically lied to as in the following case:

W.R. Grace Asbestos Case
WASHINGTON (02/14/05) -- A federal grand jury in the District of Montana has indicted W.R. Grace & seven current & former Grace executives for knowingly endangering residents of Libby, Montana, & concealing information about the health effects of its asbestos mining operations.
According to the Indictment, W.R. Grace & its executives, as far back as the 1970’s, attempted to hide the fact that toxic asbestos was present in vermiculite products at the company’s Libby, Montana plant. The grand jury charged the defendants with conspiring to conceal information about the hazardous nature of the company’s asbestos contaminated vermiculite products, obstructing the government’s clean-up efforts, & wire fraud. To date, according to the indictment, approximately 1,200 residents of Libby have been identified as suffering from some kind of asbestos-related abnormality.
This is an ongoing national blight. W.R. Grace company execs possessed by the MoneySerpent have allowed their poisonous venom to slither outward from the serpent lair they created in Libby to cross America & the world in vermiculite asbestos contaminated products... All in the name of their personal profit at the expense of unknowing workers, customers.. Literally hundreds of thousands & perhaps millions tadversely affected by their greed..

Chemical River Pollution #1
In November, 1986, firefighters tackling a blaze at the Sandoz chemical works in Basel, Switzerland, flushed a total of 30 tons of agricultural chemicals into the Rhine River, killing 500,000 fish. You can add an array of chemical water destructions to this list including the Hudson disaster, the Cuyahoga river in Ohio (which actually caught on fire). Burning water, yeah.. Way to go humans. If there are aliens & they swing by our tired planet, I’d put in an application for citizenship. I guess there’s always hope.
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Particle III Water Blights
Am I the only one who thinks it sinister that much of the earth’s water supply has been destroyed by irresponsible corporate entities that profited in the process of destroying the planet’s fresh water & now often are parts of the huge conglomerates that bottle up fresh water and sell it back to us.. Again.. at their profit.
Notable Disasters:
Gulf of Mexico, US: Dead zone
A huge "dead zone" of deoxygenated water spreads across the Gulf of Mexico every summer because of severe nitrate pollution. Dead zone water is completely uninhabitable for most marine animals, & in the Gulf of Mexico it can cover an area of about 15,000 sq km (5,800 sq miles).
The Gulf of Mexico's dead zone has been an annual problem for the last 30 years, because farmers in the Mississippi watershed are using large quantities of nitrate-based fertilizers, which are also destroying the soil by leeching them of the mineral content required to grow food worth eating. Read my article on that pretty nutrient raped produce you're buying at your supermarket.

The nitrates flow down the Mississippi into the gulf & cause an algal bloom in the water, which guzzles oxygen, suffocating other forms of marine life (Red Tide as it is known here in Tampa). You should come vacation here during red tide season and sunbathe with the bloated carcasses of rotting fish & other dead sea creatures. Good stuff. Or just ignore it & look for somewhere else we haven’t ruined.. YET. WAKE UP AMERICA.. YOU’RE DREAMING a fool’s paradise.
Perhaps you'll awaken when the Chinese army comes marching out of Wal-Mart with the shiny ‘gats’ we bought them with every purchase of Chinese made crap that you didn’t need when you shopped there. So, when they march out of Wal-Mart (which is really just a Chinese branch location to finance their army in the first place, don’t act surprised).
They’ve come to mow you down & anyone who stands in the way of them getting our agricultural fields which they’ve always wanted to feed their swelling population. Art of War grasshoppers.. They won the battle before they ever fought it by taking our industry, our jobs & our money by selling us the cheap crap we just couldn’t live without, so now they own your ass. Welcome to the U.S.A.. Once proud shining examples to humankind, & now the spoiled children of the planet, turned to slavery by their own hand.
But if they're counting on healthy food from that land, chances are they won’t get it because we are destroying it through factory, chemical farming. And with the soil destruction comes the destruction of the fishing grounds of the Gulf Of Mexico.

At the moment little is being done to alleviate the Gulf’s dead zone problem, & according to conservationists, some locals actually welcome the dead zone's arrival because crabs & lobsters are easy prey as they flee the deoxygenated water. Good news if you like to eat accursed, bottom-feeding sea bugs.

Romania: River pollution
Jan. 2000, a storage pond at a gold mine near the city of Baia Mare in northern Romania, burst its banks. This has become known as an aquatic version of Chernobyl. Some 100,000 cubic meters of water, containing an estimated 100 tons of cyanide, spilt into small local rivers, then finally into the River Tisza in Hungary.
The spill wiped out all fish & plant life for several hundred miles. 5 weeks later another spill, this time of heavy metals, struck the same region.
According to the United Nations the spill, which killed thousands of fish in Hungary & Yugoslavia, was one of the worst river pollution accidents in Europe. Years after the incident fishermen in Hungary claimed their catches were only a fifth of their former levels.

Worst Marine Pollution
A fertilizer factory on Minamata Bay, Kyushu, Japan, deposited mercury waste into the sea from 1953 to 1967. 43 people died, & up to 20,000 were affected by poisoning - 4,500 seriously.
Read the book "Blue Gold" to learn how the fresh water supply was stolen from humankind by corporate interests.

Particle IV Atomic Blights –
Truth Is stranger than fiction & worse than Godzilla.
Human disruption of natural law also reaches inner spaces to produce toxicity with half-lives capable of destroying whole lives for thousands of years.
Notable Disasters:
Chernobyl
USSR (now Ukraine) April 26, 1986. Thirty-one people died at the time, & 10,900 sq. miles of land & 1.7 million people were exposed to radiation. During a routine test, reactor number 4 was operating on very low power, which made it unstable. A sudden surge of power resulted in two explosions, which wrecked the reactor core & blasted a hole in the roof of the power station. It's not known how many of the estimated 200,000 people involved in the clean-up operation died in the following the disaster, as no systematic records were kept.

Particle V Soil Depletions & Land Pollutions
Human industrial food farming using chemical & other artificial & unbalanced factory farming methods is destroying the soils ability to produce crops worth eating & threatens to destroy our agricultural fields’ ability to produce crops at all. See the C2 Viridian REVELution article “Aneurysm Epidemic” for more info on how this directly affects all consumers & what you can immediately do about it.
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1984 Humankind breaks the sky! A hole is discovered in the Ozone layer.
First noticed by a research group from The British Antarctic Survey in the 1970's, in the 1980's the first measurements of this loss were actually documented. In 1984, when the British first reported their findings, ozone levels were about 35 percent lower than the average for the 1960s. When the first measurements were taken the drop in ozone levels in the stratosphere was so dramatic that at first the scientists thought their instruments were faulty.
But, no such luck. Humankind broke the sky & although measures have been taken to correct this (of course, (Of course, without upsetting consumers or the economy too much), the hole still looms. The problem remains in the background, as it has now been replaced in the national consciousness by more novel sound-bite packages about more current disasters. The fact that the sky is falling just isn’t as popular anymore. So ya’ know, so wah’, fah’ get-bout’-it., more important distractions like Britney’s next 24 hr. marriage are just around the corner.
Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) are a family of chemical compounds developed back in the 1930's as safe, non-toxic, non-flammable alternative to dangerous substances like ammonia for purposes of refrigeration & spray can propellants. Their usage grew enormously over the years. One of the elements that make up CFCs is chlorine. Very little chlorine exists naturally in the atmosphere. But it turns out that CFCs are an excellent way of introducing chlorine into the ozone layer. The ultraviolet radiation at this altitude breaks down CFCs, freeing the chlorine. Under the proper conditions, this chlorine has the potential to destroy large amounts of ozone. This has indeed been observed, especially over Antarctica. As a consequence, levels of genetically harmful ultraviolet radiation have increased.
Consequences:
The Southern Ocean is one of the world's most productive marine ecosystems, home to huge numbers of penguins, seals, & bottom plants, & a major supplier of nutrients carried to other parts of the world by undersea currents. Little is known about the effect of UV-B on marine life, particularly the microscopic algae called phytoplankton that forms the foundation of the undersea food chain. These tiny plants capture the sun's energy through photosynthesis, providing food for microscopic animals.
Less phytoplankton means less food for these animals to eat. It is estimated that a 16 % ozone depletion could result in further losses in Phytoplankton, which would lead to a loss of about 7 million tons of fish per year. With the human food supply already strained due to demands of an ever-increasing population, small reductions resulting from UV damage may be disastrous to many people, especially the poor & indigenous people.
DNA
It also damages the DNA of marine bacteria & the larvae of starfish & urchins, they say. & it even alters ocean chemistry, creating potentially dangerous substances in the water itself.
"This refers to the fact that UV radiation is involved in a number of photochemical reactions in seawater (including the hydrolysis/splitting of water molecules) that produce radicals (hydroxyl, peroxide, superoxide, etc.). These radicals are very reactive & can cause biological damage by oxidizing biological molecules. It's really dramatic what the changes in ozone levels will do to rates of DNA damage & inhibited development," says biologist Deneb Karentz of the University of San Francisco. "If you have a 30 per cent decline in ozone, that doesn't mean a 30 per cent decline in a given biological process - it could be a lot more than that". Experts predict that an estimated 10 % reduction in the ozone layer will result in a 25 % increase in non-melanoma skin cancer rates for temperate latitudes by the year 2050.

Particle VII
The Oil Blight
1 Oil comprises use an ongoing, multipronged death grip on all life. Drilling, transporting & burning oil produces several blights in one black, slimy, sludgy, stinky package. Perhaps similar to the number of Americans who have never raised or slaughtered any of the animals they devour on a daily basis is the number who have ever actually beheld crude oil (The stuff sucked from the bowels of the earth before it is refined into the slightly less offensive gasoline we happily burn & bitch about when prices go up so that we have to pay more for our slow death by planetary asphyxiation).

Anyone who’s ever been in the presence of crude oil can readily understand why it is so deadly a substance when burned. Crude is so offensive to all the senses that it’s no wonder that it is capable of destroying biological entities. There is no way for an oil company to be clean, no matter how much they pay some Madison Ave.advertising wizard (salaried liar) to come up with ways to greenwash consumers into thinking that they are. Extracting, refining & burning oil is & will kill us all & we should be thankful that we may be saved from ourselves by running out of it before we get the chance to destroy all future biology on the planet along with ourselves by refusing to accept the fact that we cannot continue to burn oil & live.

Disasters of note:
Exxon Valdez - “Imagine 125 Olympic sized swimming pools filled with oil - That's how much the Exxon Valdez spilled. An estimated 1,500 miles of shoreline was devastated by oil. Destructions included a national forest parks, & wildlife refuges. The US District Court slapped the largest ever fine imposed for an environmental disaster on Exxon. Over 10 years after the spill, much of the wildlife has still not fully recovered.”

The Worst oil tanker disaster was
The Atlantic Empress collided with the Aegean Captain off the coast of Tobago on July 19, 1979, & 280,000 tonnes (275,577 tons) of oil were lost.
The Prestige sinks off the northwestern coast of Spain in Nov. of 2002.
22 million gallons of fuel oil are spilled. This is about twice the amount The Valdez spilled & the ecological costs are still being tallied.

Worst Land Pollution on the planet also has to do with oil use.
The Russian Republic of Komi which lies above the Arctic Circle, is a land of plains & mountain regions, with a population of around 1.75 million who live mostly in the major cities, such as the capital, Syktyvkar. Oil & gas companies pump Komi full of cash. The total area devastated by pollution from this industry is approximately 5,213 acres, (around the same size as El Salvador).

An accident on August 17, 1994, added to the numerous ruptures & spills that occurred around this time. The cause of the Usinsk accident was the poor condition of the pipes that transported the oil from the oil plants to an oil refining plant.

What you can immediately do:
Be a true American patriot & not just a bumper sticker patriot & begin doing any combination of things you can afford to do that reduces oil dependence. It all adds up to your savings & your & everyone else’s future. It may seem small to start by just changing out your light bulbs & installing a fuel catalyst you car, but all good things work together for the greater good & S2 SmallShifts add up to exponential attacks in the war on foreign oil. Contact me if you'd like to drastically reduce your environmental footprint & help the U.S. return to its former glory as a beacon of light & progressive leadership rather than the death-star of intimidation an exporter of war that we have become under our current negative, money worshiping leadership. We can do this, but WE THE CONSUMERS must all particiCreate. No Vexation without participation! Stop putting all the blame on corporations & government & realize your part in the macro way things are. Start where you are & change while we still have a chance.

AND stop supporting NASCAR & sending the message to the rest of the world that you are a zombie blankly staring at cars going around in a circle, needlessly burning noxious elements while cities choke in smog & nations shoot at each other over the stuff. Don’t bitch that the price of gas is too high when so much is needlessly wasted in moronic activities like this. No what would really be exciting? See who can build s technology that can go faster without killing people & other biological entities in the process.

BLIGHT IN PROGRESS:The leaking Trans-Alaskan pipeline

The world's worst industrial tragedy -Poison
Gas leak from Union Carbide's pesticide factory in Bhopal, India, killed thousands.
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L. A. together with 3 other Cal. cities has been named as the most polluted US cities. The cities have more particle pollution & higher smog levels than other metro areas in the US. Pittsburgh, Penn., is placed fifth for particle pollution, with Houston, TX, in fifth place nationally for smog pollution.
These are some of the finding of the 2004 annual report of the American Lung Association. For the first time, the Association measured particle as well as smog pollution. (Particle pollution refers to the microscopic soot-like particles produced by power plant emissions, diesel exhausts, wood burning, & other sources.)
According to the report particle pollution is a widespread problem across the country but especially serious in large parts of the East, Midwest, & in California.

4 Eastern US metro areas notoriously appear on the top 25 lists for both short-term & year-round particle pollution levels. Particle pollution problems are pervasive in the Southeast, where every county with complete monitoring data in Georgia failed the year-round test, & five metropolitan areas rank among the worst in the nation for year-round particle pollution levels. Two cities ranked among the worst in short-term particle pollution.
Parts or all of 11 Midwest cities (in Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Ohio & Wisconsin) rank among the 25 worst for year-round particle levels, while six also rank in the 25 worst for short-term particle pollution.
California cities dominate the lists of most polluted cities in the nation for all measures. Ten of the 25 worst cities for short-term levels of particle pollution are from California; as are 7 of the worst 25 for year-round particle levels & 9 of the worst 25 for ozone. Twenty-three California counties have unhealthy short-term levels of particle pollution, while 13 failed the year-round test. If measured against California’s particle pollution standards, which are tougher than those required by EPA, another four counties would have failed the year-round test.

The American Lung Association states that:
• 55 per cent of Americans live in areas with unhealthy levels of ozone or particle pollution.
• 47 per cent of Americans live in areas with unhealthy levels of ozone.
• 28 per cent of Americans live in areas with unhealthy short-term levels of particle pollution.
• 23 per cent of Americans live in areas with unhealthy year-round levels of particle pollution.
• 16 per cent of Americans live in areas where there are unhealthy levels of ozone & short-term & year-round particle pollution.

$$$ You buy water now.. AIR IS NEXT $$$

For these blights & similar catastrophes of varying degree we Viridian - Americans consider it necesary to defend this land from wayword & imperious factions of human consciousness in an effort to help save humnankind from itself as well as grant all biological entities a future that not only seems more assured but is one that we'd like to live in.. A future where we or our children do not have to become economic slaves just to meet our "Unalterable Needs", where we don't have to cough with each breath, where we can dance in the rain rather than try to walk between its acid drops.