LETTER TO THE EDITOR / Scenario of Horror

I have done many years of research, for a book, on the terrible demolishing of the Key West natural environment including the bad decisions we continue to make degrading our natural heritage.

I have lived and dove and fished and closely observed south Florida for almost 8 decades, including our precious keys. I have drawers full of my notes of observation detailing our endless, continuing  desecrating of our natural heritage, the environment, land and ocean.

I received catastrophic news that was substantiated and printed in the Key West Citizen Newspaper extracted from the Sarasota Herald Tribune on July, 31st , 2015.  For days I could not write due to numbing shocking frustration and wrath.

Basically just adjacent to The Big Cypress National Preserve and the Everglades, plus the 2 wild life management areas a formal proposal was put forth by Kanter Real Estate, LLC.  They filed an application with the Florida Department of Environmental Protection todrill an exploratory oil well 12,000  feet deep.  Let me make this as lucid as possible for myself and for readers.  What this means is that this drilling could and would impact the entire vast biosphere of south Florida. This unprecedented invasive well placed in a region of immense fragility would endanger and put at extreme risk the whole treasured Eco-system.

Ignored would be an unparalleled valued tract of the planet that people draw inspiration from, acquire tranquility and peace of mind and for some people a reason to go on with their lives drawing from the healing aura of this natural treasure. It possesses  hope and sustenance that is dimensionless, in fact,  infinite.

Factually, all oil drilling whether it is labeled fracking or not requires chemicals.  Drills require lubrication which are termed “muds”. These are composed of hundreds of compounds, usually each oil corporation has its own protected recipe. They are all composed of hundreds of compounds, some heavy metals, including outright poisons like Cyanide and Arsenic or related deadly chemical substances.  South Florida, our home is one contiguous mass of flowing water, both on the surface and the aquifer underneath, all connected, all integrated.  Toxins from drilling and open pit mining, which was also applied for, will leach directly into our water flowage, that finds its way, unerringly into the sea and our critical drinking water,  vital to a civilized society. It all spells doom for the keys and all of South Florida including crucial organic life in all directions fish, lobster and crabs.dead. This is a soup of death, carrying lethal toxicity. This sends my head spinning.

Have we lost all reason, all sanity? It is part of a maniacal frenzy, crazed exploiting.     Spills of all kinds most likely could occur chemical and petroleum. In addition to all this the application includes a license to do seismic survey of the sacred Big Cypress Swamp wetland.  What this means is to set off explosives in order to measure and analyze vibratory returns. A solemn protected area, a retreat for the last of our remaining wild life, last of an intact ecological system.

What does all this mean, shredding the remainder of our natural heritage ?

Newer extraction methods as shale mining or hydraulic fracking, tar sands, deep offshore drilling have been known but sane humanistic environmental safeguards have prevented the chaotic deadly pollution that these diabolical  methods create.

There was a morality that has gone the way of the Ivory Billed Woodpecker. Bristol Bay’s proposed pebble mine in Alaska is a prime analogous destructive mine in a priceless fragile wrong biospheric location. Sanity has gone. Are we in-line to suffer the fate of Ahab the sea captain in  Herman Melville’s Moby Dick in his crazed pursuit of the great white whale?   This application for oil drilling,

mining and seismic exploration is fanatically crazy and ought to be treated like an animal infected with rabies.

There are many ways that civilizations come to an end.

Jerrold Weinstock, M.D. (masters level ecologist.)

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