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Animas River Environmental Effects

Decent Essays

Recently, a contractor working for the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) unintentionally released 3 million gallons of toxic mine waste into the Animas River in the Mountain West state of Colorado. Today, people in the US are debating the efficacy of the EPA (the right-wing is using the spill as anti-government propaganda) and the toxic aftermath the spill will undoubtedly have on local economies, communities and ecosystems. So far, the spill has "contaminated the Animas River, San Juan River, and the Colorado River in Utah." In addition, several "water supply systems have been affected by the spill. While the river system mostly serves farming communities, the disaster also poses a risk to the drinking water of 17, 000 people living …show more content…

According to history (some say legend), "In 1765, explorer Juan Maria Antonio Rivera was sent north from Santa Fe looking for gold, Indian settlements and evidence of European activity." The ensuing one hundred years were rife with geopolitical calculations and nation-state squabbles between France, Mexico, Spain and the US: treaties, territorial disputes, wars, assassinations, etc. Following the Mexican-American War (1846-1848), the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed. As a result, American settlers inundated the Mountain West region in search of wealth and new …show more content…

Their history is all but erased, their lives destroyed in the pursuit of material wealth (resource extraction). Superficial statues and hollow tributes now stand where vibrant human communities once lived for millennia. The US Government, unrecognized by vast portions of Native Americans, hence illegitimate in their eyes, ruthlessly imposed treaties, laws, cultural mandates and regulations on a population who never asked for such measures. There was resistance, but it was stamped out. Thus, the bloody history of European settlement is never far from the minds of indigenous people living in the US. It would be wise to recall the Sand Creek massacre of 1864, where "a 700-man force of Colorado Territory militia attacked and destroyed a peaceful village of Cheyenne and Arapaho in southeastern Colorado Territory, killing and mutilating an estimated 70–163 Indians, about two-thirds of whom were women and children." Indeed, from Sand Creek to My Lai, from Kandahar to Fallujah, US state-sponsored terror always produces the same results: massacres, mutilated bodies and unprosecuted

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