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Judith Gradwohl's Raw Sewage

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Imagine a peaceful paradise, where the heavenly ocean breeze and the glorious blue waves set the mood for delighted sensations. This beautiful fantasy of a beach will perish, if humans continue to let ocean pollution conquer Earth’s alluring waters. Terrible things are deposited in our ocean including, garbage, toxic waste, oil, sewage spills, and plastic waste. Every hour, 1.5 million pounds of garbage are dumped into the ocean, killing 100,000 marine creatures due to plastic entanglement, poisoning, etc. (All-Recycling-Facts.com). If we continue to be incautious, we could be dealing with a mass extinction of marine life! Humans could lose a food source soon if we can’t consume fish because of the intoxicated waters. Something must …show more content…

According to “Raw Sewage” by Judith Gradwohl, it states, “Around the world, untreated sewage flows into coastal waters, carrying organic waste and nutrients that can lead to oxygen depletion, as well as disease-causing bacteria and parasites that require closing beaches and shellfish beds.” This shows that many beaches are unavailable, due to the extreme risk of assimilating awful diseases, which come from sewage dumping in the ocean. Additionally, as a result of high levels of bacteria in the ocean, 2400 beaches were closed in 1993, just in the United States alone (Ibid). The diseases that can come from the contaminated sewage water include: viral hepatitis, cholera, typhoid fever, and a range of stomach and intestinal diseases (Ibid). Along with humans getting extremely sick from bacteria in the ocean, marine life can die from bacterial decomposers taking away oxygen in the …show more content…

Whales have a distressing increase in assimilating cancer, along with getting other illnesses like nervous and digestive system problems, liver disease, contaminant-induced immunosuppression, endocrine system damage, reproductive malformations, and growth and development issues, all because of ocean pollution (Bluevoice.org). According to “The Effects of Ocean Pollution on Marine Mammals”, by Bob Bohle, it states, “...from overfishing to greenhouse gases and global warming to the introduction of toxins into the environment – has affected every square mile of ocean on the planet and strongly impacted roughly 40 percent of marine ecosystems.” This shows far ocean pollution has come. As stated before, humans are now catching the effects of ocean pollution. Toxins from plastic and mercury that end up in fish, are entering the human food chain, which are now being linked to cancers, birth defects, immune system problems, and childhood development issues (Gianna Andrews,

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