When Reading About Iraq Becomes a Distraction from the Really Bad News

At least the horrors of war, tyranny, etc. seem part of the potentially reversible damage that humans regularly inflict upon each other. Much worse is the new found fact that women's breast milk in the U.S. contains enough rocket fuel residue to expose infants to thyroid damage. Of course, in countries such as Iraq, where the U.S. has been using depleted uranium it's obvious that major environmental problems and the military-industrial complex are not separate issues. After all, rocket fuel is connected to the "defense" of the country, and is apparently showing up in bovine and human milk because chemical waste in water used in irrigation that somehow gets into the food we eat. Isn't it sad? To read more, go here.
But wait, there's more....The global warming news is very, very bad right now. This website has succinct easy to read stuff about what's going on, and also some simple actions that individuals can take to reduce CO2 emissions. I don't know anything about these guys at Black Rhinoceros, but they seem cool to me. What about the terrifying news about water? You can read a lot from that book, Blue Gold on the Third World Traveler website. That, by the way, is a great resource for information. They have William Shawcross's stuff on Cambodia there too, which again, is less terrifying to read about than the long-lasting, catastrophic environmental news that gets worse every day. Oh yeah, and of course, that war in Iraq is all about controlling the fossil fuel whose burning is sending our planet straight toward what those radical right christians call the "end times."
It's enough to make you want to either become a full time environmental activist and or spend your time on such less difficult problems to solve as war, poverty, and the protection of civil liberties, oh, but they're connected, for as Ross Gelbspan put it in his interview with Kelpie Wilson of Truthout, "If one honestly acknowledges the scale and urgency of the problem, it becomes clear that it cannot be effectively addressed without major structural changes to global economic dynamics. And, from what I've seen, the major environmental groups - and especially their funders - are not prepared to address that reality."
I agree, and I think that both the media and a lot of people would just rather that most of us not know anything at all.