This Borrowed Earth makes me scared to live by Duane Arnold

This Borrowed Earth is about man-made environmental disasters. The book is broken up into segments, each is about a specific environmental distaster from the past 60 years. Each of these segment describes live in the area before, the events that lead up to the disaster, the disaster itself and then a look at the long term effects of the disaster. The messege that This Borrowed Earth tries to deliver is that if we are not careful, we can do a lot of damage to our earth.
The kind of damage that can come from these disasters is horrific. The nuclear incident at Chernobyl, Ukraine didn't kill right away: it released deadly radiation into the atmosphere that is still around today. Those in the town of Chernobyl, Ukraine developed cancers and their children are genetically predisposed to thyroid problems. In 1986, millions of gallons of toxic chemicals were accidentally dumped into the Rhine River, all because of human error. This book really helps illustrate how we can harm our environment so easily through in-depth examples.
The fact that most of the incidents occured by simple errors at factories really made me think.
Factories that produce harmful chemicals and toxic residue are more common than you would think. The incident at Seveso, Italy involved a shut down in the reactor of the ICESMA factory. The factory produced hexachlorophene, a multi-purpose chemical with a lot of potential dangers. The reactor shutting down caused an explosion, releasing a toxic cloud causing blindness and killing animals. Similar incidents occured at plants like at Times Beach, Love Canal New York, and Bhopal India.
A disaster like this could happen at any moment. People had no way of knowing something would go wrong with this machinery. In Cedar Rapids, we live near a nuclear power plant. If that plant were to have a meltdown like what occured at Three Mile Island or in Chernobyl, we would be at an enourmous risk. This book shows that errors like this could happen at any moment.
This book truely showed me how capabile humans are of destruction of the planet, and that when people say we are destroying our earth, it isn't an exxageration. The in-depth description of environmental disasters paints a picture of how we are slowly destroying our home, and when things go wrong, large scare disasters create widespread misery. This Borrowed Earth showed the relationship between environmental degredation and the government. In Minimata, Japan, the government and Chisso Chemical Company refused to acknowledge that the mercury poisonings of villagers was the result of chemical runoff into the water. The poor villagers lost their livelyhood (poisoned rivers yielded no fish) and couldn't recieve compensation from the government until a 20 year battle and secretive research got the victims the help they needed. In Chernobyl, the Soviet Union remained silent after the nuclear incident. As a cloud of radiation spread all over Europe, they didn't find out until it was too late; many crops had been spoiled and people became sick. This book helped me understand that care of the enivronment is partially business and humans working to stop the destruction of our home.