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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Michael M who wrote (52851)	8/23/1999 6:06:00 PM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

I became interested in the environment at a very early age, I was probably eight, so that would make it 1960. One of my grandmothers lived out in the country, on the Back Bay of Biloxi, Mississippi, and I used to spend at least a week, sometimes two or three, at her house every summer. She had wonderful pine trees, and owls, and foxes, it was heaven on earth for a child. There was a little creek not far from her house, I used to catch minnows in it, and use them to bait my hook to catch catfish off her pier. And then one day someone built a house upstream, and put the sewage discharge into the stream. My grandmother told me not to play in the water anymore, it was dirty, and I could see stuff in it, stuff I thought might be human waste, and for sure there were soap bubbles in the water, and it smelled bad. And I got mad and wanted her to do something about it, but there really wasn't anything anyone could do. I guess she could have hired a lawyer, but she was a retired widow woman. Of course, there wasn't an EPA, or a Clean Water Act back then. And then my dad graduated from dental school, and we moved to Baton Rouge, and all the chemical plants and Kaiser Aluminum, and the slaughterhouse, and oil refineries, all put their effluent into the air and water, North Baton Rouge smelled really bad, and all the houses and cars were dirty from air pollution, but we lived in South Baton Rouge, so it only affected us when we went to my dad's office, which was in North Baton Rouge. That was something, especially the bauxite plant at Kaiser Aluminum, dust everywhere. It was awful. Nowadays, people can't do stuff like that anymore. I think we are better off now.