As the well-known apologue cautions: If a frog is placed in water that is heated up gradually, it will not notice being boiled alive. This concept proves analogous to humans’ reactions to our increasingly polluted surroundings.
Currently, hundreds of ecologically compromised locations in the U.S. have been officially listed for remediation by the EPA, with 153 active entries in their database in New Jersey and an additional 122 entries in New York. While some sites are visited and responsibly treated for the possibility of future use, other locations remain untreated or improperly addressed; many of which exist within our communities. Although they are present, impactful, and worrisome, they are often hidden in plain sight.
Ask yourself, why are we so resigned to living with surrounding toxicity? Are we indifferent? Habituated? Perhaps we already feel so resigned to the preexisting existential threat of global toxicity that merely acknowledging the issue is too much of a burden to carry, and so we ignore it. Regardless of the reasons, we owe it to ourselves and future generations to remain perceptive to the condition of our surrounding environment.
