Sometimes I Wonder

I wonder if there's any hope for humanity at all. An aunt made me aware of the first and Liberal Redneck pointed me to the second.

Item #1

In the Valle de San Felix, the purest water in Chile runs from two rivers, fed by two glaciers. Water is a most precious resource, and wars will be fought for it. Indigenous farmers use the water, there is no unemployment, and they provide the second largest source of income for the area.

Under the glaciers has been found a huge deposit of gold, silver and other minerals. To get at these, it would be necessary to break, to destroy the glaciers - something never conceived of in the history of the world -and to make two huge holes, each as big as a whole mountain, one for extraction and one for the mine's rubbish tip.

More here.

Item #2

BAGHDAD -- Iraqi officials say that in a desperate move to dispose of millions of barrels of an oil refinery byproduct called "black oil," the government pumped it into mountain valleys and leaky reservoirs near the Tigris River and set it on fire.

The resulting huge black bogs--in the heartland of Iraq's northern Sunni-led insurgency--are threatening the river and groundwater in the region, which is dotted with villages and crisscrossed by itinerant shepherds. The region also contains Iraq's great northern refinery complex at Baiji.

The suffocating plumes of smoke are carried as far as 40 miles downwind to Tikrit, the provincial capital that formed Saddam Hussein's base of power.

More here.