Pollution

Diego likes The Wild Kratt Brothers on PBS. They talk about animals and their habitats. He is interested in talking about endangered species. He likes to talk about why animals are endangered and the impact of human beings on animal populations. He brought up the coral reefs.

He wanted to talk more about pollution. We talked about the Gulf oil spill from five years ago.
"For 87 straight days, oil and methane gas spewed from an uncapped wellhead, 1 mile below the surface of the ocean."

He asks difficult questions mostly about why people do things that would hurt the planet, when we depend on the planet to live. He talks about what we need to live and how if we kill the trees, we won't be able to breathe. He understands so many things without being told. He wondered why he knows these things and other people do not. Because if they knew, they wouldn't do it.


We talked about how humans make messes on the Earth, but other animals don't do that. We looked up pictures of the Fukushima disaster. He wanted to know what Cesium looks like. He had such good questions and so much to say. I just let him ask me questions and we tried to find the answers to them. He asked when it would run if they could stop the leak. That is a hard question to find the answer to. We are still looking for the answer to that. We found that they have to keep adding water to keep the reactors cool and that water leaks out into the ocean at the rate of 300 tons every 8 days. That is hard number to comprehend. They say it is enough to fill an Olympic swimming pool.

They sent a robot down to look at the reactors a week ago. We saw the video from that.

He wants to write letters to our Representatives to get them to close the nuclear power plants down in Ohio. We found that there are two and that their licenses run out in 2017 and 2026. He thought first we could tell the workers to shut them down. But I explained how the workers don't get to decide that.

He loves to use google earth to spin the globe and zoom in to different places. He is especially interested in the Sonoran Desert. He zoomed in on Japan today and we had a discussion about languages.

We learned greetings in Greek and Spanish. Because one of his Great Grandparents is Greek and one is Spanish. Another is German so we will get to that someday.