I do agree there’s deeper issues than the water offgassing methane, which isn’t great for the human body. But in the grand scheme of of the mostly science-illeterate public, it seems to me necessary to show the dramatic short term effects to get them onboard with mitigating the longer term problems.
I used to live in an area of my county called Swamp Creek. Basically a big valley following a crick that was also a salmon spawning stream. A developer spent literally a decade trying to get the county and locals onboard for his gross high-priced high-density developments on the side of the valley in exchange for clearing out our gorgeous temperate rainforest. We took photos of the crick during peak salmon spawning every year for five years. The year the developer got its permit and paved the hillside, the spawning completely stopped because the salmon just wouldn’t do it with all the oil in the water. Too murky.
A progression of five photos. The first four showed the crick practically overflowing with salmon in clear water. The fifth year it was completely empty of salmon, murky with algae, and gross. I think this kind of demonstration can be valuable. Even if it’s not telling the whole story. In the case of Swamp Creek, the part that wasn’t told was all the ecological damage down stream of the development, and the fact that salmon wouldn’t swim further upstream to find clearer water. They just gave up and died there instead, because they couldn’t see an end to the murk.
The area used to be quite pristine. Literally a temperate rainforest. Now it’s nothing more than high density housing. It no longer provides any ecological services, they tried to mediate the damage to the crick at least once, by manually widening and deepening it with excavators, and it still overflows every single year due to all the pavement allowing contaminated street water to wash directly into the crick. Pretty soon it’s going to end up being a completely paved waterway like the Los Angeles river, and it won’t support any worthwhile life.
