The Natural Resources Defense Council and other environmental groups claim that the corps underestimated the extent to which the dredging could spread pollution and interfere with a cleanup already approved by the federal Environmental Protection Agency.
The South-to-North Water Diversion Project, which began in 2002, is not scheduled for completion until around 2050, and is projected to cost $59 billion, to spread pollution, and to cause water imbalance in China's longest river.
Famine sells diet foods and invents nouvelle cuisine; Pestilence spreads pollution; War is a glamorous global reporter stirring up trouble.
For years environmentalists have bleated on about imminent food shortages, spreading pollution, accelerating climate change and the early exhaustion of the world's oil and other minerals.
In 1995, environmental activists received considerable publicity after they boarded and occupied an oil-storage buoy in the North Sea to prevent it from being moved and scuttled in the North Atlantic and thus spreading pollution; the buoy was ultimately dismantled in 1998.
Steven Donziger, the lawyer behind the case, along with activist groups, including Amazon Watch, alleged Chevron was responsible for wide-spread pollution in Ecuador's Amazon.
It also smacks of anthropocentrism since humans will doubtless carry to Mars the attitude that microbes are lower lifeforms and that it's OK to stomp all over their planet spreading pollution and mucking up their environment.
Commercial fishing, once concentrated in Lake Erie, with limited activity in the other large lakes, went into decline with the spread of pollution.
People in polluted states are believed to be dangerous not only to others because they may spread their pollution, but they themselves are often thought to be in danger of attack by demons, who are attracted by the defiled person's impurities (see also angel and demon).
But the real fury was soon aimed at the central government, accused not just of early decisions that had spread the pollution much more widely than need be, but of having neither the will nor the equipment to prevent the oil reaching land, nor the real complaint to clean up when it did.
This could have implication on the effect an obstacle would have on its surroundings, such as wind disturbance, or spread of pollution.
