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Minamata Disaster
The Minamata Disaster was a disease that was linked to poisoned water in a fishing village in Japan in the 1950s due to a nearby company dumping waste leading to high levels of mercury in the water. -
Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring Published
Silent Spring is the story that sparked the global grassroots environmental movement in 1962, explaining how chemical pesticides work, what their drawbacks are, and how we can protect crops in better, more sustainable ways. -
Stockholm Conference
The Stockholm Declaration placed environmental issues at the forefront of international concerns and marked the start of a dialogue between industrialized and developing countries on the link between economic growth, the pollution of the air, water, and oceans and the well-being of people around the world. -
Endangered Species Act:
The Endangered Species Act established protections for fish, wildlife, and plants that are listed as threatened or endangered; provided adding species to and removing them from the list of threatened and endangered species. -
Italy’s Seveso Dioxin Cloud
A valve broke at the Industrie Chimiche Meda Società Azionaria (ICEMESA) chemical plant in Meda, just north of Milan, Italy. This accident resulted in the release of a chemical cloud containing the highly toxic dioxin TCDD. -
France’s Amoco Cadiz Tanker Spill
The Oil Tanker Amoco Cadiz ran aground on Portsall Rocks, 1.2 miles from the coast of Brittany, France. The ship was owned by the American Petroleum Company Amoco. The ship's steering mechanism failed, and despite two unsuccessful towing attempts, it ran aground. The ship split in three and sank, spilling its cargo of 68.7 million gallons of oil into the sea. The spill polluted 360 kilometers of coastline from Brest to Saint Brieuc. It was the biggest marine oil spill in Europe's history. -
Love Canal
The Hooker Electrochemical Company (now Occidental Chemical Corp. or OXY) used the abandoned Love Canal to dispose of over 21,000 tons of hazardous chemicals. The drums leaked and contaminated soil and groundwater. -
Bhopal Disaster
40 tons of toxic methyl isocyanate gas released into the air, killing over 3,000 instantly and condemning hundreds of thousands to a future of prolonged pain, caner, stillbirths, miscarriages, lung and heart disease and the drawn-out deaths of everyone around them. -
Chernobyl Meltdown
The Number Four RBMK reactor at the nuclear power plant at Chernobyl, Ukraine, went out of control during a test at low power, leading to an explosion and fire that demolished the reactor building and released large amounts of radiation into the atmosphere. -
Montreal Protocol
A global agreement to protect the stratospheric ozone layer by phasing out the production and consumption of ozone-depleting substances (ODS). -
Kyoto Protocol
The Kyoto Protocol operationalizes the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change by committing industrialized countries and economies in transition to limit and reduce greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions in accordance with agreed individual targets. -
Documentary film An Inconvenient Truth released
Oscar-winning documentary about the environment. Former presidential candidate Al Gore holds this film together as, in front of an audience and with dew aids beyond photo slides, he explains how humans have messed up the planet. Gore issues an urgent warning on what must be done, and done quickly, to save the earth. -
Deepwater Oil Spill
The Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded and sank in the Gulf of Mexico. The explosion killed 11 workers and injured 17 others. The rig sank about 36 hours later. The explosion caused a catastrophic oil leak from the well. Over the next 87 days, an estimated 3.19 million barrels of oil spilled into the Gulf. -
Niger Delta Oil Pollution
Hundreds of square kilometers have been contaminated. Around 6,000 kilometers of oil pipelines run through the Niger Delta and the vast majority of them are antiquated. Hundreds of old wellheads litter the marshlands. Their operators have abandoned them and left them here to rot. -
Amazon Wildfires
MAAP also documented close to 100 major human-caused fires of standing forest in Brazilian Amazon, burning roughly 110,000 hectares (about 272,000 acres).