Yesterday's New York Times expose about dangerously high levels of mercury in bluefin tuna set off a tsunami of wails from sushi lovers"and launched an avalanche of e-mails, judging by the article's current status as the Time's "most popular" e-mailed story.
But there's a footnote to this sushi scare on the Time's editorial page today that deserves to be equally widely read. While everyone's moaning about the toxin-tainted tuna, is anybody asking what all that mercury's doing in our oceans in the first place? The Times connects the dots for us:
Though some mercury in the atmosphere occurs naturally, roughly two-thirds is produced by industrial sources " especially coal-burning power plants. It settles into the water in a form called methylmercury, is absorbed by bacteria and then makes its way up to the very top of the food chain " to humans. It is a reminder of how interconnected all life on earth really is. The mercury that worries us in the tuna we eat is the very residue of the way we live. The only way to reduce the one is to improve the other.
To learn more about how pollution is harming our oceans, go to oceanconservancy.org. 
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