Dangerous neighborhood

From a Yahoo! News story: “WASHINGTON – Space shuttle Atlantis is now in a rough orbital neighborhood — a place littered with thousands of pieces of space junk zipping around the Earth at nearly 20,000 mph. There are more pieces of shattered satellites and used-up rockets in this region than astronauts have ever encountered. As soon as the job is complete, the shuttle will scamper to safety - all those tiny projectiles raise the constant threat of a potentially fatal collision. NASA now puts the risk for a catastrophic collision with junk during the mission at 1 in 229 — greater than typical flights to the space station but lower than the agency's initial estimates. The Air Force is tracking more than 19,000 objects in all sorts of orbits — most of it junk. The dirtiest spots are at 525 miles up where a Chinese satellite was destroyed and 490 miles, where an Russian-American satellite collision occurred. And the higher the space junk orbits, the longer it stays aloft because there's even less drag from the ultra-thin atmosphere pulling stuff down. For example, a 4-inch object 490 miles up will stay in orbit for more than a century, Johnson said. Objects between one-tenth of an inch and 4 inches are dangerous enough to cause major and even fatal damage, but cannot be specifically tracked.” So, why are all the green revolution people not saying anything about this? And, we want to travel to Mars? What for? To pollute it? Please.