I can only call Andrew Blackwell an environmental
voyeur. He is not content to read about
bad things – he has to see them. He
knows of Chernobyl, but he has to have his meter tell him he is being cooked by
the nuclear energy that is still all around.
Unlike most of us who travel to pristine areas to avoid the
ugliness that is being foisted on the world, his vacations, if you can call
them that, are in the tar sands. He goes
to these places knowing that are bad, but he does not go to preach. He takes us along and lets us look over his shoulder;
shake our heads and wonder – what next.
His writing is descriptive and vivid, “…rose the Syncrude
upgrading plant, the flame-belching doppelganger of Disney’s Enchanted Kingdom,
built of steel towers and twisting pipes, crested with gas flares and plumes of
stream.” And his writing also conveys a
dark, foreboding vision of the future that is filtered through these awful and
apocalyptic. Then as we move through
the dark areas of polluted earth on this bizarre trip our Dante guide lets us
listen to the nonsense that lets people accept their fate and the fate of their
land – “I think that dirty oil thing comes from a lobbying group in Saudi.”
Resignation is obvious in a statement from a drunken
worker “Lemme Tell You something. By the time I’m fifty, I know – I don’t
guess, I know – I’m gonna have some kind of cancer.” But he is not going to quit. He is stuck in our make a living world where
the cost of survival is the debt of education, acceptance of contributing to
destructive acts, or the sacrifice of years of health.
This is not a descent into Hell, rather it is a horizontal
path that zigs and zags with destinations like the massive gathering of trash
in the midst of the ocean – the vortex of human waste, coal mines of China and the sewage of India.
But our guide has a strange affliction – he wants to see the
rosy aspect of each corner of Hell. He
wants us to see happy people content in their apartments with electronic parts
boiling in solder and emitting toxic fumes, he wants to see the soy farm
intrusions in to the rain forest with much more innocence that some might
feel.
Perhaps this joyride into the horrors of pollution is really
a reminder that each Hell hole is created to serve the demands of those of us who
want to live in a clean and beautiful environment. That behind Yellowstone and the other
magnificent parks lays a consuming matrix of people and industry that is
leaving a mark throughout the earth and each tendril of the pollution center
reaches in to the center of humankind throughout the planet. They are really not the worst or the most;
they are just artifacts within hundreds of sores from the cancer of our
consumption.
In a way the author’s enjoyable romp also downplays the
serious situations. After reading about
the coal mining in China chapter I thought that this review in NYTimes was a
more appropriate look at the serious situation. China’s Poisonous
Waterways By SHENG KEYIAPRIL 4, 2014
“BEIJING — Over the past few years, trips back to my home
village, Huaihua Di, on the Lanxi River in Hunan Province, have been clouded by
news of deaths — deaths of people I knew well. Some were still young, only in
their 30s or 40s. When I returned to the village early last year, two people
had just died, and a few others were dying.
“My father conducted an informal survey last year of deaths
in our village, which has about 1,000 people, to learn why they died and the
ages of the deceased. After visiting every household over the course of two
weeks, he and two village elders came up with these numbers: Over 10 years,
there were 86 cases of cancer. Of these, 65 resulted in death; the rest are
terminally ill. Most of their cancers are of the digestive system. In addition,
there were 261 cases of snail fever, a parasitic disease, that led to two
deaths.
“The Lanxi is lined with factories, from mineral processing
plants to cement and chemical manufacturers. For years, industrial and
agricultural waste has been dumped into the water untreated. I have learned
that the grim situation along our river is far from uncommon in China.
“The nation has more than 200 “cancer villages,” small towns
like mine blanketed with factories where cancer rates have risen far above the
national average. (Some researchers say there are more than 400 such villages.)
Last year the Ministry of Environmental Protection acknowledged the problem of
“cancer villages” for the first time, but this is of little comfort to my
parents’ neighbors and millions like them around the country.
“More than 50 percent of China’s rivers have disappeared
altogether, and few of the surviving waterways are not completely polluted.
Some 280 million Chinese people drink unsafe water, according to the Ministry
of Environmental Protection. Nearly half of the country’s rivers and lakes
carry water that is unfit even for human contact.
And China’s cancer mortality rate has soared, climbing 80
percent in the last 30 years. About 3.5 million people are diagnosed with
cancer each year, 2.5 million of whom die. Rural residents are more likely than
urban residents to die of stomach and intestinal cancers, presumably because of
polluted water. State media reported on one government inquiry that found 110
million people across the country reside less than a mile from a hazardous
industrial site.”
There is more, but the picture is clear. He literally ends up in shit – that is, he
finishes in the over populated country called India (which translates to river)
and it is the country of rivers – religious rivers in fact. But the growth of population has another
graph – the growth of municipal waste – merde.
It is a country without the controls and systems to handle run away
population (something the author does not mention directly) and consequently
the shite does not hit the fan – it fills the rivers and Krishna’s sacred river
is an open sewer.
There is much to think about – but the real lesson is that
behind the places of beauty we have protected are places of ugly that are the
result of our human choices, greed, and indifference.
