This Borrowed Earth: Lessons from the Fifteen Worst Environmental Disasters around the World (MacSci)

250 Pages·2010·2.51 MB·English

by  Robert Emmet Hernan

THIS BORROWED EARTH
LESSONS FROM THE FIFTEEN WORST
ENVIRONMENTAL DISASTERS AROUND THE
WORLD
Robert Emmet Hernan
THIS BORROWED
EARTH
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THIS BORROWED
EARTH
LESSONS FROM THE FIFTEEN WORST
ENVIRONMENTAL DISASTERS AROUND
THE WORLD
Robert Emmet Hernan
Foreword by Bill McKibben
Preface by Graham Nash
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this borrowed earth
Copyright © Robert Emmet Hernan, 2010.
All rights reserved.
First published in 2010 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fift h Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the
world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers
Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN: 978–0–230–61983–8
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hernan, Robert Emmet.
Th is borrowed earth : lessons from the fi ft een worst environmental
disasters around the world / Robert Emmet Hernan.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978–0–230–61983–8
1. Environmental disasters—Case studies. I. Title.
GE146.H37 2009
363.7—dc22 2009019880
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India
First edition: February 2010
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America.
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgments vii
Foreword by Bill McKibben ix
Preface by Graham Nash xi
Introduction 1
Minamata, Japan, 1950s 9
London, England, 1952 31
Windscale, England, 1957 39
Seveso, Italy, 1976 45
Love Canal, New York, 1978 61
Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania, 1979 81
Times Beach, Missouri, 1982 91
Bhopal, India, 1984 101
Chernobyl, Ukraine, 1986 109
Rhine River, Switzerland, 1986 129
Prince William Sound, Alaska, 1989 137
Oil Spills and Fires of Kuwait, 1991 155
Dassen and Robben Islands, South Africa, 2000 163
Brazilian Rainforest 171
Global Climate Change 179
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vi CONTENTS
List of Some Environmental Organizations 189
Notes 193
Sources 197
Index 231
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My thanks and deep appreciation to:
Jeanne Silverthorne, my wife and best friend, for just about everything;
Bill McKibben for providing the clearest and most compassionate voice
in support of efforts to save this planet from those who don’t care;
Graham Nash for his efforts throughout his career to support environ-
mental protection, for his support for this project from its earliest incarna-
tion, and for his forceful preface;
My friends and supporters Bill Kulik, Jim Morris, and Carl Garvey,
for generously sharing their thoughts and comments after reading the
manuscript;
Luba Ostashevsky, my editor at Palgrave Macmillan, for her support and
thoughtful comments throughout the editorial process, and her assistant,
Laura Lancaster, for her help in editing and finalizing the photo rights;
Linda Langton, my agent, of Langtons International Agency, for her
enthusiasm and effort to place the book in difficult times;
Elizabeth Durst for her editing that tightened and strengthened an ear-
lier version of the text;
The important photographers and organizations that generously
donated permission to use their photographs for free or at reduced cost
to support the project, including Robert Del Tredici, Dino Fracchia, Jim
West, Greenpeace, International Fund for Animal Welfare, and Shisei
Kuwabara;
The members of environmental groups who taught me the importance
of citizen activism and government enforcement, including Rick Brown
and Tom O’Leary and the Lower Providence Concerned Citizens; Flare
Deegan, Marge Tombler, and Jeannie Losagio of Save Our Lehigh Valley
Environment; and Peter Bulka, Lois Gibbs, and Debbie Cerrillo at Love
Canal;
The people of Minamata, Japan, who have endured with strength and
faith the suffering inflicted on the community for the past fifty years,
and those who serve to bear witness to that suffering, including Hanaga-
san, Michiko Ishimure, Aileen Smith, Eiko Sugimoto, Jun Ui, Satoshi
Kamizawa, and the staff at Minimata Disease Center Soshisha.
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viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author purchased fifteen tons of carbon credits to offset the estimated
carbon emissions resulting from the publication of this book. The calcula-
tions were derived from “Going Carbon Neutral: A Guide for Publishers
(U.S. Edition),” www.newsociety.com. The carbon credits for a reforesta-
tion project were purchased through carbonfund.org.
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FOREWORD
A
re these events really receding into distant memory? It seems impos-
sible to those of us who lived through them, but I think it’s true.
Some college students I quizzed recently had only a dim recollec-
tion of hearing about Chernobyl, and Bhopal elicited a complete blank. I
didn’t bother asking about London and its choking fogs.
And so Robert Hernan provides a deep service by reminding us how
out of kilter things can go. In an age where we’re once again ideologically
committed to “loosening the reins” on private enterprise, it’s sobering to
remember what has happened in the past. In an age when new technolo-
gies are barely tested before they’re put into widespread use—genetically
engineered crops, for instance—it’s even more sobering to contemplate a
seemingly iron-clad rule: every new machine or system seems to fail cata-
strophically at least once.
In the years to come, the line that Hernan draws in his introduction
between natural and environmental disasters will blur—if global warm-
ing raises the sea level and then amps up the hurricane, is the wave that
inundates Miami “environmental?” It’s not an act of God, that’s for sure.
Still, in some way it will be an act of collective folly—not the individual
and corporate greed that so often seems to stand behind these tragic tales.
And it won’t respond in quite the same way to the individual heroism that
Hernan documents so movingly in these pages.
What will remain the same, however, is human vulnerability. W. Eugene
Smith’s pictures of the victims of Minamata Disease capture that vulner-
ability at its deepest, and so do the stories of the firemen at Chernobyl and
the many others chronicled herein. That vulnerability endangers us, of
course—but it is closely related to the love, the shared concern, that might
save us yet. I was speaking not long ago on a panel with Lois Gibbs, the
hero of Love Canal, and I found myself thinking how magnificent it was
that she had rallied not only to her own cause and that of her neighbors,
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