Industrial-"Accident"

Editor’s note: The 2011 nuclear disaster in Fukushima, triggered by an earthquake and a tsunami, was one of the worst nuclear accidents of the twenty-first century to date. Nevertheless, worse ones might come in the future. In the quest for energy to fuel the machine, industrial civilization has built many vulnerable hazardous structures that can unleash highly toxic materials in the case of an “accidents.” Despite eleven years since the incident, TEPCO and the Japanese government haven’t been able to manage the waste water. Now, they are planning to dump it into the Pacific Ocean. Not only is the Pacific Ocean home to numerous marine creatures, it is also a source of livelihood for the humans who live near: the humans that the Japanese government claims to care for as their citizens. This decision by the Japanese government demonstrates, yet again, that decisions in this civilization are not made based on public welfare. More nuclear power means more weapons, more mining on indigenous lands, more CO2 emissions, more radioactive waste and more accidents. ...

Florence Nightingale, the English pioneer of modern nursing is quoted as saying, “I attribute my success to this: I never gave or took an excuse.” Editors note: Never give up your agency. If your goal is to save life on the planet, sometimes you have to sink your own boat. [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PW7J2Ii1uxU&t=8s[/embed] Derrick Jensen This is Resistance Radio on the Progressive Radio Network. My guest today is Diane Wilson. She’s a mother of five, a fourth generation shrimp boat captain and an environmental activist. She’s been fighting to save the bays on the Texas gulf coast from chemical and oil development for the last 30 years. I also have to say that you have for at least 15-18 years been one of my heroes so thank you for that. ...

This article originally appeared in Mongabay. Featured image: Barge transporting oil drums in the Niger Delta. Image by Stakeholder Democracy via Flickr ( CC BY-NC-ND 2.0). Oil has been spilling from a wellhead in Nigeria’s Bayelsa state for a month now, with the local company responsible unable to contain it. Experts say the scale and duration of the spill is so severe that it’s imperative that local communities be relocated for their safety. Oil spills and other forms of pollution caused by the industry are common in Bayelsa, the heart of the oil-rich Niger Delta. Companies, including foreign oil majors, are largely left to self-declare the spills that frequently occur, but face only token fines for failing to respond quickly. Crude oil from a blowout has been pouring into creeks in the Niger Delta since Nov. 5, with the well’s owner, Nigerian energy firm Aiteo, unable to contain the spill and specialists called in to help. ...

Non-neutrality of technology & limits to conspiracy theory By Nicolas Casaux “For, prior to all such, we have the things themselves for our masters. Now they are many; and it is through these that the men who control the things inevitably become our masters too.” Epictetus, Discourses, Book IV, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Ed. In an essay published in the fall of 1872, entitled “On Authority," Friedrich Engels, Marx’s alter ego, railed against the “anti-authoritarians" (the anarchists) who imagined they could organize the production of “modern industry" without recourse to any authority: ...

In this piece, Salonika explains how this culture prioritizes economic gains over human and natural welfare. She describes how series of toxic accidents in India (of which the Vishakhapatnam gas leak is one example) lays testimony to this fact. In such a culture, is it possible to hold the responsible actors accountable for their actions? Vishakhapatnam Gas Leak: Who do We Hold Accountable? By Salonika On 7th of May, 2020, a gas leak on the outskirts of Vishakhapatman (R. R. Venkatapuram village) has killed 12 people, including 2 children, and injured 1000 others. Vishakhapatnam is one of the largest cities of Andhra Pradesh, the eastern state of India. ...

Editor’s note: large sections of this article are inspired by Without Rubber, the Machines Stop by Stop Fossil Fuels. Deep Green Resistance does not endorse their organization or their analysis but it’s worth reading. by Liam Campbell It’s easy to take rubber for granted. Without it, most of the world’s vehicles would literally grind to a halt, airplanes would eventually be grounded, and most of the world’s industrial factories would cease to be profitable. When someone mentions rubber people think of tires, but open up a car and you’ll find a staggering number of components require the substance: seals, hoses, shock absorbers, wiring, and interiors. If you swim farther down the supply chain you’ll discover that the manufacturing factories that create vehicles also need vast quantities of rubber to operate their own machinery; the same is true of the processing plants that refine raw materials for the factories, and so on all the way down the supply chain. ...

By Lierre Keith / Deep Green Resistance Editor’s note: This first appeared in Mother Earth News on July 28, 2010. We are republishing it on the sixth anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Everything that’s wrong with this culture is in the story now pouring out of a broken oil rig 40 miles off the Louisiana coast. I don’t mean story as in fictitious. I mean it as a narrative, the account of successive events that builds into a history. That history is now washing up on the shore as oil-drenched corpses; nothing more than a quick, bracing glance is needed to know how those birds suffered. It’s also a history that’s waiting to turn cells toward the fierce hunger of cancer, settling into the lungs of children, erupting into blisters on the skin “ so deep they’re leaving scars.” ...

by Marcela Belchior / Adital via Intercontinental Cry What would initially appear to be the end of the line for the culture and survival of the Krenak indigenous people, impacted by the pollution of the Rio Doce, from the Mariana tragedy, in southeastern Brazil [state of Minas Gerais], could rekindle a 25 year struggle. After being left unable to live without the water of the river, the Krenak population is mobilized around a possible solution for the continuity of the community: to expand the demarcated area of the indigenous territory in the region and to migrate to a new location. ...

Elvira Nascimento Cyntia Beltrão reports from Brazil on what may be the country’s worst environmental disaster ever, at the Samarco open pit project jointly owned by Vale and BHP Billiton: Last Thursday, November 5th, two dams containing mine tailings and waste from iron ore mining burst, burying the small historic town of Bento Rodrigues, district of Mariana, Minas Gerais state. The village, founded by miners, used to gain its sustenance from family farming and from labor at cooperatives. For many years, the people successfully resisted efforts to expel them by the all-powerful mining company Vale (NYSE: VALE, formerly Vale do Rio Doce, after the same river now affected by the disaster). Now their land is covered in mud, with the full scale of the death toll and environmental impacts still unknown. ...

By Ashley Southall and Timothy Williams / New York Times Nearly 200,000 people in Charleston, W.Va., and nine surrounding counties were without drinking water on Friday after a chemical spill contaminated supplies, the West Virginia governor’s office said. Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin said early Friday in a statement that the federal government had approved a request of assistance in dealing with the chemical spill into the Elk River, which flows into the Kanawha River at Charleston. ...