Our co-blogger Robert Feinman passed in July. Jonathan has already posted a best of series taken from Robert’s more than 600 posts to The Writing On The Wal. But Robert wrote elsewhere as well and, for some time, I’ve enjoyed a Sunday morning tradition of reading the essays he posted to his personal blog.

Beginning on 18 October I began to cross post Robert’s essays to share his thoughts. Strictly speaking, Walmart was not specifically the subject of Robert’s writings, but Walmart was certainly always a player in the universe he explored.

The Aberfan Effect

The Welsh village of Aberfan suffered one of the worst mining disasters when a huge slag heap at the edge of town collapsed and covered the local school killing 144 people, mostly children.

The pressures for enhanced profits caused short cuts to be taken disregarding environmental conditions. Warning signs of instability of the slag heaps were ignored. The surroundings were dotted with these mountains which was not only unsafe but unsightly.

Surprisingly after the disaster the local populace figured out a way to remove these eyesores, proving that this could have been done earlier and preventing the tragedy.

For all those years the populace lived with ugly mounds, when they could have been replaced by a pleasant surrounding.

You can read a fuller account here.

Moral: Don’t foul your own nest.

I call the failure to learn this lesson the Aberfan Effect.

Don’t the business and political leaders have to live in this world too?
Do they want their children raised in dangerous, polluted conditions?
What does the extra profit do them if they can’t enjoy their surroundings?
Are they immune to environmental poisons like Arsenic in the drinking water
and Mercury emissions from coal power plants?

Have we learned from this? Apparently not, here’s a small list of similar disasters:

The Berkeley Pit Copper Mine, Butte, Montana.

Hudson River PCB Contamination.

Hanford Nuclear Weapons Site.

Indian Point Nuclear Power Plant.

Mercury Emissions from Coal Power Plants.

Buffalo Creek Flood.

Kingston Fossil Plant coal fly ash slurry spill.

And a group that is fighting back:

Sludge Safety Project.

Copyright © 2004-9 Robert D Feinman
Feel free to use the ideas, but the words are mine.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 13th, 2009 at 0600 by Jeff Hess and is filed under Robert Feinman. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.