Territories speaks with Emmet Grogan about ongoing struggles against polymetallic sulfide and lithium mining in Maine. As people in the Caribbean Sea and on the Atlantic Ocean try to survive another hurricane season exacerbated by climate change, we’re reminded that we are already living through the catastrophe. Not content to let a good crisis go...
Of course there is an alternative, as the article is arguing implicitly, you ban mining and other unsightly industrial activities in rich areas with strong environmental and safety laws, and outsource it to poor nations without the political leverage to strongly regulate mining companies. This objectively results in far, far more environmental damage, but that environmental damage is contained to highly populated areas full of poor people you don’t have to think about.
I really wish more environmentalists were pushing for potentially environmentally hazardous processes to be moved to areas with strong regulation and environmental protection laws, instead of just pushing them onto poor people, but unfortunately a lot of people seem to be so (purposely) disconnected from the industrial processes necessary to make everything from wind turbines and trains down to the food that appears on the shelves that they view the mining and manufacturing of these things as completely unconnected to these things themselves appearing in their lives.
That’s a very good point. It’s pretty damn sad at how disconnected many of us are to the processes that get us everyday things.
Fucking preach. Very good point about pushing mining impact into “more friendly” regulatory environments.
The disconnect is baffling in a lot of industries.