Our World and Everything in It

 
I just wrote the blog “Cruisin” last week and this week Trafigura, a Swiss trading Company, paid $22 million in fines to Abidjan, Ivory Coast, Africa for dumping 500 tons of oil based waste off their coastline. The ship was a Greek owned tanker under Panamanian flag. According to the N.Y. Times, the waste that was “a fuming mix of petrochemicals and caustic soda — that started out in the Mediterranean and ended up in Africa could have been safely disposed of earlier in its journey.” It went on to say “Without strict, and strictly enforced, international rules on waste disposal, dangerous cargoes will find the course of least resistance, least cost, and least regulation, scarring the lives of some of the world’s poorest, worst governed and most defenseless people.”

 
100 people died. 100,000 had to seek medical treatment. Trafigura had $28 billion in revenues last year. The ship traveled from the Mediterranean to Amsterdam to unload the waste safely and legally. However, the disposal company found much more toxic waste than originally estimated to do the job for $15,000. When the Dutch company wanted $300,000 instead for the cleanup, and there may have been as much money wasted in delays, the ship went off looking for a cheaper place to dump. So they went to Africa. $28 billion in revenues and $300,000 to $600,000 in cost was too much for 100 lives and 100,000 people made sick. Nice, real nice. Trafigura deserved the $22 million fine. Of course they point fingers at the government there. And the government claims they didn’t know how much toxic waste was really unloaded. The Abidjan government has fallen as a result of its protesting citizenship.

 
Africa appears to be the dumping ground for many things these days. Oil fields are ruining both the Niger Delta and Nigeria from the interior and now a tankard is caught dumping around the exterior. Poachers run rampant killing endangered animals for everything from Gorilla hands, to ivory tusks, to a “bushmeat” trade for chimpanzee steaks. I think the N.Y. Times should have included scarring some of the world’s most wild and beautiful land and animals, as well as, most defenseless people in its article.

 
This should make us pause to think how easy it is for one tanker to make 100,000 people sick. This was no virus. This was manmade. Yet so many of us are still resistant to the fact man pollutes enough to adversely affect our environment. The Abidjanians didn’t suffer and die from natural causes in this case. We should not be smug in thinking our government wouldn’t allow such a thing either. Would this be allowed for a price? We spew pollution into the air everyday for a price. We pollute our ground and water with chemical runoff for a price. Industrialized farming does it with animal waste for a price. I think some people think our environment is a giant composter. Put anything out there and it will miraculously turn it into something good and useful again.

It’s just not so.       

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 14th, 2007 at 7:24 am and is filed under Uncategorized. 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.