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Speaking of famous Churchill quotes (though according to the linked page, Churchill claimed to have gotten this one from somewhere else): if you feel like a heaping helping of disillusionment, check out this post by ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
bdunbar, summarizing what is probably the true story of Love Canal, despite the fact that Reason Magazine is the major source cited.* The gist is that the company that produced the toxic waste was forced to sell the land by the threat of eminent domain, despite their objections that it was clearly unsuitable for building a school on.
The worst thing about this story is that the local government's "desperate" need for any available land was driven by the will of the people, specifically their desire to immigrate to Niagara Falls and/or have lots of babies. Democracy sometimes leads to really stupidly short-sighted government actions, no doubt about it. (Incidentally, Churchill thought short-sightedness is something we just have to live with. I couldn't disagree more--some aspects of the future are definitely predictable enough to act on.)
To my mind, however, the best solution to keep this sort of thing from happening again is a policy of transparency/open government (see page 4 of the linked document), so when our elected officials are trying to do something ridiculous like build a school and a neighborhood on top of a toxic waste dump, it has to tell us that that's what it's doing. That way we can stop it before it starts, rather than discovering what happened twenty-five years later, when the horrible consequences finally come into the open.
(Of course, limits placed on any conceivable transparency program in the name of national security mean that it won't help us prevent other outrages, such as government spying on Americans without a warrant. For that, we'll still have to wait for a leak [pun only slightly intended] to the press, and then hope it's possible to embarrass our representatives into stopping it, or replace them with others who will.)
The other good solution to the specific problem of toxic waste, of course, is to make it food for another industrial process.
* The author of the Reason article admits that "Hooker Chemicals may very well have botched others of its many chemical dumps," and that "The customary practices [at the time] were to pile up such wastes in unlined surface impoundments, insecure lagoons, or pits, usually on the premises of the chemical factory, or else to burn the wastes or dump them into rivers or lakes." But that's not what Hooker did at Love Canal. (Okay, that sentence just sounds wrong...)
P.S. Things I did not know (earlier) this morning: Pi day (3/14) is also Albert Einstein's birthday. I wonder if he was born at 1:59...
bdunbar, summarizing what is probably the true story of Love Canal, despite the fact that Reason Magazine is the major source cited.* The gist is that the company that produced the toxic waste was forced to sell the land by the threat of eminent domain, despite their objections that it was clearly unsuitable for building a school on.The worst thing about this story is that the local government's "desperate" need for any available land was driven by the will of the people, specifically their desire to immigrate to Niagara Falls and/or have lots of babies. Democracy sometimes leads to really stupidly short-sighted government actions, no doubt about it. (Incidentally, Churchill thought short-sightedness is something we just have to live with. I couldn't disagree more--some aspects of the future are definitely predictable enough to act on.)
To my mind, however, the best solution to keep this sort of thing from happening again is a policy of transparency/open government (see page 4 of the linked document), so when our elected officials are trying to do something ridiculous like build a school and a neighborhood on top of a toxic waste dump, it has to tell us that that's what it's doing. That way we can stop it before it starts, rather than discovering what happened twenty-five years later, when the horrible consequences finally come into the open.
(Of course, limits placed on any conceivable transparency program in the name of national security mean that it won't help us prevent other outrages, such as government spying on Americans without a warrant. For that, we'll still have to wait for a leak [pun only slightly intended] to the press, and then hope it's possible to embarrass our representatives into stopping it, or replace them with others who will.)
The other good solution to the specific problem of toxic waste, of course, is to make it food for another industrial process.
* The author of the Reason article admits that "Hooker Chemicals may very well have botched others of its many chemical dumps," and that "The customary practices [at the time] were to pile up such wastes in unlined surface impoundments, insecure lagoons, or pits, usually on the premises of the chemical factory, or else to burn the wastes or dump them into rivers or lakes." But that's not what Hooker did at Love Canal. (Okay, that sentence just sounds wrong...)
P.S. Things I did not know (earlier) this morning: Pi day (3/14) is also Albert Einstein's birthday. I wonder if he was born at 1:59...
