Toxic Slugde Flooded a Village

[auroraglacialis]

The Danube river - is that where it is heading to? If so, I will wail. That river goes through our state here, I visited it in the past, I cycled along it for a week to Vienna and enjoyed its company. My favourite books on a palaeolithic girl by Jean Auel have the setting of the untainted Danube river as the background. The river delta is a vast and beautiful and amazing ecosystem. If this goes there, this is like two river deltas damaged in one year (together with the mangroves of the missisippi). I didn't catch all the news yet, but something like this is bound to happen again.
As a geologist I know a bit about mining and while of course the tailings are in these days not simply dumped, the sludges are held back by dams - and dams can break for a number of reasons.
And the distinction between human error and natural disaster is just crap - If humans build a dam to hold the sludge back and that dam eventually for some reason breaks it is human error - not of an individual who pressed the wrong button but human error in general. And from that perspective, almost all disasters are human made. Even a hurricane disaster of a flood is, because people just build houses that are not adapted to the region in places that are unsuitable for settlement! Oh there are so many geologists jokes on that - frustrated jokes - jokes on people who have been warned over and over not to build anything in a place and are rewarded for ignoring that advice by some disaster that they then call natural. What about San Francisco. When will it happen? Eventually it will, you know? At some point in time, the Quake will hit the city, people will die, buildings will crash. Then geologists can once more say "told you so", but that is no reason for anyone to even think about it for a moment. They are all just hoping it will play out nice. And that is the attitude people have in soooo many areas - trash the planet and hope it will recover, build some crap and hope it holds, use some toxic stuff and hope someone will find a solution to set it right later (like with nuclear power). This whole society is based so much on hope, that it makes me sick. I know thea are usually the ones telling me to "get real", but that very words is what I want to shout back at them!

[Empty Glass]

Hungary: Toxic red sludge has reached the Danube



It hasn't hit the part of the river that I've seen (I've cycled along it too in Austria) but I'm still very saddened to hear about this.

You mention San Francisco - I fear for all my friends who live and hail from there, and I can only hope that whatever buildings they may be residing in when the time comes have been retrofitted at the very least.

[Human No More]

I really hope those responsible pay for this... not that it will undo the damage...

[ISV Venture Star]

Ugh. This is utterly dreadful.

[Tsyal Makto]

Oh sweet jesus.

Humanity really is batting 1000 this year environmentally, aren't we?

[TheIknimaya]

I read about this a couple days ago while I was sitting in the van as my mom and sister went inside a store. I opened up Twitter on my iPhone and saw this so I followed the link and read the horrible news.

It's really unfortunate that stuff like this can happen. It's caused significant damage. Also, there was a dead cat in one of the pictures.

The company who is responsible for this is screwed.

[Sight Unseen]

Originally Posted by Human No More

I really hope those responsible pay for this... not that it will undo the damage...

Yeah. I hope they are made to physically help clean it up. Because after all, we can't take enough of their money, but we damn sure can take their time.

Originally Posted by Tsyal Makto

Oh sweet jesus.

Humanity really is batting 1000 this year environmentally, aren't we?

First there was the Deepwater Horizon, and now this. If I'm not mistaken, I think that this spill is larger than the oil spill by several hundred thousand gallons.

[auroraglacialis]

Yeah - this year has quite some strikes in that area. Not that there have not been many others in the past years that have gone unnoticed but I think the awareness is higher for once and I really think that as industrialization increases, complexity grows, the point of diminishing returns is passed (meaning to get more resources we have to take higher risks and invest more energy than ever) these things will just increase. Especially as countries that cannot afford (due to the economic system and the very nature of complexity and diminishing returns) protective measurements ramp up industrialization (and we "westerners" cannot blame it on them as it is the consumption in our countries that requires this mining)

The spill there is of course much different from the oil spill in some aspects - at least the gallon-count cant be compared, but one thing is sure - the immediately affected areas are just dead and depending on the toxicity and heavy metal content of the sludge may not really ever be cleaned up completely. I still have some hope that the Danube may prevail, but it seems they have to dump stuff into her already to prevent worse and that is not a good sign. It reminds too much of the planes spraying dispersants over the gulf in early summer....

[Pygmy-Na'vi]

This is unfathomable... The newspapers in my country have been covering this pretty extensively, and the last news I read was that the river which was hit by the sludge first is dead. No life left whatsoever. I am seriously pessimistic about this - I've seen firsthand what even a tiny bit of pollution can do to a water system (estensive logging/clearcutting of an area where the ground is rich in iron oxide - killed all life in the stream that ran past my previous home, the water looked pretty much the same as it does in the hungarian river - just red toxic sludge).

Btw, I guess you've all heard about Vedanta by now? They have a dam just like this one but larger in a rural area in (i think it is) Tamil Nadu in india.

[Sight Unseen]

Doesn't it just make you want to scream at someone? We humans are killing ourselves and everything around us with our apathy.

Huge oil spill? Meh. Injecting carcinogens into the ground in search of natural gas? So what. Toxic waste? Whatever. Whaling in Antarctica and seal hunting in the Arctic? Uh huh.

[auroraglacialis]

Ah Vedanta again. Our cozy RDA equivalent from the "real life Avatar" situation earlier this year

But as always - they are not alone. There are thousands and thousands of such dams - all over the world. For all kinds of minings tailings. And it is not just metals they contain. They contain the waste of processing. Ore these days is mined in low quality, so to get the ore out of the rock, the rock is ground to small pieces, then it is dumped into basins into which a secret chemical is added. Then these basins are bubbled. The chemical forms foam and attaches to the ore minerals. So the foam contains the minerals and can be used further, the residue settles at the bottom of the basin and is then pumped out into the tailings basin behind the dam, chemicals, unwanted minerals, heavy metals all in place and due to the grinding all that stuff is highly reactive as the surface was increased by orders of magnitude.

Oh sorry - just dumped in some first hand experience her, that made me turn away from economic geology during university...

Originally Posted by Sight Unseen

Doesn't it just make you want to scream at someone?
Huge oil spill? Meh. Injecting carcinogens into the ground in search of natural gas? So what. Toxic waste? Whatever. Whaling in Antarctica and seal hunting in the Arctic?

Well - nature can fix a lot, but people dont even allow for that. It is incredible - humans dump toxic pesticides in the environment that never existed naturally and microbes develop within decades that degrade them and clean up. But if you beat on and on, take away the means to recover - how it this healing to happen? You just need forests and phytoplancton to turn CO2 into O2 again. Taking away 50% of the forests and with human impact diminishing phytoplancton by about as much within 50 years - who the f* is going to take away all the excess CO2 pumped into the atmosphere? This culture is almost systematically destroying this planets life support system - in terms of a war, it does not just attack one target, it also cuts the supply lines and eliminates the means of production of supplies. So it pumps CO2 into the air and takes away the means of turning that CO2 into O2 again and poisoning the soil and water so that these means cannot just grow back. It not only blocks rivers with dams and prevents fish to reach their breeding grounds, it also poisons the rivers with endocrine disruptors, drains the wetlands for residential development or farmland and of course people catch the fish for food.

So which one is worse? I say certainly not people going fishing or even seal hunting for food. The've been doing this for tens of thousands of years. But the sheer scale for example of commercial fishing and the multitude of accompanying factors are insane.

[Sight Unseen]

Originally Posted by auroraglacialis

This culture is almost systematically destroying this planets life support system - in terms of a war, it does not just attack one target, it also cuts the supply lines and eliminates the means of production of supplies. So it pumps CO2 into the air and takes away the means of turning that CO2 into O2 again and poisoning the soil and water so that these means cannot just grow back. It not only blocks rivers with dams and prevents fish to reach their breeding grounds, it also poisons the rivers with endocrine disruptors, drains the wetlands for residential development or farmland and of course people catch the fish for food.

And the sad part is: We as a race could live just fine without doing these horrible things.

[auroraglacialis]

Originally Posted by Sight Unseen

And the sad part is: We as a race could live just fine without doing these horrible things.

Yeah, but "fine" is not good enough for some, hmm?

But yeah - that revelation was what turned me away from beeing a misantropic person. People always think of me that way for me bashing these topics. But looking into some things - lives of native people, anthropology - that convinced me that it is not humanity that is somehow "evil". That it is not "a virus". I argued about that statement of famous "Agent Smith" a lot and wont repeat it here.

Humans have the ability to be like that - to be "evil" and destroy the world and once a certain set of memes come up, the path is set and it does not look good. But if you step aside from that mindset for a moment despite people who are still encroached within that set of memes calling you "idealist" - one can see the possibilities. Peaceful societies in the present and past, existing in a natural balance, often even refusing and resisting the memes that this culture is so fixed on: development, growth, technotopia, hierarchy, monuments, ...

No, it turns out I really like humans. It is something else that I dont like and that is something not all humans have...

[Sight Unseen]

Originally Posted by auroraglacialis

No, it turns out I really like humans. It is something else that I dont like and that is something not all humans have...

I agree with you there. It's not that I don't like humans, it just the Na'vi seem to have a lot of the things.... a lot of the things we humans have somehow lost or buried. I don't like humans that are inhuman, which is a majority of society. I believe there's still hope for us, but it's a faint glimmer.

I would rather be a Na'vi than a human for sure, but that doesn't mean that I've completely shoved humanity out the airlock. I acknowledge the fact that we humans need to change. But some don't. They're content to sit on their arses and rake in the profits at the expense of the planet they're sitting on. Those are the people that need to be changed, or failing that, stopped, at any cost because they are killing the rest of us.

Yes, I admit I am a misanthrope. I want more than anything to be one of the Na'vi. To be surrounded by people that think the way I do, to be on Pandora, to thrive off the land.

The people poured their concrete floors,
And built their churches and their walls,
They painted pictures of their hopes and fears on them.

They fashioned streets out of the rock,
And struck up statues to their gods,
And hung out flags on every corner they made.

A single look, a tiny touch can change the system, it's enough,

[Tsyal Makto]

Well, I don't consider myself to be a misanthrope (not anymore at least), but I do consider myself extremely, extremely anti-authority. After a lot of study and thought, I've come to realize that the root of the problem is not the masses of society, it is the elite. It is the few extremely rich, and extremely powerful rat bastards that run the world, and their apologists in the mainstream media. The masses have been purposely made ignorant, so that they will act as resistanceless pawns, to the advance of the elite on their own lives and the well being of the planet. We've been taught not to question, to simply believe everything we see, even if it is the noose that will be eventually be used to hang us all. Any glimmer of hope that people might have is usally quickly extinguished in a flurry of propaganda.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. In a society with a triangular hierarchy, never think that authority has your best interests in mind. Up until the Enlightenment, authority ruled the world with a fascist, corporatist, theocratic, totalitarian system, and they desperately want it back again. They want a world of cheap, ignorant labor that they can exploit to the death for the sake of their own well being, and they want to be able to strip and demolish and drill the world to oblivion for the same reason. They want a system of Neo-fuedalism, in a world where they can drill what they want, blast what they want, pump out what they want, and dump what they want, and if anybody has the audacity to speak out, they'll either 1) "disappear" or 2) get publicly executed. 1984 is a masturbatory aid to some of these sons of bitches.

So yeah, I have gone from hating people in general, to pitying them, while at the same time wishing a slow, painful death on the rich, powerful sons of bitches that truly deserve that kind of fate. They deserve to be lined up, and shot, one-by-one, and I dream of being the one to pull the trigger. Other than being a Na'vi, being able to take part in a global revolution is one of the dreams I long for the most. In the words of Mike Malloy, when the lights go out, there's a few out there that I want personally.

Plus something else by Malloy. It's about American corporations specifically, but it doesn't really matter anymore because they all act the same, wherever they are...