Wholesale Dealers Of Death And Destruction
By Sukumaran C. V.
04 June, 2014
Countercurrents.org
The most alarming of all man's assaults upon the environment is the contamination of air, earth, rivers, and sea with dangerous and even lethal materials. This pollution is for the most part irrecoverable; the chain of evil it initiates not only in the world that must support life but in living tissues is for the most part irreversible. In this now universal contamination of the environment, chemicals are the sinister and little-recognized partners of radiation in changing the very nature of the world—the very nature of its life. Strontium 90, released through nuclear explosions into air, comes to earth in rain or drifts down as fallout, lodges in soil, enters into the grass or corn or wheat grown there, and in time takes up its abode in the bones of a human being, there to remain until his death. Similarly, chemicals sprayed on croplands lie long in soil, entering into living organisms, passing from one to another in a chain of poisoning and death. Or they pass mysteriously by underground streams until they emerge and, through the alchemy of air and sunlight, combine into new forms that kill vegetation, sicken cattle, and work unknown harm on those who drink from once-pure wells. As Albert Schweitzer has said, ‘Man can hardly even recognize the devils of his own creation.'—Rachel Carson ( Silent Spring ).
Rachel Carson deliberately took on the most cherished tenets of the scientific establishment and, with an unquenchable anger at what she considered the 'senseless, brutish things' that human beings were doing in their war against nature, tried to make us look at what we were doing to life in the name of progress—Linda Lear, Carson's biographer.
In the backdrop of the prolonged protest against the KKNPP, even if my sympathies were and are with the local people, even if I was and am strongly against nuclear power and nuclear (and all kinds of) weapons; I have written nothing against nuclear energy, because as far as nuclear science is concerned I am an ignoramus. As I passionately hate the corporate servile policies of our Left, Right and the Centre of the Left governments and politicians that destroy the Environment and the habitats of the wild animals and the marginalized people, I read everything Arundhati Roy writes and I think if those in power read her works like The End of Imagination , The Greater Common Good , Listening to Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy , An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire and Broken Republic , India will certainly be a better nation as far as the real Indians, the poor and the farmers, the downtrodden and the displaced and of course the Environment, are concerned. And it was through Arundhati Roy, I have come to know about the wonderful writer and Environmental activist Derrick Jensen and his two-volume book Endgame , which begins with the premise: “Civilization is not and can never be sustainable. This is especially true for industrial civilization.”
Jensen made me confident to write against whatever that is nuclear. Still I don't claim that I have understood all the nuances of the nuclear science. And Endgame is not about nuclear science. But to see that the use of the ‘nuclear energy' has done more destructive work than any creative or useful service to the living world, no expertise is needed. The terrible history of nuclear ‘energy' starts with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is high time the advocates of the nuclear energy (and nuclear weapons too) learnt that, as Derrick Jensen says, ‘the planet had already come up with the best solution for storing uranium: keep it in its natural state underground.'
It is from natural uranium the fissionable isotope uranium 235 or enriched uranium—the fuel for nuclear reactors—is separated. And what is left of this process of separation is called depleted uranium (DU). Jensen writes: “The term depleted uranium is something of a misnomer in that it implies that the remaining uranium has become significantly less dangerous, more, well, depleted. But depleted uranium—99.8 percent uranium 238—is just as toxic and about 60 percent as radioactive as enriched uranium. And with a half-life of 4.5 billion years, it will truly be one of this culture's trademark gifts that keeps on giving: it will kill essentially forever.”
If the DU, the left over, is so dangerously radioactive and cancerous, we can simply presume the destructive capacity of the enriched uranium—the fuel we use in the nuclear reactors and its waste. DU and the products from its decay, including other isotopes of uranium, thorium 234, and protactinium release alpha and beta radiation that causes cancer and genetic mutations. Whatever the short term gains of nuclear power, it is stupidity of the highest level to advocate it or to argue for it.
And let us see what the U.S. is doing with the DU. It is better to quote Jensen: “The United States has made a lot of it, well over a billion pounds. Beginning in the 1950s, the feds started trying to figure out what they were going to do with all of this stuff….leaders of government and industry solved the problem of disposing it in typical win-win (for them) fashion by giving it away free to both national and foreign arms manufacturers….The list of countries using or purchasing weapons or shells made with DU is long…Spreading these toxic, radioactive materials around the world is bad enough, but the real danger comes when the weapons are used. And they are used often. In 110,000 air raids against Iraq during the so-called First Gulf War (“so-called” because my understanding is that for something to be called a war the other side has to actually be able to fight back), U.S. A-10 Warthog aircrafts fired about 940,000 DU projectiles.”
“When a DU projectile hits a target, about 70 percent of the round vaporizes into (hot) dust as fine as talcum powder…300 tons of DU are estimated to be blowing in the wind from this particular desert storm….As well as affecting U.S. soldiers, DU has probably already harmed 250,000 Iraqis. The same can be said for the residents of Bosnia, and soon we will be saying the same for the people of Afghanistan. Leukemias and cancers have gone up by 66 percent in recent years in southern Iraq, with some locals experiencing a 700 percent increase. And there have been birth defects. One doctor began her report, “In August we had three babies born with no heads. Four had abnormally large heads. In September we had six with no heads, none with large heads, and two with short limbs. In October, one with no head, four with big heads and four with deformed limbs…””
Do we the humans occupy the earth to live and love or to hate and destroy? Is the destructive urge the prominent feature of the human race? Isn't it high time we stopped destructing and killing, and started to live and let live?
As Derrick Jensen, who belongs to the group of a few real great U. S. writers like Rachel Carson and Howard Zinn, says: “Civilization is not redeemable. This culture will not undergo any sort of voluntary transformation to a sane and sustainable way of living. If we do not put a halt to it, civilization will continue to immiserate the vast majority of humans and to degrade the planet until it (civilization, and probably the planet) collapses.”
The industrial civilization we have been building over the last few centuries is intrinsically woven with violence and devastation — Violence against the indigenous people and the Environment to control and exploit the natural resources for the profit of a few.
The U. S. in the world represents the highest form of the industrial civilization. Let's see for whom the industrial civilization and the U. S. stand for: “Shortly after Bush took office, a government scientist prepared testimony for a Congressional committee on the dangerous effects of industrial uses of coal and other fossil fuels in contributing to “global warming”, a depletion of earth's protective ozone layer. The White House changed the testimony, over the scientist's objections, to minimize the danger. Business worries about regulation seemed to override the safety of the public.” (Howard Zinn).
This characteristic feature (business worries) of the industrial civilization will inevitably lead us to horrible infernos. If we don't put a sudden stop to our craze for industrial development that undermines the very environmental conditions which enable Life to sustain on earth, we will change the whole earth into a fire-ball before too long.
All the great human civilizations have been born in the cradle of river basins. The Mesopotamian in the Euphrates, the Egyptian in the Nile, the Harappan in the Indus. It was the rivers which helped humans to ‘develop' themselves, and if human development causes irrecoverable damage to the rivers by damming them and by dumping garbage and industrial effluents into them and by devastating the forest cover which sustains them, it means that the human civilization is digging its own grave by its so called development.
The nation called the U. S. was built by snatching the pristine lands and virgin forests that belonged to the Native Americans by eliminating them. In 1968 a Native American, Vine Deloria, jr., wrote sarcastically:
“Every now and then I am impressed with the thinking of the non-Indian. I was in Cleveland last year and got to talking with a non-Indian about American history. He said that he was really sorry about what had happened to Indians, but that there was a good reason for it. The continent had to be developed and he felt that Indians had stood in the way, and thus had to be removed. “After all,” he remarked, “what did you do with the land when you had it?” I didn't understand him until later when I discovered that the Cuyahoga River running through Cleveland is inflammable. So many combustible pollutants are dumped into the river that the inhabitants have to take special precautions during the summer to avoid setting it on fire. After reviewing the argument of my non-Indian friend I decided that he was probably correct. Whites had made better use of the land. How many Indians could have thought of creating an inflammable river?”
We are making the whole earth inflammable. Our culture of exploitation is making the whole world a violent and bloody one. The ozone layer which protects life on earth is fast depleting. In the Antarctic Peninsula, summer ice is melting at a faster rate than at any time in the last 1000 years. Prof. Eric Steig from the University of Washington says that it is almost certainly a result of human-induced global warming.
If we continue to be ‘developing' like this, will there be an earth which sustains any form of Life, let alone the humans, in 3014? It is really difficult to answer the question in the affirmative.
Sukumaran C. V. is a former JNU student and his articles on gender, communalism and environmental degradation are published in The Hindu. Email: [email protected]
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