"Texaco came barreling into this delicate ancient landscape in the early 1960s with all the subtlety and grace of an invading army. And when it left in 1992, it left behind, according to the lawsuit, widespread toxic contamination that devastated the livelihoods and traditions of the local people, and took a severe toll on their physical well-being.
A brief filed by the plaintiffs said: “It deliberately dumped many billions of gallons of waste byproduct from oil drilling directly into the rivers and streams of the rainforest covering an area the size of Rhode Island. It gouged more than 900 unlined waste pits out of the jungle floor — pits which to this day leach toxic waste into soils and groundwater. It burned hundreds of millions of cubic feet of gas and waste oil into the atmosphere, poisoning the air and creating ‘black rain’ which inundated the area during tropical thunderstorms."
A libertarian acquaintance of mine insists that if oil companies are left to their own devices they will clean up their own messes because they will not want to "lose customers." Thus he wants our own EPA and other regulatory bodies dissolved. Also, with no more government, there will be (by definition!) no more government corruption. And the aforementioned unsavory destruction of nature can only occur when companies collude with corrupt governments. See the logic? Me neither.
The current version of Homo sapiens doesnt seem to be compassionate enough to leave to a strictly libertarian form of governance, as much as some love to believe. Until we reach an 'age of compassion', it seems that we will have to rely on just enough government to keep us safe and just enough privacy to keep us sane. Events that have occurred in the Niger and Amazon Deltas for fifty years and more show us that balance continues to elude us in devastating ways.
No comments:
Post a Comment