Things Have Changed (sidebar) has the blogger's career experiences with environmental degradation in non-capitalist places, in response to the frequent accusation that it is capitalism that has caused pollution. Experiencing the Environment.
That same year, a colleague went on a due diligence trip to Volgograd (the former Stalingrad) to look at a factory our company was thinking of acquiring. Upon his return, he reported that the toxic waste from the plant, and every other factory in the area, was transported by a pipeline some miles to a local lake where it was dumped without any treatment.
What, are you doubting his lived experience?
4 comments:
I've lived & worked in the far east, in the FSU. But far the most responsible operations are the ones run by western companies. There is no comparison. It's what, 3 or 4 generations born in the USA since WWII, we've enjoyed the experience of living and raising our young in a high-trust society, but at the same time, most have grown so accustomed to the workings of their surroundings that they no longer understand their basis.
I definitely do not doubt his lived experience. I lived in China for a while twenty-five years ago, and the levels of pollution were extraordinary compared to anywhere I've been in the United States. On a "clear" day you could walk up to the top of the local hill and look back down, and perceive gradations of air pollution down to the street level where it was thickest (and where you lived most of the time).
An incident I omitted in my piece since it wasn't directly on environmental or safety: in the mid-80s I spoke with one of our plant managers who had returned from a delegation to the Soviet Union. At a 20,000 employee plant with a similar product but using several generations older technology, we was explaining a process improvement which he'd drawn on a sheet of paper. Asking someone in the room to make a copy he was met by silence and then the topic was changed. Later, someone took him aside to explain that copiers were banned as the authorities were worried someone might use them to duplicate forbidden political materials.
Working in the FSU (Kazakhstan) we brought in a rail car full of oil well cementing chemicals, very expensive. Some of it was dry sacked material, on pallets, some of it in 5 gallon heavy duty industrial plastic buckets, the kind with snap lids, O-ring seals. The car went missing in transit. When found, the seals had been broken, and all of the liquid chemicals had been stolen. Even worse, we found the chemicals, hundreds of thousands of dollars worth, had been poured out on the railbed. They were after the buckets, which were forbidden from private ownership, because they didn't like people being able to carry things away in them.
Soviet-era thinking and rules-making was always a mind-bending exercise for westerners, when encountered. Usually when you started to grasp the brutal logic of it, it was time to move on to another assignment.
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