“The Lord can make you tumble, the Lord can make you turn, the Lord can make you overflow, but the Lord can’t make you burn.” That’s Randy Newman’s take on the infamous event of 1969 when Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River, contaminated by decades of industrial waste, burst into flames. Though it wasn’t the first or worst time the river had burned, a Time magazine article about the incident eventually spurred the environmental movement, leading to the Clean Water Act of 1972. Though lacking combustion, the recent spill in the Animas River nonetheless caused the river to burn.
Local reaction, particularly among reflexively ideological Republican politicians, has been predictably self-serving and misguided. Sen. Ellen Roberts called the spill the “EPA’s Love Canal.” Love Canal was, of course, one of the nation’s worst examples of corporate greed and malfeasance – a housing development built on a toxic chemical landfill. The horrifying consequences to the residents living there included cancer and birth defects. This disingenuous scapegoating of the EPA is meant to weaken the very agency that is the bulwark standing between the environment and capitalism run amok. Likewise, Rep. Scott Tipton has proposed a probe of the EPA’s role in the disaster, when it is the mines that merit study.
Capitalism is the most dynamic force in humanity’s economic history. It has raised people out of poverty and improved the lives of billions. From a moral perspective, you can question the motives behind the capitalists’ drive for wealth and power but it is difficult to deny the positive collateral effect. Unfortunately the profit motive is essentially amoral. Corporations can and do destroy the environment in the pursuit of profit.
The obvious response to an ecological disaster caused by unbridled capitalism is regulation. Industrial irresponsibility torched the Cuyahoga River, and closer to home, contaminated the Colorado Rockies and a watershed that drains half a continent.
Contrary to what some politicians want you to believe, government is the solution to many problems. In the sad case of the sullying of the Animas River, the solution lies with the government, specifically the EPA.
Patrick Owens
Durango
