While I was posting the following Wendell Berry quote yesterday, I was thinking about Libby, Montana in which a company (W.R. Grace) watched townspeople sicken and die for 30 years after realizing their responsibility in the sickness and deaths of dozens of townspeaple but deciding to sacrifice those lives, and cover their culpability in order to keep profits up. By the time the E.P.A. showed up in Libby, 120 people in this tiny town had died from asbestos poisoning and 25% of the population was sick with lung abnormalities related to asbestos exposure. In the face of 100,000 asbestos claims (amazingly, most of these were unrelated to Libby), W.R. Grace hid in bankruptcy while $120 million taxpayer dollars went into the first stages of cleaning up the mess in Libby.
Berry’s quote is worth repeating:
Were the catastrophes of Love Canal, Bhopal, Chernobyl, and the Exxon Valdez episodes of war or of peace? They were, in fact, peacetime acts of aggression, intentional to the extent that the risks were known and ignored. (Wendell Berry)
