Save The Earth - Start a Business

It had been a while since I'd dusted off
PhotoshopThe Gimp, and so went in search of interesting fodder. I'm a little stunned at what I found.

The picture isn't what stunned me - it's more or less run-of-the-mill 1930's Heroic Progressivism. What stunned me was Treehugger.com that used it in a post titled 6 Green Lessons We Can Learn From Communism.

What do you think of when someone mentions communism? Stalin, a hammer and sickle, the color red, Russia, Cuba, factories, soldiers marching in unison, and cold, cold oppression? Yeah, me too. But what if I told you that in some ways, communism is green?
Before you call the Dept. of Homeland Security, consider this: The impression of communism I invoked is largely thanks to American cinema, a still paranoid post-McCarthy news media, and Stalin's monstrous reign after WWII. But between the actual doctrines of Marxism and the pre-revolution fervor in Russia and Eastern Europe, there are actually a bunch of lessons we can glean from communists and apply today—to environmentalism.
Yes, even though communism led to corrupt governments responsible for the suffering of millions, communists and communist thinking have nonetheless produced some worthy green ideas.

Wow. The post goes on to describe a bunch of stuff that mostly falls into the wouldn't it be nice if we could force people to stop doing things we don't like (living in McMansions, etc), but all I could think of (other than a hundred million dead) were the ecological catastrophes that came from Communist rule. In the interest of helping out the Greens, here are six green lessons they need to learn from Communism:

1. The Aral Sea

The Aral Sea, which straddles the border between Kazakhstan in the north and Uzbekistan in the south, was once the fourth largest inland body of water in the world, and until the 1980s, Muynak was a busy fishing port.
Now, however, the nearest water is about 100 kilometers (60 miles) away, and the boats that were the town's economic lifeblood lie abandoned on the dry seabed.
The lake began to shrink in the 1960s, when the Soviet Union embarked on a vast irrigation project, diverting water from the Syr Darya and Amu Darya rivers that fed the Aral Sea to cotton production in the Central Asian deserts.
Since then, the water level has dropped by 18 meters. As the volume of water in the sea has decreased, its salinity has increased, killing off marine life.

2. Chernobyl

The Chernobyl disaster, (Ukrainian: Чорнобильська катастрофа) Čornobyľśka katastrofa, was a nuclear accident that occurred on 26 April 1986 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (then part of the Soviet Union), now in Ukraine. It is considered to be the worst nuclear power plant accident in history and the only level 7 event on the International Nuclear Event Scale. It resulted in a severe release of radioactivity due to a power excursion that destroyed one of the site's reactors. Most fatalities from the accident were caused by radiation poisoning.

3. A nation of Chernobyls

The massive civil and military use of nuclear power since the 1950s has also damaged the regional environment. Most of the Soviet Union’s nuclear tests (over a hundred from 1955 to 1990) were carried out on Novaya Zemlya, and large quantities of solid and liquid radioactive waste were dumped in the Barents and Kara Seas. The northern fleet, which includes nuclear-powered icebreakers and nuclear submarines (sometimes without nuclear warheads but still driven by nuclear reactors), is stationed at bases along the northern coast of the Kola Peninsula, near Murmansk. The nuclear power station at Polyarnyy is classified as "dangerous" by the International Atomic Energy Agency. As if this were not enough, the Soviet Union detonated nuclear charges for civil engineering and mining purposes on at least twenty occasions from 1969 to 1988. Few of these activities are mentioned in official reports, and very little is known of the extent of radioactive contamination in the region.

4. China's Three Gorges Dam

It's not that it's flooding a huge area, although that is causing all sorts of problems. The real issue is that the land that's being flooded is contaminated by pollution.

5. De-forestation in China

Each year, China loses an area the size of Oregon to the desert. Poor land management? Boy, howdy.

6. De-forestation, aquifer depletion, and sewage contamination of rivers and bays in Cuba.

Cuban bays are widely recognized as being among the most polluted in the world. (7) The Almendares River, which flows through Havana, carries the untreated sewage of over 42,000 people directly to Havana Harbor and coastal waters. (8) There has been evidence that in Havana, an underground aquifer that provides 36% of the city’s potable water that runs directly beneath the polluted Almendares, represents a very high risk of widespread drinking water contamination for the city. (9)

This is a phenomenon that is being replicated throughout the country: it has been estimated that annually 863.4 billion gallons of contaminated water finds its way into Cuba’s rivers, much of it industrial.

Funny, these are perhaps the six worst ecological catastrophes in history, and they all occurred under Communist regimes. You might almost expect a pattern; indeed, as TJIC once said in a different context:

if when you attempt to implement “wonderful communism” and every single frickin’ time you get mass murder, starvation, and gulags, then that is communism

Can we please add "environmental catastrophe to the list?

And that's your lesson for today: Save The Earth - Start a Business. People take care of what they own.


No need to thank me, it's all part of the service.