let me share a memory with y’all. it’s from i guess 1978 or thereabouts. it’s high summer. i don’t remember where my mom was driving me, in our avocado green chevette, i just know there was a traffic jam that turned 35w northbound into a parking lot from horizon to horizon.
picture it – wait, you don’t have to use your imagination, this happened all the damn time back then.
every one of those damn cars was burning leaded gasoline. there were no emissions regulations. there were no safety regulations. there were just thousands and thousands of detroit steel shoeboxes belching visible smoke as they idled, engines loud and hot, here and there a radiator giving up in the heat, a cloud of burning oil rising.
i, a smeet of five or six, was choking on toxic smog.
i reckon it was about a half hour into the traffic jam that i first threw up. i remember a blinding headache, i remember being confused, i remember dry heaving with my arms and head hanging out the window, the green metal of the car burning my hands and my chin. i don’t remember passing out, but i’m told i lost consciousness before mom was able to get to an off-ramp, because there were no emergency lanes on the highways back then.
i lived. and life went on. what were we going to do, complain? if i’d died, the cause of death probably would’ve been recorded as heatstroke, not carbon monoxide poisoning.
i know i’m probably preaching to the choir here on tumblr. but i really wish i could tell that story to the people who think deregulation is no big deal. i wish they’d put themselves in my mom’s shoes.
or even just look at some old pictures, then look out the window.
ever notice how cityscapes used to have that orange tint and hazy aura? yeah, that’s poison gas.
remember how the mississippi river used to be a stinking soup of baby-shit yellow sludge covered with disturbingly stiff rafts of light orange foam?
i can’t even find pictures of the sludge and foam, i guess they didn’t end up on the internet. the smell was indescribable. that oily shimmer. the reek of dead things. people didn’t boat on the river for pleasure; it smelled too bad, it was too ugly, and you could get super super sick if you touched the water.
and now look at it.
i still wouldn’t want to drink it, but if i fell in i wouldn’t bolt for the shower in a panic, you know?
if the thieving billionaires get their way, we can kiss those sailboats goodbye, and learn the smell of toxic foam once more. the ultra-rich won’t even feel the extra money, they’ve already got more than they could ever touch, they just stash it in offshore accounts to rot, but the rest of us will return to a time of neverending nausea and weird cancers. a time when every elementary school class had at least one kind who’d been born with no fingers or their heart outside their body, and this was just… the way things were.
i’m sorry. i didn’t mean to longpost. it’s just. god. y’all have no idea how CLEAN everything is now, compared to when i was a kid. and these rich old men are counting on that, on people not knowing or not remembering how bad it was before regulation, not realizing how much we need these protections until it’s too late.
Look, my parents worked for the EPA in the 70s and 80s. They have stories, I tell you. My dad mostly did Waste Cleanup, where he went around to contaminated sites and worked out how to Fix Them so they no longer killed everything around. He told me he used to wear these very sturdy boots since there was a lot of walking around and such. One day he goes to a site that has a literal green haze over the ground. He walks around with his breathing mask and takes samples and does other engineering-type things. Went back to the hotel, slept all night, and when he woke up in the morning he put his foot through the bottom of his boot – because the toxic soil had eaten the stitching out and ate through parts of the leather.
Overnight.
He had a personal Biohazard suit. And gas mask. He had a sample spill in his car and it ate through the seats leather, the foam, and damaged the metal underneath.
He’d routinely come home with jars and go “Hey Kelsey, this is what Toxic Waste smells like.”
He had to have monthly blood draws and check ups to make sure he wasn’t being poisoned by his job.
And he cleaned up those sites. For years he did that. And he actually enjoyed it because he loved being able to look at those sites and see wildlife return years later. He mostly does stream restoration now and teaches science classes at a high school, but he still takes the occasional cleanup job because he wants to leave a healthy world to my brother and me.
I will physically fight someone who says that the EPA and environmental regulations aren’t necessary. Because there are people who aren’t that old that remember what it was like before the government was like “hey businesses? maybe don’t dump your toxic sludge into bodies of water or nearby parks.”
Those corporations won’t do the right thing unless they are fined heavily if they don’t.
The war on you
Person who just told me regulation re: climate change is probably a bad idea?
I was a kid in the ‘80s, and this right here is why I don’t believe you.
I got to breathe in leaded petrol for the first 9 years of my life because we didn’t stop using it until the end of ‘99. I grew up in a a city with particularly low air quality, so fuck knows what that did to me. ‘99 was also the same year asbestos use was finally banned, but it’s still in everything from homes to schools. My Nan spent years trying to get it removed from her council house floor, the floor I spent my childhood playing on.
Part of the argument for Brexit was the same sort of “let’s free ourselves from the horrors of regulations!”. I dread to fucking think what shite we’ll start importing and what’ll end up in stuff when companies start cutting corners.
There’s a plot of land not too far from me. It’s just an empty field with some trees, but it’s fenced off with biohazard signs and no one will build next to it because there used to be a battery factory there and they’d just dump all the byproducts.
My dad dumped various dangerous chemical wastes and asbestos and shit on some random island in the Thames Estuary while he was working at a dockyard in the 70s and they built a posh housing estate on the same island over the top of the landfill when I was a kid. If you lived there, you were banned from growing edible plants in your garden.
Oh shit, apparently it wasn’t just asbestos:
Wooooooow
but regulation is just governments being nosy right
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