You know what, you're right. Industrial sabotage IS an option. Thank you for opening my eyes.
listen. we can’t afford to take options off the table. i was reading this article last night about how northern St Louis is basically knee deep in uranium leachage from the Manhattan Project and how it is quite explicitly giving everyone cancer. Oh, and there’s also a spreading underground landfill fire that’s steadily approaching the uranium dump site, and the EPA wasn’t doing shit. They were “trying to repair community relations” after a bunch of moms who had cancer whose kids died of cancer demanded a community meeting and the EPA was like: sorry guys! this is just gonna keep poisoning you!
and there was a line in the article about how the community was powerless, how they couldn’t take shovels and trucks and excavate and remove the uranium themselves, or address the dump fire
it’s not an easy task, but it’s a straightforward one. Something has to be done. The government will only mobilize for public safety if put under overwhelming pressure to do so. Those moms organized: they created Just Moms STL and have been bringing pressure, and they’re getting media attention. If they got their group together and got shovels and trucks and showed up at the site and said: let us in, we are going to take care of this if you don’t - obviously they aren’t going to be let in. But you come back every day, and say fuck you, this is killing us, and since you don’t care, we’ll be coming back until you do - that’s going to make a bigger stir than just some quiet community meetings.
The goal, in this case, is putting pressure on the EPA to address this now. The goal is media attention and national pressure. These are white people and it’s radiation, not lead poisoning, so the government might even care. There are cases where ordinary people don’t need specialized equipment to handle things - snipping chain link fences, for example, or ruining concrete, or stealing construction materials. In cases like these, however, there needs to be federal action. this is something regular citizens can’t do themselves.
To move tons of leaking unshielded uranium to a location that is “safe” is an undertaking that should be done by professionals, by experts, with the best possible gear & all possible precautions. Deciding where to move it is by itself a huge undertaking: where will it go? how will it be stored? is this just going to start poisoning someone else? Sick moms in STL just don’t have the resources to manufacture containers to safely store the uranium or protective gear to handle it or shielded trucks or trains to carry it. They can’t even purchase any of this stuff in the quantities necessary. This is why we have a government, and things like the EPA: to undertake the projects too big for any one community alone.
What the community can do - what we can do - is bring on pressure. sometimes direct action is investing in some wire cutters and doing some nighttime strolls in curiously concealing clothing; sometimes it’s making a public stink big enough to make people care. I’m not here to tell activists or especially the STL moms how to do things - they’ve been doing this for years and years already, and they know the community and their resources and they decide their approach. I just think that this is an example that we can all look at and learn from, and think about how this relates to us and our communities. What would you do if this was your neighborhood? if every kid on your street had cancer, and most of the adults, too, and you had to practically become an investigative reporter yourself just find out what’s going on, let alone address it?
Anyway. The EPA has just decided on a strategy to address the radioactive pollution. The “strategy, announced by former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, was dubbed “Excavation Plus,” and entailed partial removal of the site’s radioactive contaminants, followed by installation of a specially engineered cover as a form of long-term protection.” As outlined in the linked article, they don’t know where they’re moving the waste yet, they’re only removing some of the “contamination” and they’re capping the rest - just like they did to the local Weldon Springs site that processed the uranium, which “was found to be so contaminated that the Department of Energy eventually entombed the whole site in layers upon layers of clay and soil, gravel, engineered filters and limestone rocks, creating a mountain covering forty-five acres, containing approximately 1.5 million cubic yards of hazardous waste”. Oh, and it’s “leaking”.
so, yknow. Write and call your senators and reps and mayor and city council and tell them to make clean energy & sustainable innovation a priority. Keep an eye out in your community: are you near a waste treatment plant? a certain kind of mine? are people getting sick in your area? is something being built in your county that’s going to eventually kill you? We have to look out for each other, because with the government it’s gonna be too little too late. Because if we don’t, even the best case scenario for these situations becomes a nightmare. Even if they clean up all the radiation, even if they speed it up and get it done in months instead of years, even if the government pays out reparations to the victims - they still have cancer. Their kids have cancer. Their kids have died. The damage was done.
