Comments on: Everything Flooded with Red by Andria Timmer

By: Hayden Panettiere

Hayden Panettiere — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 19:37:57 +0000

It is amazing, I have talked to many elderly people and they say that they never remember disasters like this. I am not sure if it is just better publicity with the internet and such or we have one huge problem on our hands.

By: Rex

Rex — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 17:01:03 +0000

I still think one of the best ethnographies of an industrial disaster of this sort — and extremely relevant to what’s going on in in this entry — is “Everything In Its Path” by Kai Erikson. So often the scale of these disasters is incomprehensible to the people involved in them, much less outsiders who hear of them second hand. Erikson’s book does a superb job of presenting the desolation and hopelessness that emerges in the aftermath of these sorts of disasters.

By: MTBradley

MTBradley — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 21:24:16 +0000

An analogous and oddly (to me at least, but maybe that’s just because it happened in my part of the world) unmemorialized event occurred in 1924 in Smyth County, Virginia.

By: Marissa

Marissa — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 19:42:32 +0000

I was having a powerful response to the same comment last night reading this guys, but wasn’t sure how do make it into a productive comment. I work with a mining combine (city and mine built together) in the former Soviet sphere. There is a huge tailings pond at this site, which was reinforced in the mid-90s, during the period in which this community was at its lowest point in terms of economic production at least. This article also has a huge assumption that is bothering me about alot of anthropology I come across lately; which i see as basically a kind of economic man argument that many anthropologists would oppose vehemently if posed in terms other than those of “deregulation”:

When they joined the European Union in 2004, Hungary was ahead of the curve when it came to cleaning up environmental messes which is why this latest catastrophe comes as such a surprise. Hungary also had the longest wait between application and admission to the European Union. During this time they were scrutinized on everything from environmental concerns to ethnic relations. One would expect that potential environmental threats would have been addressed. It begs the question, is this disaster an anomaly or a sign of things to come? What does this bode for the neighboring countries of Romania and Bulgaria who, in comparison, had a very short period of pre-accession negotiations?

By: Rick

Rick — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 12:39:58 +0000

“Environmental disasters are becoming more and more common and it serves no one if we continue to downplay their severity.”

Is that true? If we looked at both the severity and regularity of environmental disasters historically, would that statement be true? Can we say that even in the former Soviet Union things were better environmentally than they are today? And, if it’s true, then by how much? Also, wouldn’t we need to differentiate between chronic and acute disasters; say, the Gulf Oil Spill versus chronic pollution in China’s expanding urban areas?

By: Jakob

Jakob — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 11:58:33 +0000

I don’t like the trend these days to write “environmental disasters are become more and more” and the like, which I think is not true. What this disaster and the one in the gulf of mexico have in common (and I definitely do agree, that they can fully be called disasters), is that they where human caused environmental disaster, which might in fact be a sign of the times. It may be a slight difference, but just saying, they are a lot or even more environmental disasters these days, sounds like the earth itself was at fault.