Not In My Backyard!
by Cheryl Rofer
That’s been an environmental cry for some time, but now we’re also hearing it with regard to the Guantánamo detainees.
I’ve been reminded of it in several articles and opinion pieces on environmental issues lately, and it’s those I’ll deal with in this post, leaving the Guantánamo uproar to others, who are dealing with it quite competently.
There are good reasons for not wanting certain kinds of things in one’s backyard. The hurried uranium-mining for the Cold War buildup of nuclear weapons left some messes behind. Tajikistan currently gets Paul Goble’s spotlight, but there are others across the old Soviet Union: Ukraine and Uzbekistan, to name two more. It’s one of those cosmic oddities that Russia doesn’t have much in the way of uranium reserves, and it’s one of those political difficulties that the Soviet Union was less careful than they might have been, particularly when the mining was outside of Mother Russia, leading to some of the grievances that eventually tore the Union apart.
The United States did these things hurriedly, too, although many of them have been cleaned up. Some of the tailings remain, particularly on Indian land.
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