Word: minamata
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...Japan is not without sin. Indeed, when it was industrializing in the last century, Japan was as famous for environmental catastrophes as for conservation. Minamata disease, the consequence of an industrial mercury discharge, caused muscular and neurological damage for thousands of Japanese; dioxin pollution has only recently been addressed. In the 1960s, Tokyo's air had the sort of reputation that Beijing's does today. Japan's household carbon dioxide emissions have increased an estimated 40% since 1990. A visit to any department store is to bear witness to an excess of wrapping and packaging...
...Pressman, who works for the American mining giant Newmont, which operates a mine 100 km south of Manado. "It's one of the great, unrecognized environmental disasters of our time." Then Pressman mentions a name that has been burned into the world's consciousness along with Bhopal and Chernobyl: Minamata...
...Minamata is the Japanese town where for 40 years a plastics company discharged mercury into the bay from which most of the town's fish were caught. Scores, perhaps hundreds of people subsequently died and thousands developed crippling illnesses, including paralysis and severe psychological problems. Children were born with deformities, the images of their arched, agonized bodies a perpetual reminder of the black underside of the 20th century's industrial triumphalism. That tragedy, Pressman points out, was the product of 27 tons of mercury over 40 years. "Imagine what these amounts could do in Manado...
...mercury being dumped by the illegal miners in Talawaan is a relatively stable compound that is toxic only after repeated contact. But eventually it will be converted by bacteria into methyl mercury, the far more toxic form that wreaked such damage in Minamata after the same transformation took place. Guesses about how long the process will take range from two to 10 years. But nobody disputes that the conversion will happen. And when it does, Manado will be in grave danger. In Minamata, the population subsisted largely on a diet of fish caught in their...
...Minamata is precisely the sort of piece New Yorkers expect to find only in New York. There are no plans to take it there, and that is too bad. Yet maybe the best measure of the health of the American theater is that now New Yorkers, too, have to travel to see the full range of what American creators have to offer...