Monday, March 06, 2006

invisible to the decision-makers


The Voice of San Diego shows how degraded conditions in the colonias of Tijuana are directly related to environmental degradation there and miles away in San Diego. A welcome change: the environmentalists working on cross-border issues do their best not to blame the residents.

2 comments:

Bryan Finoki said...

it's interesting. the primordial toxic stews which are created at the border, now coming back to haunt the U.S.. After all this time, of Americans funneling their waste onto the Mexico side (the two sides playing an age old game of toxic volley and waste 'hot potato'), to create a sort of toxic buffer zone between them; a fortified hazardous wall, now comes back for revenge in a slushy mess, where entire canyons slide in a single instantaneous shift back across the border, where houses and farms are buried and churned and resurface on the other side of the fence again. the border has become now an ambiguous swamp of despicable and irresponsible sewage policy, where landscapes are used as weapons against the poor. in all their attempts to pass off their problem to 'the other side' and to keep the borderlines clarified, the result is a swelling transborder waste site consuming both countries like some liminal cancer gone wild.

when are we going to finally see these borderzones as opportunities to create something special, something unique, as models of evolutionary planning, cultural diplomacy, environmental bliss, rather than perpetuating some misguided game of toxic avenger with our neighbors, to the point of sharing an irreversible enviro-disaster with each other forever.

rn said...

So true, Bryan. Borderlands should be interesting places, in-between zones where cultures can influence each other.

Instead, we seem to prefer the militarized version: either barren zones of fences and walls or horrific zones that show mutual disregard, as we shower each other with sewage.

Talk about mutually assured destruction.