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who rocks the cradle... By Debora MacKenzie You can always spot someone who has taken care of toddlers. They glide about at embassy receptions, chat with potentates, sip kir--and move every single glass back from the edge of wherever it's been left. This kind of behaviour is seared into your brain so deeply even after the shortest spell caring for anyone small and mobile that it becomes unconscious and permanent. Those glasses must be moved to safety--because if something can spill, it will. This would not be a bad instinct to instil in environment ministers. After all, people who look after two-year-olds don't debate the precautionary principle--they live it. So I am shocked that Isabel Tocino, Spain's environment minister, could have let a pond of toxic sludge near Seville spill all over her nice green wetland. The woman has six kids. Perhaps she has no real power and couldn't move that pond back from the edge however desperately she wanted to. Or maybe she hasn't yet grasped the similarity between governing countries and looking after small children. Last month, a dam failed at the Los Frailes mine and spilled four million cubic metres of toxic sludge near the Doņana National Park, a vital refuelling point for migrating birds and home to lots of wildlife. Bulldozers deflected the flood away from the main park. But the heavy metals that now contaminate the soil upstream from Doņana will be leaching out for years--into local crops and people, into plants eaten by birds from the reserve and into the park itself This Week, 2 May, p 12). As an accident waiting to happen, this was the equivalent of a jug full of purple grape juice wobbling on the edge of a coffee table in a beige-carpeted living room full of hyperactive two-year-olds. Los Frailes is an open-cast zinc, lead, copper and silver mine. When you mine metals, you pulverise rock, add water, and treat the slurry so you can skim off the metal bits. Then you dump what's left, the tailings, into a pond to settle. At Los Frailes, this mess of acid and heavy metals was held back by an earth dam. It suddenly broke--inexplicably, say its owners. Not really, say activists who had long been issuing warnings about the dam. The pond had already been used for 19 years by another mine. That mine closed, and last year Los Frailes opened, with twice the previous mine's output. Moreover, there has been record rainfall in Spain this past year, so there was more liquid going into the pond. Perhaps this sudden increase in pressure made a small leak expand into something much bigger. Or perhaps the managers were raising the height of the dam. This could cause the pressure within the dam wall to reach a point at which the earth and water might suddenly behave like a liquid, making the structure fail catastrophically. In 1985, 300 people died when a dam at an Italian fluor spar mine failed under remarkably similar circumstances. If tailings are the environmental equivalent of grape juice, then people who manage over-stressed dams are two-year-olds. Two-year-olds don't mean to upset the juice. They just don't understand what they're doing enough to guarantee they won't. Which leaves parents having to arrange things to prevent spillages. More precautions must have been possible at Los Frailes--the pond could have been moved, the dam reinforced, or the whole project rethought. Why did the minister not grasp this? I have a cunning plan. Europe is desperately short of childcare facilities for the children of working parents. It is also short of government ministers with the precautionary principle in their bones--certainly Spain could use a few more. And what do politicians like? To be seen as caring and able to shoulder a tough job. And to have their photos taken with small children. I propose a chain of politically funded childcare centres across Europe. We could call it Politikids. Anyone aspiring to high office would have to put in time in these centres looking after the voters of the future. We could trust them to behave unimpeachably. With an entire political class conditioned to move the juice away from the edge of the table, everyone could breath easier. And our children would be cared for by educated, motivated people who would probably pay us for the privilege. After all, if we can't trust politicians with our toddlers, why on earth should we trust them with our governments? From New Scientist, 16 May 1998 | |
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