Not long ago, Nauru was one of the wealthiest nations on Earth: The phosphate mines, before they dried up, gave the nation the second-highest per-capita GDP in the world. But today, 90% of its residents are unemployed and the nation's economy sags under enormous debt. The phosphate mineral money that brought Ferraris to the island in the 1970s and '80s has dried up, leaving all those sports cars to rust. Today, most Nauruans live on about 90 to 100 Australian dollars a week.
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But a hundred years of strip mining -- first by a parade of foreign administrators of the island and eventually by Nauru itself after it gained independence in 1968 -- have left two-thirds of the island uninhabitable and killed about 40% of the surrounding marine life, according to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change.
In Nauru's mining history, no one has bothered to rehabilitate the post-mined topography. So much of the island's green skin has been peeled back and left raw and exposed to the elements. It looks like a moonscape. And like the moon, people can neither live nor grow food there.
When the coal runs out, they'll be saying the same thing about mountaintop removal mining in Kentucky.
May 19, 2014 at 10:22 PM
Got a chance to see Godzilla this evening, and I have to say for those of you that enjoyed last year's Pacific Rim and curse the name of Matthew Broderick for the lame 1998 version of this film, Bryan Cranston and some breathtaking CGI work steal the show. This is a Godzilla movie about Godzilla kicking ass, fitting for his 60th anniversary, and not about a bunch of tiny, pitiful humans.
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OK, sure, the pitiful humans do play a part. In 1999, a Japanese scientist named Dr. Serizawa (Ken Watanabe) arrives at a collapsed mining cavern in the Philippines, to discover that the miners have broken through into the nest of a Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organism (MUTO). The beastie has gotten loose, and meanwhile in nearby Japan, nuclear engineer Joe Brody (Bryan Cranston) has noticed distinct, regular seismic activity heading for the plant he works at. He tries to convince the plant owners to shut the place down, but the warning comes too late: both the nuclear plant and his wife are destroyed by whatever created the seismic phenomena.
Fast forward 15 years to 2014 and Joe's son Ford (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) is now a Navy Lieutenant and bomb disposal expert (natch) who finds out his dad is still insisting there's a massive cover-up at the nuclear site (in chilling shades of the Fukushima disaster in our timeline) and they investigate their old house only to discover Joe's seismic research, the fact there's no radiation at all, and that there really is a massive cover-up and Joe's not insane.
Turns out Dr. Serizawa has been hutning this seismic phenomenon too, and he has a very good reason: He's part of an international program called MONARCH that has been working to contain and hide the fact these MUTO monsters have been set loose on earth's surface since man has learned to split the atom, and there's a massive MUTO cocoon at the plant site that's feeding off the radiation and giving off regular EM pulses as a result, and the cocoon is waking up. All hell breaks loose, and the rising MUTO has only one natural predator...
Gojira. Godzilla. The fraggin' King of Monsters. Guess who's coming to dinner?
At this point you'll want to strap in for some serious action and some breathtakingly beautiful cinematography. and some utterly amazing disaster footage. These kaiju don't just fight, they rampage and decimate. They make the beasts in Pacific Rim look like toys. Colossal doesn't begin to describe these forces of nature, and Godzilla is the biggest one of them all in a big, BIG way.
Definitely see this one for the last 30 minutes alone.
1 Comment
Close this window Jump to comment formThey probably don't want anyone teaching about Nauru, either:
Canary in a phosphate mine
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Not long ago, Nauru was one of the wealthiest nations on Earth: The phosphate mines, before they dried up, gave the nation the second-highest per-capita GDP in the world. But today, 90% of its residents are unemployed and the nation's economy sags under enormous debt. The phosphate mineral money that brought Ferraris to the island in the 1970s and '80s has dried up, leaving all those sports cars to rust. Today, most Nauruans live on about 90 to 100 Australian dollars a week.
...
But a hundred years of strip mining -- first by a parade of foreign administrators of the island and eventually by Nauru itself after it gained independence in 1968 -- have left two-thirds of the island uninhabitable and killed about 40% of the surrounding marine life, according to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change.
In Nauru's mining history, no one has bothered to rehabilitate the post-mined topography. So much of the island's green skin has been peeled back and left raw and exposed to the elements. It looks like a moonscape. And like the moon, people can neither live nor grow food there.
When the coal runs out, they'll be saying the same thing about mountaintop removal mining in Kentucky.
May 19, 2014 at 10:22 PM