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After Jeff Bezos’ brief escape from Earth yesterday, the founder of retail giant Amazon had an idea. “We have to take all the heavy industry, all the polluting industry, and move it into space and keep the Earth as this magnificent gem of a planet that it is,” he said in an interview. at NBC News. “It’s going to take decades to achieve, but you have to start. And great things start with small steps.
Big things start with small steps, but this particular idea is a big step backwards. Getting into space to craft objects in zero gravity is a logistical nightmare with astronomical costs, to say the least. And it’s not really a very innovative plan. Sticking unwanted objects in a place seemingly out of sight, out of mind is a tired idea. It’s the same old mindset that dumped industrial waste on colonized peoples and colored neighborhoods for centuries.
Long before rich white men catapulted themselves into space, they approached what was the “frontier” at the time with dollar signs in their eyes and destruction in their wake. As a result, today the sacred lands of the Shoshone and Paiute tribes have been designated as a nuclear landfill in Nevada. A rural expanse of land along the Mississippi River, where once enslaved people and their descendants made their home, has become Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley” after the installation of more than 150 refineries and petrochemical facilities.
Their lands and homes have become “areas of sacrifice” for industry and Western development, environmental justice advocates often say. As the founder of Amazon, Bezos is responsible for creating new “sacrifice zones” for warehouses in his retail empire. These have yet to be dealt with – perhaps he could start there, before creating new ones in space?
Do you know what’s so amazing? Pay taxes, treat workers with dignity and take stock of your carbon footprint as floods and fires rage. For too long, frontline communities have been areas of sacrifice for the excesses of the rich. Our communities need real climate action NOW. https://t.co/C080jaO9U5
– GGJ (@ggjalliance) July 20, 2021
On a personal level, Amazon now has a huge footprint in the region where I grew up, the “Inland Empire” of California. When I was a kid there, the place was still sort of a Los Angeles badlands – a potential stop for city dwellers and townspeople crossing the desert to Las Vegas. It was a place out of sight and out of the minds of the Bezoses of the world.
Today, the area is increasingly dominated by retail warehouses that butt up against people’s homes and attract polluting trucks and planes. The Inland Empire has one of the worst air pollution in the country. Amazon is its largest private employer in the region, and it faces pressure from residents and its own employees to clean up its act.
“Every time I see one of these [Amazon] trucks with a smiley face on them, it looks like they’re making fun of people, ”said Adrian Martinez, senior lawyer for the nonprofit Earthjustice. Earthjustice is currently representing environmental groups who have filed a lawsuit against the developer of a new air cargo logistics center in the Inland Empire that is home to Amazon.
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Amazon and Bezos both made resounding pledges to tackle climate change. But the people Martinez represents still breathe Amazon pollution. “That’s what they are, they’re promises. And I think I’ll feel a lot more confident when I see zero emission trucks driving around my customers’ neighborhoods, ”Martinez said.
People like Martinez aren’t asking Bezos, Amazon, or other polluting companies to move their pollution into space. They’re asking for things like more electric delivery vehicles on the road, a much lighter lift than figuring out how to grow the industry in space. They are asking in the first place that the pollution stop and that the billionaires stop designing new “zones of sacrifice”.
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