‘Forgotten, but not gone’: Contaminated land, climate change, & government inaction
Channel: ramblinactivist
Date: 2021-10-24

Ramblinactivist 2021/23, 25th October 2021


This is an over thirty-year long story about my involvement with contaminated sites, and helping communities to get action to clean them up. It’s innately connected to my home town, Banbury: An average small town, on the border between the Midlands and the South East; yet in the 1980s, this place taught me about the issues of waste disposal and land contamination. Not because it was exceptional, but because these issues affect almost every community across Britain.


Despite warnings about the issues of contaminated land since the 1960s, governments have failed to act to create a comprehensive system to track down, assess, and where necessary decontaminate these sites. Just like other major ecological issues – such as climate change – the obstacle to change are the economic vested interests that pressure decision-makers not to act. Valuing profit over the lives of ordinary people, they prevent effective action.


Find out more about 'The Truth About Zane' here:
https://www.truthaboutzane.com/



You can read The ‘Meta-Blog’ issue no.18, download a PDF, or download/listen to the audio podcast, here:
http://www.fraw.org.uk/blog/2021/20211025-forgotten_but_not_gone.shtml

You can find all my various blogs here:
http://www.fraw.org.uk/blogs/index.shtml

It would really help to promote this work if you could follow, subscribe, or like my social media presence -- which can be accessed from the link above. In today’s digital analytics popularity contest, all that button-pressing means something in today’s messed-up world.


Chapters:

00:00 Opening titles
00:34 Introduction
01:15 ‘What's past is prologue’
02:45 The farce of ‘Section 143’
05:40 Cameron & Osborne deregulate further
08:40 ‘High-tech’ landfills are this generation’s toxic legacy
12:58 The meeting I knew I would have one day
15:06 Solving this begins by valuing our children, not land
17:23 End credits