A year later, in November 2016, I returned to Mariana to commemorate the first anniversary of the Fundão dam disaster, or what Brazilian activists had designated as the Rio Doce “environmental crime.” This time our caravan started at Linhares, the fishing and surfing town where the toxic spill had entered the Atlantic Ocean, and we worked our way back along the route of the spill to the mine. [...] On November 5, in what used to be Bento Rodrigues, the town closest to the tailings dam, those present renewed their commitments — to keep fighting for the rights of the citizens who suffered most directly from the dam collapse at Mariana and to strengthen the campaigns for a radical paradigm shift in the extractive sector, both in Brazil and globally.5 In the fall of 2017 I returned to Brazil onc. [...] These techniques dramatically increase the ratio of mining waste to marketable ore, which in turn means a need for more and bigger tailings ponds and increased pressure to overextend the engineered capacity of the existing dams.24 Before the breach of the Fundão dam, Samarco had been accelerating the scale of iron production (and therefore the amount of tailings) at the Mariana mine in order to ma. [...] The scope of the spills has raised complex and ongoing public policy questions for governments and mining companies about short-term and long-term risks in mine tailings storage and the liabilities of both governments and mining companies in the face of far-reaching environmental disasters. [...] In the days immediately after the Mount Polley spill, the BC government hastened to assure the public that the cost of the cleanup after the breach would be borne by Imperial Metals and not by taxpayers.
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- 64
- Published in
- Canada
