Jenny Hall

I watched this amazing documentary by Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky last night in Fed Square. It was both inspiring and depressing – what are we doing to this planet? There were whole landscapes without trees or plants of any kind…

Some interesting facts from the documentary about the Three Gorges Dam in China:

-the dam is 50% again bigger than any other dam on earth
-most of the foreign engineers walked off the job because they thought it was just too big (the reservoir alone is 600km long)
-when they filled the dam in 2006 seismologists recorded a wobble in the earth’s rotation
-it took 15 days to fill
-13 cities and 2 million people were moved to accommodate the dam, often the people themselves taking apart their houses brick by brick (they were paid per brick)
-day labourers working on the dam are being paid 20 yuan per day – that’s AUD$3 dollars
-27 nuclear power plants are planned for the next 10 years and coalburning furnaces are being constructed weekly
-the new cities built to replace the old have not been well-planned, are very high density and have no parks or public spaces…

And before you decide to update your computer to the latest model, 90% of recycled computers end up in China. They are broken down by hand (without protective clothing) for parts and the chemicals, especially lead, beryllium, cadmium, mercury and highly toxic phosphor dust that come out of that process are apparent in the air 15kms outside of Taizhou, the main town. For more on this, read ‘Where computers go to die’ at: http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/04/10/ewaste/

Makes our feel-good attitudes to recycling seem completely misguided…