Ever since I first heard such places existed, the idea of
the Alang ship-breaking yards
has haunted my imagination
(scroll north - it keeps going for a while).
This is where the world's shipping goes to
die: one long beach where vessels are run aground, to be stripped down
and chopped
up by workers of all ages in the most horrendous conditions, using axes
and hammers and their bare hands.
I'm not sure how close I could get, as a westerner - but I'd sure like
to try and see it for myself. The image of this enormous beach,
scattered with these vast steel behemoths shimmering in the heat haze
of a thousand oxy-axetylene torches, while people swarm over them like
ants over a carcass...
4 comments:
Wow.
It's the ants stripping the carcass of the cockroach, as well as a restatement that the organic will always wear away and consume the manufactured. I was thinking about this earlier in the week. It started with my realising that even if I was ever to get a book written and published, it would most likely be out of print in my lifetime, a transitory notion of success. And then I realised that if I was to become an architect or a builder, my handiwork might, if economic conditions were right, might last 500 years max before it was pulled or knocked over my time or progress or the weather. And then I realised that whatever we create - no matter how majestic and huge and over-engineered - will eventually be worn flat by the wind. And then I felt very very small and so much better.
National Geographic did a great picture story on this a few years ago. While it looks highly photogenic, I can't help but think it's also highly toxic.
"I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said:—Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away."
I was thinking on this subject just on Monday morning, looking out of a cab window as we crossed over the Thames. I was thinking about how our civilisation is held up by information being passed from one generation of to the next, how in the past, we'd encoded that information in stones, or clay, papayrus or paper - but now we make do with the flimsiest, most transient, ephemeral media conceivable - it could all so easily just evaporate into nowhere - leaving much of the last 20 years as a complete mystery to anyone trying to figure out what we've all been up to during all this time.
To add: I spent some time looking at this article and others when I heard about the shipbreaking trade. I feel about it the same sort of dismay I felt when I heard about the west African computer breaking trades.
A great report from 2005. Basel Action Network’s (BAN) (long - 85 page .pdf) “The Digital Dump: Exporting Re-use and Abuse to Africa”
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