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I've been thinking about the Hudson River Valley, an area someone once described as the Rhineland of North America, a stunning construct of sweeping vistas and panoramas of the magnificent waters of a winding, roaring estuary, flanked by cliffs and palisades and mountains. You may know that this area inspired the first significant American art movement, the Hudson River School, led by the likes of Thomas Cole and Jasper Cropsey, and, later, by Albert Bierstadt and Frederic Church.
Church loved the region so much that he built a Moorish palace, called Olana, on a mountaintop outside the city of Hudson, New York, about 110 miles north of Manhattan. He was not alone; luminaries from Washington Irving to Robert Fulton, the inventor of the steamboat, to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, to the French designers who founded the fabric company Pierre Deux, have inhabited stately manses on cliffs above the river.
So, given its natural beauty, its rich cultural heritage, and its iconic significance in our nation's history, I've come up with the perfect way to celebrate the Hudson River Valley. Why not find a piece of land near Olana, bring in a foreign company that is still paying reparations for its use of slave labor during the Holocaust, and invite them to build an industrial plant that produces so much pollution that it would be illegal in the company's home country? |
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Just for fun, why not build a 40-story high smokestack that would dwarf Olana and send plumes of smoke through at least three states?
You could even power it with a mixture of coal and - possibly - combustible animal parts and old rubber tires. Then, you could build a conveyor almost a mile long to carry the plant's product - cement - on a raucous, rattling, earsplitting course down to a pier on the Hudson created by an illegal landfill.
For good measure, why not make it the largest cement plant in North America? Larger even than the one the same company just opened in Camden, New Jersey, which has already paid a $20,000 fine for violating pollution rules.
Great idea, huh?
You might not think so, but, as the St. Lawrence Cement Company, a subsidiary of the Swiss holding company Holcim, has discovered, you can bring this idea close to fruition without attracting much media attention. |
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For several years now, the company has been pressing its plans for the giant plant without raising much of a blip on the national media radar. The Attorney General of Connecticut and public officcials from Massachusetts have joined New York groups in opposing the plan, but this still doesn't seem to attract the attention of the mass media.
Strangely enough, when I turn on the tube, or the radio, or pick up the national magazines or newspapers, I don't read about the plan to build the biggest cement plant on the continent in the middle of one of the country's most beautiful areas, for the benefit of foreign former slave overseers, at a cost to the health of people in three states.
Don't you hate it when a good idea gets overlooked? |
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| Excerpted from www.tompaine.com (March 13, 2002). Michael Ryan has written, directed and produced films, television, and theater, published several books of humor and satire, and worked as a Washington and foreign correspondent and editor for major magazines. |
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