“I get that many resource mining dependent people don't care about the rights of neighbors to have clean drinking water.”
apparently u r not aware that most “resource mining dependent people” live close to the resource. That is as true in Africa or S America as it is in the US. By your logic, the extractors r wantonly shitting in their proverbial kitchen. In some parts of the world that is true but it’s generally cuz the laborers don’t know any better and making it to the next day is more of a concern than what their environment will b like next year. In the US that doesn’t tend to occur for a variety of reasons that include people generally knowing that shitting in the kitchen isn’t good. They didn’t arrive at that knowledge thru government dictate.
It would also be wrong to assume that the laborers r a bunch of skill-less drones that r readily replaced. 100 yrs ago that was less true in the US but 100 years ago there were lots of MDs administering radium for various ailments. It wasn’t necessary for the federal government to step in to eradicate the bad practice: the scientific community did it on its own.
There’s a big difference between damage caused thru ignorance vs damage caused by careless disregard. Going back to your tool analogy: the Bronze Age came about at dif times in dif places. I suspect that it came about earlier in places like Cyprus where the metals were readily accessible and more easily transformed to alloy. In some places, including Cyprus, the metals occurred as metals and the folks that were lucky enough to live in those places were 1st movers. Those folks eventually became “western civilization” (there r also some Asian examples); however, in the process there was a lot of poisoning of people w arsenic, lead, mercury, etc as well as groundwater poisoning that precluded vegetation. The world would b a very different place if those folks had recognized that mining detrimentally affected vegetation and concluded that they must stop all mining and refining.
Lastly, making statements like Trump longs for the days of Love Canal is just stupid. Pick a president since FDR and I can point you to environmental calamities that directly involve federal negligence or fraud. The EPA came into existence under Nixon. I’m betting that u don’t have anything good to say about Nixon either. The EPA hasn’t made the problems go away and there have been a few Democratic presidents since Nixon. Should I blame Carter, Clinton or Obama for the leaking nuclear waste tanks at Hanford?
