"Our greatest responsibility is to be good ancestors."

-Jonas Salk

Tuesday, August 10, 2010

Russian Grass Fires


Excellent photo journalism from a Dutch Newspaper with a hat tip to VicDiesel.

Here's a Russian Heat Wave RSS feed for those especially interested.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Horrible stuff... Since when is Russia suppose to look like Australia with our ol' bushfires?
You can't help but feel for the country.

Michael Tobis said...

Seems to me, if y'all git these down yore way, maybe some of y'all ought to head up there fer a stretch and straighten 'em out a bit.

Don't seem like they know what they're doin' much. Seems from the pitchers and the stories I've heard like they're sendin a crew of schoolteachers and war veterans and the like out there with watering cans and coke bottles to get barbecued.

Anonymous said...

And it's not just Russia that suffers from Russia's fires, but everywhere where the smoke goes from there.

Sometimes it smells like burning trash, though not that much this year.

If we, a much smaller neighbour would be causing them so much trouble, they'd sure like to make a lot of noise about it.

Similar components of recklessness exist with the waste water cleaning in the Baltic sea. I don't know how many billions the country rakes in with oil and natural gas, and how much it spends on the military, but it's weird how other countries need to give development aid for waste water treatment plants in st Petersburg. Though, make no mistake, we do pollute a lot ourselves too, but at least it's quite a lot less.

It is a nuisance that some countries are so badly organized in some regards. For some reason we have less problems with Sweden or Norway.
We live in an interconnected world, whether we want it or not. Certainly we are doing mutually beneficial trade every day. But at times it's forest fires, at times it's Chernobyl. How would a libertarian view those? Certainly Lassez faire is inadequate. You'd have to cue in Julian Sanchez and government control, or in this case, intergovernmental or supragovernmental control, and that's not libertarian anymore.

People were wondering if some firest fires near Chernobyl would cause radioactive material transport. I doubt, but haven't heard from anyone whose competence I would trust at any level.

More positively, recent news tell of rainstorms that have finally put out many of the fires.

Anonymous said...
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Hank Roberts said...

Someone's probably overlaid the fallout map
http://www.chernobyl.info/img_popup.php?src=flash&imageID=86&langDefID=2
with the fire map, but I haven't seen it. Deposition of fallout was very spotty, it's not a nice simple distribution.