Garbage disposal

I don't believe it, but the calendar says it's almost 25 years since President Kennedy ordered a naval and air quarantine down in the Caribbean.

When American air reconnaissance discovered beyond any doubt that the Soviet Union was building missile bases in Cuba, Kennedy told Mr Khrushchev that any ships approaching Cuba with military equipment – vividly described as offensive – would be halted by American warships and if they held their course, they'd be blown out of the sea. The most frightening weekend since the Second World War, when the Soviet Union and the United States seemed to be on the verge of war ended when, on Mr Khrushchev's orders, the Russian ships turned around and sailed for home.

Last weekend the government of Mexico sent ships, airplanes and helicopters out into the Gulf of Mexico to enforce a naval and air quarantine against the United States. Well, not quite the United States, but against American ships approaching the Mexican coast. Not ships really, but one ship. To be truthful, a cargo boat, a barge. You may have heard of it, the Break of Day. Actually that's the name of the tugboat that for more than a month has been lugging the barge across about 1600 miles of blue water looking for a place to land its odious cargo – 3,100 tons of refuse, industrial waste. In a word, the American word, garbage.

Its story, which nobody noticed outside a small town halfway along the south shore of Long Island, started last November. The town board of this place known as Islip voted to ban from now on all industrial waste from its landfill a pretty capacious landfill, 75 acres, which people had come to look on as a giant maw or hole – and a permanent one – for the dumping of garbage. But the dump is almost full and the town, which is building an incinerator, says, 'Enough is enough!'. It will not allow any expansion of the landfill.

Now the doings of the town of Islip are no more likely to be reported in the big city 40 miles away than the doings of Little Piddletrenthide are known in London. So, apparently unaware of the Islip ban, on 22 March a barge left Long Island City and headed east for Islip and its reliable dump. It was told to move on. After a rush of phone calls, the barge trundled out of an inlet that gives East Islip access to the Atlantic and ploughed away south towards North Carolina, about 350, 400 miles. Somehow it thought it had permission to dock in Morehead City, North Carolina. It was misinformed. Morehead City said, 'No sir, on your way!'

One day, I imagine, we shall have the log book and the manifest of the tugboat Break of Day and learn why it kept choosing and setting out for a particular destination. Next place was New Orleans, another trip of about, what, 700 miles round the tip of the Florida Keys and up into the gulf. It got near enough to alert the governor of Louisiana who threatened to call out the national guard to keep the barge from docking.

So it circled an island in the gulf and was spotted by the coastguard moving off into international waters. Off and down towards the Yucatan peninsula and a Mexican port and once that route became known, that's when the Mexicans blew up and brandished, so to speak, helicopters, airplanes and warships.

Mexico, like every other country below the Rio Grande is very sensitive to any act that suggests even a hint of bullying by the nation that is variously known as the giant of the north, big brother or the Yankee imperialists. The Mexicans, like the North Carolinians and the Louisianans, objected to having their country regarded as the Americans very own garbage dump. In a grander phrase, one newspaper defined the approach of the luckless barge as 'a veritable crime against our patrimonial sea'. Great word, patrimonial – in Spanish, patrimonial. It means property inherited from one's ancestors.

Well, sooner or later, I imagine, the crew of the Break Of Day will have to take on food and water. I don't believe even the incensed Mexican government would let them starve afloat on the patrimonial sea. Very likely by the time you hear these words, the Break of Day will have landed somewhere with or without its dread cargo.

Dumping in international waters without permission, by the way, is a crime, but whether the ordeal of the barge is over or not, it will not be forgotten. It has become a symbol, a tragi-comic symbol of our plight as we reap the full harvest of the industrial revolution, which was planted, seeded, 200 years or more ago by the flying shuttle and the spinning jenny and the power loom and coke for producing iron and on to the railway engine. I suppose in the beginning each of these inventions was, at first, a laughing stock and then pointed to with pride.

As a boy, I was inclined towards romantic poetry about mountains and trees and flowers, maybe because I lived in a seaside town that had none of them. I was a great admirer of the writings of John Ruskin, but he lost me with one thundering line he wrote in protesting the arrival of the railways. 'You have filled every green valley of England with belching fire and smoke'. I haven't really read much Ruskin since because, at the time, nothing was more romantic than a train and I wanted desperately to be an engine driver, just as my grandsons started out wanting to be airline pilots and now have moved on to a passion for computer chips.

And somewhere along the road from the steam engine to semi-conductors, we also thought up the steel mill and the oil rig and the motor car and long-distant trucking and the laundrette and detergents. And it's only 25 years ago since Rachel Carson, an American scientist, wrote a book which some of us thought rather shrill at the time. It was called 'The Silent Spring' and in it she contended that all the marvellous weedkillers and insecticides and pesticides we'd discovered were a threat to wildlife and soon would be to human beings.

'The Silent Spring' is now the prophetic book of the environmentalists and, sooner or later, we are all environmentalists, if only like the mayor of Morehead, the governor of Louisiana, the government of Mexico, when we declare our membership in what is now called the 'Nimby' club – 'Not in my backyard'.

For a long time, I myself thought that the early environmentalists were a fussy, puritanical lot until one day, maybe 20 years ago, I was staying with a friend in Cleveland, Ohio and he told me we would not be going fishing in the great lake Erie, since it was for long, wide stretches polluted. Then I recall getting angry when I heard they were going to start strip mining close-by some of the great national parks in the west.

Only a couple of years ago, I think I told you that down the island, Long Island, we no longer can enjoy our finest, most succulent, eating fish, the noble striped bass because it spawns in the Hudson River and then swims into the Atlantic and the bays around Long Island, and the Hudson River is toxic. And last year, a mysterious brown tide killed off our pride and joy, the Peconic Bay scallop.

These are small losses but they given sudden meaning to the problem of pollution when they happen in your own backyard. Only two weeks ago, we went into the consuming Canadian grievance of acid rain dumped on their country by the factories and chemical plants of the industrial Midwest.

Then, this week, I saw a map, a small map, of Europe that took in Western Scotland in one top corner and in the bottom right-hand corner, Chernobyl. It coloured, in red and orange, the lands that still contain either heavy or medium levels of radioactive iodine from the nuclear accident of a year ago. From Cornwall up through Wales and out into almost all of Denmark, Norway and Sweden and down through Germany into Czechoslovakia and Austria and Hungary and then from Switzerland down to the leg of Italy, the red and orange splotches signified huge areas where countless animals had to be destroyed or, along with countless crops, were declared unfit for human consumption.

Now, we come full circle back to that floating barge and the omens present in my backyard. Long Island, which is 110 miles long pointing out into the Atlantic and is an average of, say, 15 to 20 miles wide, Long Island does not get its water from rainfall but from underground wells and aquifers. The Islip town board acted because, like many another town on the island, its dumped garbage is seeping or boring into the soil and beginning to poison the drinking water.

The governor of New York, Mr Cuomo, calculates that unless there is a radical reform in recycling garbage, within nine years, there will be very little unusable water on the whole island. So, where do we go to hide?

Wait! I came on a travel folder this week which offers, and I quote, 'an ecological paradise of sea lions, sea elephants, cormorants, penguins, albatrosses, many happy clean species'. Scuba diving in limpid waters, horseback tours for exploring the islands and, it says here, its environment charm is complemented by the warm hospitality of the inhabitants. Excellent cuisine, the meat comes from pasture-fed lamb and steer, bread, fresh and crunchy, is baked at home. Eggs are collected daily and marmalade tastes like granny's own.

Anyone can get a visa to go there. The flight by British Royal Air Force from Oxfordshire takes only 18 hours. This paradise is called the Falkland Islands.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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