'Sacrifice zones' and 'expendable people' equate with neoliberal society

Gay Alcorn.

In This Changes Everything, climate change activist Naomi Klein identified something that few people would openly admit, but most know deep down. Industrialisation lifted the living standards of millions, and the key to it was cheap energy. Yet a few people bore a heavier cost than the rest of us for industries that were always polluting.

Klein called them “sacrifice zones”, or “middle of nowheres”, those communities living right next to coal mines, for instance, who may have had employment for a time but who suffered disproportionately, out of sight and out of mind.

“For a very long time,” Klein writes, “sacrifice zones all shared a few elements in common. They were poor places. Out of the way places. Places where residents lacked political power, usually having to do with some combination of race, language and class. And the people who lived in these condemned places knew they had been written off.”

Read Gay Alcorn’s story on The Guardian - “The impact of environmental disaster and the injustice of a community left behind.”