Did you see the shocking story on 60 Minutes about the ship breaking beaches of Bangladesh? At first I thought the story was horrible, then my emotions fell downward to anger as I watched a nightmare on television.

Let me digress quickly about my journey of joy, living green, and assessing my emotions every eco-step of the way. This was the first green story ever, that truly boiled my insides morphing from anger, as I just mentioned, to a nightmare. Have you had one of these episodes where you can’t think of anything else and can’t feel anything but the ache in your belly for people less privileged than you?

What do you do with those emotions in the moment? I directed myself to Webster’s dictionary to define what I was initially feeling, which was the emotion of viewing people like you and me in horrible conditions. Then the story made me physically nauseated, leading to my labeling this story an utter nightmare.

nightmare
–noun
a terrifying dream in which the dreamer experiences feelings of helplessness, extreme anxiety, sorrow, etc.

horrible
–adjective
causing or tending to cause horror; shockingly dreadful; a horrible sight.

If you missed the story, here’s the short of it.

We all know how ships are born, how majestic vessels are nudged into the ocean with a bottle of champagne. But few of us know how they die. And hundreds of ships meet their death every year.

From five-star ocean liners, to grubby freighters, literally dumped with all their steel, their asbestos, their toxins on the beaches of some the poorest countries in the world, countries like Bangladesh.

You can’t really believe how bad it is there, until you see it. It could be as close as you’ll get to hell on earth, with the smoke, the fumes, and the heat. The men who labor there are the wretched of the earth, doing dirty, dangerous work, for little more than $1 a day.

It’s not much of a final resting place, this desolate beach near the city of Chittagong on the Bay of Bengal. Ships are lined up there as at any port, but they’ll never leave. Instead, they will be dissected, bolt by bolt, rivet by rivet, every piece of metal destined for the furnaces to be melted down and fashioned into steel rods. The ships don’t die easily – they are built to float, not to be ripped apart, spilling toxins, oil and sludge into the surrounding seas.

The men who work there are dwarfed by the ships they are destroying. And they dissect the ships by hand. The most sophisticated technology on the beach is a blowtorch. The men carry metal plates, each weighing more than a ton, from the shoreline to waiting trucks, walking in step like pallbearers, or like members of a chain gang. They paint images of where they would like to be on the trucks – pictures of paradise far from this wasteland.

And when night falls, the work continues and the beach becomes an inferno of smoke and flames and filth.

This industry, which employs thousands and supplies Bangladesh with almost all its steel, began with an accident – a cyclone to be precise. In 1965, a violent storm left a giant cargo ship beached on what was then a pristine coastline. It didn’t take long before people began ripping the ship apart. They took everything and businessmen took note – perhaps they didn’t need a storm to bring ships onto this beach here.

Mohammed Mohsin’s family has become extremely wealthy bringing ships onto these beaches. He pays millions of dollars for each ship and makes his profit from the steel he sells. The name of his company is PHP, which stands for Peace, Happiness, and Prosperity.

One of the single most valuable parts of the ship is the propeller. The “small” ship’s propeller is worth around $35,000 alone, Mohsin estimates. “It is the west’s garbage dump,” says Roland Buerk, who lives in Bangladesh. He spent a year in these yards, writing a book about the industry. 60 Minutes hired him to guide Simon through the tangled world of shipbreaking.

To do the same work in America or England would be very expensive.

Bangladesh is one of the poorest nations in the world and desperately needs steel for construction but has no iron ore mines. The shipbreaking yards are its mines, providing 80 percent of the nation’s steel.

60 Minutes called this filthy beach, a gigantic recycling operation, also an environmental disaster.

IS THIS YOUR OPINION TOO? Do you mirror what GreenPeace feels?

The workers toil in tough conditions. They have no unions, no safety equipment, and no training. About 50 are said to die in accidents each year, often in explosions set off by blowtorches deep inside the fume-filled holds.

One of the workers mentioned sees casualties in the yards, men who were injured here but have no money to go anywhere else. The workers are housed in barracks with no beds, just steel plates scavenged from the ships they break.

Kids as young as 14 said they had worked there for over 2 years. Wow! My research proves that environmentalists have been doing battle with the industry for years. They say the west has no business dumping its toxic waste on impoverished lands in the east. They condemn the appalling work conditions, the low pay, and the lack of accountability for workers who are killed or injured.

Their most important proposal: that ships be cleaned of their toxic materials in the west, before they sail to Bangladesh.

That’s in line with an international ban which prohibits the shipment of hazardous waste from rich countries to poorer countries.

Rezwana Hasan of the Bangladeshi Environmental Lawyers Association said, “The shipbreaking yards in Bangladesh don’t respect even the most minimal environmental standards.”

Here’s the scary part. The owners of the yards argue that environmentalism is a luxury, reserved for the rich nations.

If this were the case in Bangladesh, no one would be working because no entity would stay in business. If you think ship breaking is a tragedy, you should learn how much teachers make there. In some cases, they don’t get paid at all. Women working in the garment industry are also underpaid and work in terrible conditions.

Here’s my 2 cents. Bangladesh must find reasonable alternatives for employment before they shut these entities down for not meeting minimum wage requirements. You certainly can’t shut down an education system altogether. And the garment factories have empowered the thousands of women working there.

One of my friends is from Bangladesh so I asked her what she thought.

She told me, “I can’t tell you that these people work so hard and are so very generous! They are the poorest country in the world and I know that they will give me the shirt off their back when I go there. (Even if it is their only shirt, and they will happily give it to me.) It saddens me so much to know that there are millions of these wonderful people that are put in such danger just to survive”

ARE YOU ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THIS SCANDAL?

Are we veering in the direction of ”look at these poor downtrodden slaves?” Do you think they’re ”miserable” people? As I looked closely at their faces I didn’t see the tension and anxiety of American corporate workers! They, Bangladesh workers who know nothing else and don’t particularly want anything else. They do work 7AM to 11PM with a two hour mid-day break, get paid a low but reliable income; their kids go to school (I saw no child workers in the yard; upper teens yes, children no)–and many somewhat cheerful faces–not necessarily happy, but not miserable. They work with their friends; all feel equal. They have little and little to worry about. The conditions are daunting but not wholly, the pace is calm and there are numerous periods of waiting during the day as the ship parts are taken apart. Is this not the horror show 60 Minutes portrayed. 60 minutes called this “dirty and rough.” Do you feel the converse, meaning the conditions are far from hell?

I get a bit sentimental sometimes and want to stop right here and thank you for sharing this wonderful metamorphosis of green growing within me at levels I’ve not experienced before. Your support is deeply rooted for me and I’m honored you visit Hart of Green.

You know, we as humans tend to feel quite fufilled by learning from a story that stirs emotion and teaches us something special. I think CBS is doing a great favor to American Capitalists with this piece. CBS is saying, look, be satisfied with your stagnant wages, no health care, ever increasing work hours away from family, your jobs being outsourced. Be satisfied with CEOs making 400% more than you do while you work longer and longer. You could be stripping ships.