The image above is one of a series of photographs by Edward Burtynsky of the ship breaking yards in Chittagong, Bangladesh.  Until relatively recently old ships were broken down in the US and other western nations but these days the aging hulks are brought to Chittagong and other poorer Asian countries to be dismantled where labor is cheap and expendable and there are few if any environmental regulations or worker protections.  It is a truly Hobbesian nightmare for those tasked with working in the yards as the ships are broken apart by hand by laborers working 14 hour days for $1 or $2, but it is either that or starve for most of them so they opt for nasty, brutish, and short instead of nasty, brutish, and even shorter.  More on the Chittagong yards here. Here's a description via this deviantART post of a similar ship breaking yard in Alang, India:

Sriram Prasad, 32, with dark hair brushed forward and a bushy mustache, counts himself among the lucky men of Alang. He lives in an 8-foot-square shack with three others. They sleep on a table. The walls are covered with newspapers; little triangles of colored paper hang from the ceiling. He has a wife and two sons back home. A brother and many of his neighbors work here. He gets the shack for free.

He says he has worked here 10 years. "It's hazardous -- we're always scared of getting hurt. I get bruised all the time, but I've been lucky and never seriously hurt.

"But I've seen so many people die. I've seen 100 people die before my eyes. It is just a matter of destiny."
This attitude infects seemingly everyone in Alang. Destiny brings men who otherwise could not support themselves to this fiery corner of India. Destiny wears them out and fills them with malaria. Destiny deprives them of decent sanitation. Destiny burns them and crushes them.
"The best thing is the money, which I wouldn't get anyplace else," says Prasad, "and the worst thing is not knowing how long you'll be alive."

Bacigalupi is the author of The Windup Girl, a scifi novel set in the not-too-distant future where the earth has warmed, the seas have risen, resources are scarce, and life for those who remain is bleak.  Having read his book as the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico unfolds, it strikes me that the dystopian future world he describes is not science fiction at all for many in the rest of the world, but is already here and has been for some time now.  Nigerians have been living in a Big Oil-induced disaster area for years .  Communities have developed all over the world that scavenge from garbage dumps for survival.  Others sort through mountains of toxic computer waste dumped in their countries by western nations.  When Somali pirates captured a US ship and media attention was far too briefly briefly focused there, we learned that the impetus for at least some of the pirates was the rampant illegal fishing and dumping of nuclear and toxic waste by the West off the Horn of Africa which has rendered the locals destitute.  For the most part these hellscapes have been out of sight and out of mind for those of us in the US, but with the BP disaster still spewing oil into the Gulf and making the already existing dead zone there even worse, we are finally getting a more firsthand taste of the consequences of our own overconsumption.

Took the kid out for a walk yesterday and she got to see an egret for the first time as it waded along the shoreline looking for a meal.  It brought a smile to my face as I watched the joy and wonder of seeing this majestic, white, long necked bird for the first time spread across hers.  But I also had to wonder, as the oil from the Gulf disaster makes its way to Florida and possibly up the Eastern seaboard and yet still nobody has the courage to simply say "STOP!", whether the first time she saw a beautiful white egret might also be the last.

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