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“White Noise”, is a so-called comedy-drama on Netflix TV. This disaster movie follows the events of a train derailment and explosion that poisons local people somewhere in America. Taken from the novel written by Don DeLillo in the 1980s, the film was released in 2022 and to save you a lot of time, it doesn’t rate very highly on IMDb. To REALLY save you a lot of time, you can see the drama unfold in real life because exactly the same ecological disaster is happening right now in Ohio, USA. 

After the first few days of panic and evacuation, people returned to their homes because they were told it was safe. Very quickly, the residents of Palestine, Ohio, began to realise that the huge freight train derailment and the resulting fire and exploding toxic mushroom cloud was - and is - a life-threatening event - and as the fall-out from this disaster gets worse, the less mainstream media wants you to know.

Oscar Wilde wrote about ‘life imitating art’ in 1889 and if he stepped out of a DeLorean time machine in 2023, (poor guy, what a desperate year to come back to), he would be both amused and horrified to see our modern take on his idea. What we are seeing now is the phenomenon whereby art predicts life. 

Disaster is quite entertaining (apparently) until it becomes real. The recent events in Ohio are horrific and we need to be ruthless with the billion-dollar corporations who continue to wreak havoc on our environment. They must be fully accountable for their actions and they must be forced to compensate and clear up the damage they cause. The trouble is, they keep getting away with it. The Ohio freight train, carrying massive amounts of highly toxic chemicals and gas, was on fire as it hurtled towards its impending doom. The allegations are clear: negligence, poor working conditions and, according to staff, a company that cuts corners are all the elements we need - but wait, it gets WORSE. Reports suggest that the company decided it would be best (ie cheaper) to simply blow up the train wreck and ‘burn off’ the chemicals that were spilling from the crash scene. Can you believe this? 

Posting on Twitter ten days after the crash, US journalist Stew Peters shared a video of the explosion and said:

"This is Ohio's Chernobyl. Ohio: Dead fish and cattle are being reported as far as 100 miles away from the site. Journalists covering the story have been arrested. What the HELL is going on?"

The frequency and severity of these toxic disasters are increasing every year - and yet, year after year, powerful corporations escape the punishment they deserve. This isn’t a Scooby-Doo episode, folks. We don’t unmask the villain at the end and go back to grooving around in our little green van. This is real life and in every awful episode, the villains carry on doing truly awful things and the ‘meddling kids’ are not treated like heroes, they are silenced, arrested and murdered by armed police. 

Welcome to “Scooby Don’t - and if you do, we’ll kill you.” 

2023 has begun with a horrendous series of shootings, murders, wars and earthquakes - events which really should shake us from our slumber - as if that soft and sleepy word in any way comes close to describing the life-threatening myopia that blinds humanity. It’s been a hellish year already and all these unfolding events continue to shatter any illusion that the penny will drop for our cruel and negligent species. So now we see art predicting life in a frighteningly accurate way - and if the so-called art we watch these days on pulp-brained sites like Netflix is anything to go by, look out for more disasters coming to a neighbourhood near you. What’s next, I wonder? A fungal-infected zombie apocalypse?? An alien invasion? Or are we going to be put out of our misery by an asteroid throwing the world into a mass extinction event? (The film ‘Don’t Look Up’ is actually quite good.) 

Maybe the end of the world won’t be one huge event, like an asteroid or a nuclear war (but don’t write off armageddon too soon because we are closer to that eventuality than ever before). No, maybe the end of humanity will continue to be a gradual pandemic of poisonings and disease that will run parallel with and add to the earth’s ever-quickening ecological breakdown. So while the earth’s metabolism goes through some kind of planetary menopause, (and don’t think mother earth will give a shit when we disappear), humans will continue to poison, burn and blow up as many things as we possibly can, adding fuel, cancer-making chemicals and air-borne diseases to the black mushroom cloud just over the horizon. 

Can you tell I don’t sleep too well at night? 

Don’t sit back and relax, this article doesn’t paint a good picture, nor should it. A quick glance through the online comments from eyewitnesses suggests that the 50-car freight train derailment in Ohio, which led to a raging fire and INTENTIONAL toxic mushroom cloud explosion, has become a cataclysmic event. Others are calling it a ‘mini Chernobyl’. Just a mini one?? Like a mini-mart? Just a teeny-tiny ecological disaster then?? Like Exxon Valdez or Deepwater Horizon? Or Chevron in Ecuador? Or Shell's tiny oil spill in the Niger Delta??

Phew, if it’s just another mini-disaster, let’s forget about it and go home for a Scooby snack. Or why don’t we drop a huge containment bubble over the polluted area and let the people and animals trapped inside slowly die in their poisonous prison? (That storyline exists on Amazon Prime, I think…)

Keep watching the real disasters and make some noise. Corporations will continue to wreck our planet with their unchallenged exploitation of the earth, with their wars and with more environmental disasters like the ‘train bomb’ in Ohio. The sooner we realise this reality, the quicker we can turn this pivotal decade into a decade for change. Together we must act. 

More on the Ohio disaster here and a description of the toxic chemicals involved can be seen here

For campaign groups, see here

UPDATE Feb 21st 2023:

"The Environment Protection Agency is not only failing to adequately protect public safety at the site of the Ohio train derailment. It appears to be experiencing a system breakdown as thousands of people face the risk of cancers and premature death because of Norfolk Southern's reckless misconduct."

Steven Donziger, US human rights & environmental lawyer, advocate & writer

full update here