Dead River, a podcast by Liz Bonnin, tackles the fallout from the Mariana dam disaster in 2015 – the collapse of a tailings dam at an iron ore mine in Brazil owned by mining companies Vale and Anglo-Australian BHP Billiton, which killed 19 people in what was then considered the country’s worst environmental disaster.
Little more than three years later, as we posted at the time, another tailings dam owned by Vale collapsed at Brumadinho killing 270 people.
A gripping tale of the worst environmental disaster in Brazil’s history & the heroes fighting for justice, as told by the victims & @PogustGoodhead who are taking BHP & Vale, the owners of the mining dam, to the English courts.
— Liz Bonnin 💙 (@lizbonnin) February 21, 2024
My new podcast #DeadRiver drops Monday 26th Feb pic.twitter.com/46iqgARs2S
The disaster you could see from space: how a podcast went inside an eco catastrophe https://t.co/6Wod0eYJ9d
— The Guardian (@guardian) March 1, 2024
While it is billed as a true crime podcast, Dead River encompasses everything from environmental destruction to colonial history, family tragedy to perilous chase scenes, indigenous anthropology to the sheer brutal fact of what a river carpeted with a million dead fish looks like. It tells the story of Brazil’s worst environmental disaster. According to this podcast, the collapse of the Fundão tailings dam in 2015, which stored the toxic byproducts of iron ore mining, created more immediate devastation even than the continuous felling of the Amazonian rainforest for cattle ranching. It also killed 19 people, made hundreds homeless, and was so vast that it could be seen from space. More than eight years later, those responsible have still not been fully held to account. This has led to the largest class-action lawsuit ever held in the UK, with more than 700,000 plaintiffs seeking justice from Anglo-Australian mining giant BHP through the English and Welsh courts. The company denies the claims against it.
Liz Bonnin said:
As a biologist and a conservationist who has learned over the years how deeply interconnected and interdependent all life on Earth is, I do wonder how we can be so nationalistic about it. To me, it’s so obvious that this matters to us. The natural world isn’t ours to exploit; it’s ours to protect so we can bloody well survive. For that reason alone we have a responsibility to understand and care about the damage we’re all causing as part of a system created by colonialism and capitalism. This isn’t a story about Brazil – it’s a story about all of us.
