Not all who wander are lost!
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On a beach in West Africa the fishermen now haul in more clothes than fish, and the clothes have your charity shop's label on them.
The beach is in Accra, the capital of Ghana. A mile inland is Kantamanto, the biggest second-hand clothes market on earth. Every week about 15 million garments arrive there in bales, from Britain, Canada, China and America. Most of what you drop in a clothing bank ends up on its way to a place like this.
The locals have a name for the trade. Obroni Wawu. It means dead white man's clothes, because nobody could imagine a living person giving away so much.
The traders open the bales and sort them. 40 years ago nearly everything sold. Now about 40% of every bale is rubbish before it leaves the market, because the garments were built to be worn 5 times. That is 6 million pieces of clothing a week with nowhere to go.
The city collects what it can. The rest goes into the gutters, the lagoon and the sea.
Then it comes back. The waves roll the clothes together into ropes of knotted polyester as long as a boat, and the beach monitors who count them have a word for those too. Tentacles. They logged 2,344 of them along 4 miles of shore in one year. Fishermen's nets come up full of trousers. Propellers foul on them. Men have had their canoes capsized by somebody's old leggings.
A fishing community cannot fish, because of what the rest of the world was too virtuous to throw in its own bin.
When those clothes were wool and cotton they would have rotted on that beach in a season. Instead they are becoming the coastline.
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Mena, Arkansas Police Violently Attacks Father Trying to Report His Miss... youtu.be/4xJxQLIB0i4?is=VtLJ… via @YouTube
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Is there another way through?
The Bureau of Land Management approved blasting through 100-foot canyon walls at the entrance to the world's longest art gallery. So oil tankers can drive through it.
Nine Mile Canyon, Utah holds more than 10,000 cultural, historical and archaeological resources, including over 1,000 known rock art sites containing more than 10,000 individual images. People have used this canyon for at least 8,000 years.
The blasting happens in Gate Canyon, the entrance corridor into that gallery. Federal surveys have already found 47 historic sites along this one stretch of road alone. And it's not only the rock art. Threatened Mexican spotted owls use cliff habitat in the canyon, including areas near the proposed blasting. BLM did the minimum environmental review required and barreled ahead anyway, to move oil out of the Uinta Basin faster. Up to 1,000 vehicles a day, roughly half of them heavy tankers.
This isn't BLM's first swing at this road. Duchesne County tried the same realignment in 2015 and again in 2022. Both times, public opposition killed it. This time, BLM posted it quietly in March with no public notice, denied conservation groups' request to even weigh in, and approved it in April anyway.
It's the same playbook that just got this administration stopped at Big Bend National Park, except "stopped" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. There, a judge halted construction October 2nd, but only after bulldozers had already torn through the park’s grounds. A win in court doesn't un-crush what's already crushed.
Three groups sued over Gate Canyon this week. But a lawsuit takes months. A blasting crew takes days.
#DemsUnited 🧵
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