The Pollution of Democratic Socialism
After the worldwide collapse of socialism in the late 1980s/early 1990s we got a first look at what a country’s environment under a socialist system that banned private profit-making for decades looked like. In a word, it was a catastrophe, as described in books with titles like Ecocide in the U.S.S. R. The world learned that the socialist countries dumped untreated sewage into their rivers, streams, and lakes for decades; the Volga River in Russia was so polluted that boats were equipped with signs warning against throwing cigarettes in the water for fear the chemical-laden water would catch fire; factories had no pollution controls whatsoever; massive fish kills were routine; and the Polish Academy of Sciences reported that by the early 1990s one third of the Polish people lived in areas of “ecological disaster.”