WASHINGTON DC - Think back to 1986. Ronald Reagan was in the White House, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was at 1,750, and Duran-Duran was at the top of the pop charts. This was also the year that the Khian Sea, an ocean-going barge containing seven tons of ash from incinerated household garbage, set sail from Philadelphia to dispose of its load in an overseas landfill. Sixteen years later, the Khian Sea has at last returned to Philadelphia--with its original load of ash.

In the meantime, the Khian Sea has sailed around the world, trying to find a country--any country--that would
accept the ash for disposal. The Khian Sea originally had a contract with the Bahamas, but en route the Bahamian government changed its mind and reneged on its contract. Turned away from its original destination, the Khian Sea tried several other Caribbean and central American nations without success. Even Haiti wouldn’t take it. So then the ship set off to Africa, trying to unload its cargo (for a fee) in Guinea-Bissau, Senegal, and Cape Verde. No go. From there the ship steamed to Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Borneo, and the Philippines. No takers. So they came back to North America, and tried several states. They even tried the Cherokee nation in Oklahoma. No deal.

Some ports turned away the Khian Sea at gunpoint. During its Flying Dutchman odyssey around the world, the crew mutinied, and two executives of the shipping company went to prison for ordering the crew to dump the ash over the side in the middle of the ocean. The ship was sold once and renamed twice, apparently hoping that it could slip its unwanted cargo by a harbor master under a different name. Finally Pennsylvania agreed to take back its trash and bury it in a local landfill, near where it came from in the first place.

It is not as though the Khian Sea’s cargo was hazardous waste fit only for Yucca Mountain. (By the way, has there ever been a more appropriate name for a hazardous waste site than “Yucca Mountain”? It rivals the fictitious manure peak known as “Bandini Mountain.”) The ash could even be used for fertilizer. In fact, during its round-the-world cruise, Australian pine trees grew 10 feet tall in the waste pile, along with wildflowers and
weeds.

What the Khian Sea episode teaches us is that the NIMBY (“Not-In-My-Back-Yard”) phenomenon has colonized the world, aided, of course, by some rabble-rousing from Greenpeace, which made the Khian Sea a cause celebre. One reason this absurd episode got carried to such length is that a similar episode on a smaller scale galvanized the recycling movement. During the late 1980s TV news viewers were treated to nightly images of the infamous Mobro garbage barge trawling up and down the Atlantic seaboard looking for a place to unload its trash heap, which originated in New York. (Eventually, the Mobro returned to New York, dumping its load in a landfill near the Hudson River.) The late Karl Marx wrote that history repeats itself first as tragedy, and then as farce. He never anticipated environmentalism, which skips straight to farce every time.

Steven Hayward is a senior fellow at the Pacific Research Institute in San Francisco and the author of
The Age of Reagan--The Fall of the Old Liberal Order, 1964-1980. He can be reached via email at shayward@pacificresearch.org