40,000 years ago, early humans painted hands on the wall of a cave. This morning, my baby cousin began finger painting. All of recorded history happened between these two paintings of human hands. The Nazca Lines and the Mona Lisa. The first TransAtlantic flight and the first voyage to the Moon. Humanity invented the wheel, the telescope, and the nuclear bomb. We eradicated wild poliovirus types 2 and 3. We discovered radio waves, dinosaurs, and the laws of thermodynamics. Freedom Riders crossed the South. Hippies burned their draft cards. Countless genocides, scientific advancements, migrations, and rebellions. More than a hundred billion humans lived and died between these two paintings—one on a sheet of paper, and one on the inside of a cave. At the dawn of time, ancient humans stretched out their hands. And this morning, a child reached back.
So what this paint company does is take iron pollution from abandoned mines that are polluting soils and rivers and makes iron based red pigment paints out of it.
Basically they realized hey no one’s cleaning this shit up, it’s polluting the streams, killing all the fish, making the water undrinkable and there’s a huge market for it so why not make money by cleaning it the fuck up?
They remove this stuff by the industrial bucket load from the rivers. The idea is if it’s in a painting, if it’s in your home, it’s not poisoning wildlife.
