『Episode 44: A Tale of Two Cities Called Asbestos』のカバーアート

Episode 44: A Tale of Two Cities Called Asbestos

Episode 44: A Tale of Two Cities Called Asbestos

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There is a city in the Ural Mountains named Asbest — the Russian word for asbestos — where the municipal anthem is "Asbestos, my city and my fate," the welcome sign reads "Asbest is my town and destiny," and the memorial to dead residents is carved from a block of asbestos ore. Its youth hockey club is named Chrysotile. Episode 44 visits the two cities on earth named for the mineral: Asbest, Russia, where the mine is still open and the pit runs seven miles long — and Asbestos, Quebec, the town the Jeffrey Mine built, which looked at the same mineral and voted the name off the welcome sign.In Asbest, the denial is civic pride. Uralasbest employs roughly one resident in ten; the town's flag is asbestos fibers passing through a ring of flame; the company billboard reads "Asbestos is our Future." And the science is now local: a peer-reviewed comparison found cancer mortality eighteen percent higher for men and twenty-one percent higher for women in Asbest than in the surrounding Sverdlovsk region (1997–2010), and in January 2024 the World Health Organization's cancer agency published a cohort study of more than thirty thousand Asbest workers confirming dose-dependent risk — more fiber, more mesothelioma; more dust, more lung-cancer death. The official response is the "safe use" doctrine, and Russia exports it: chrysotile has been blocked from the Rotterdam Convention's hazard-disclosure list at every Conference of the Parties for twenty years, most recently in May 2025. Russian domestic use has collapsed eighty-three percent since 1995 — what's left is mined to sell to Asia, Latin America, and Africa.The other city made the opposite choice. Asbestos, Quebec grew up around the Jeffrey Mine — mining from 1881, run by Johns-Manville from the First World War to 1983, once the largest open-pit asbestos mine in the world. In 1949, five thousand miners struck for nearly five months in a conflict that helped set the road to Quebec's Quiet Revolution. In 2012, the province cancelled a fifty-eight-million-dollar loan and the mine closed for good. And in October 2020 — voting from their cars in a pandemic parking-lot referendum, ages fourteen and up — residents chose a new name: Val-des-Sources, the Valley of the Springs, fifty-one and a half percent on the third round of a ranked ballot, official December 15, 2020. Plus the detail that belongs to Arc 9 alone: in 2018, Uralasbest stamped its export pallets with a seal reading "Approved by Donald Trump, 45th President of the United States" and posted "Donald is on our side" — the cover-up that began as private letters now runs on a shipping label.What This Episode CoversThe city that named itself after the mine — Asbest, Russia: ~55,000 people and falling, a pit nearly half the size of Manhattan, a youth hockey club named Chrysotile, the anthem, the flag, the billboard — and the asbestos-ore memorial inscribed "Live and Remember."The science, local and undeniable — the Sverdlovsk mortality comparison (cancer +18% men, +21% women, 1997–2010; women's lung cancer +76%) and the IARC's January 2024 cohort of 30,445 Asbest workers: mesothelioma mortality more than seven times higher at the highest fiber exposures.The twenty-year veto — how a Russia-led bloc has kept chrysotile off the Rotterdam Convention's prior-informed-consent list at every Conference of the Parties since 2006 — seven countries, four percent of delegations, blocking a label, not a ban.The town that walked — Asbestos, Quebec: the Jeffrey Mine, the 1949 strike and the Quiet Revolution, the 2012 loan cancellation, and the 2020 drive-in referendum that renamed the town Val-des-Sources — a decision driven less by shame than by economics (in French, the mineral is "amiante"; the name killed business cards, not consciences)."Donald is on our side" — the 2018 pallet seal, chairman Vladimir Kochelayev's hope that deregulation could "restore asbestos's reputation," and production rising from 279,200 to 315,000 tonnes, eighty percent of it exported.Hostages of the paycheck — why the workers of Asbest are not the conspiracy but its prisoners: the same people as the workers of Libby, the shipyards, and the textile mills — and the whole difference between the two cities is that one of them got a choice.Key Statistics~55,000 — Asbest's population (2025 estimate), down from 68,893 in 20107 miles × ~1,000 feet deep — the Asbest open pit on the Bazhenovskoye deposit, nearly half the size of Manhattan1 in 10 — Asbest residents employed by Uralasbest (~6,000 people)+18% / +21% / +76% — excess cancer mortality (men / women) and excess female lung-cancer mortality in Asbest vs. the rest of the Sverdlovsk region, 1997–201030,445 workers / RR 7.64 — the IARC Asbest Chrysotile Cohort (followed to 2015) and its mesothelioma rate ratio at the highest fiber exposure20 years — chrysotile blocked from Rotterdam Convention listing at every COP, 2006 through May 2025−83% — ...
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