I bumped into my colleague Virag Molnar the day before yesterday in our sociology department office, and asked her about the news coming out of Hungary. To my shock, she revealed that she had a special connection to the disaster. She also had telling insights about how the crisis is connected to major developments in the region and to particular struggles in Hungary. I thought it would be important for her to share her observations with DC readers. -Jeff

Frankly, I would have never thought that my home town – a non-descript place of about 30,000 people in Western Hungary that was established as a socialist new town in Hungary’s postwar rush to build up heavy industries virtually from scratch – would become front page news in the New York Times and other international media outlets. But two weeks ago, during my early morning routine of drowsily surfing the Internet for my daily dosage of news I was confronted with surreal images of a rust-red landscape that looked like a scene from Michelangelo Antonioni’s Red Desert or a sci-fi movie set on Mars but turned out to be pictures of the very region I come from.

My home town and the surrounding area became the site of Hungary’s worst environmental disaster when a reservoir containing toxic red sludge, the byproduct of aluminum production, burst and flooded several neighboring villages and small towns. The events are baffling and astonishing on multiple levels. The accident seemed unreal because in our quiet “Second-World” and EU-member complacency we have come to believe that this kind of environmental disaster occurs only in “less developed” regions where such disasters are enabled by a combination of cheap labor, lax regulations, disregard for the environment, outdated and dangerous technologies, complicit states and powerful multinationals.

The Bhopal gas tragedy in 1984 in India, the nuclear disaster in Chernobyl in 1986, or most recently the Baia Mare cyanide spill in Romania in 2000 that devastated the ecosystem of the River Tisza and parts of the Danube have all clearly exhibited most or all of these . . .

Read more: In Hungary: The Politics of Toxic Sludge