3 DECEMBER 2004: Twenty years ago today, families in Bhopal, India were awakened in the middle of the night by terrible burning in their eyes and lungs. Within minutes, children and mothers and fathers staggered into the street, gasping for air and blinded by the chemicals that seared their eyes. As they ran in complete terror, someone yelled that the Union Carbide pesticides factory had exploded, spewing out poisonous gas throughout the city.

Soon thousands of people lay dead in the city’s main roads, with every truck, taxi and ox cart weighted down with injured and terrified refugees. No one in the emergency room at the city hospital knew what the toxic gases were or how to treat the thousands of patients that flooded into the hallways and filled the front door. By the morning, more than 5,000 people were dead, while a half million more were injured.

Bhopal has rightly been called the Hiroshima of the chemical industry. It not only tells the stark story of the human fallout from a chemical factory explosion born of supreme negligence, it also offers important lessons about the continuing failure of the chemical industry and government to address the security and public health threats posed by dangerous chemicals.

The day after the disaster, Union Carbide’s CEO Warren Anderson flew to India to assess the damage his company had visited upon its Indian neighbours. He was promptly met at the airport and arrested. After a few days, he was released on bail and allowed to return to the United States on the condition that he appear before the Bhopal court to face criminal charges. Anderson has not returned to India since, even though there’s an outstanding warrant for his arrest and a pending criminal homicide case against him and other Carbide officials in the Bhopal courts. The Indian government has even issued extradition orders for Anderson, but the US government has so far ignored the extradition request. This complete lack of respect for the law reinforces the image of the chemical industry as a renegade industry that is largely uncontrollable and unaccountable.

 

 

Twenty years have passed, but even today thousands of people in Bhopal remain sick from their chemical exposure, while more than 50,000 are disabled due to their injuries. The amount of compensation Union Carbide paid to the survivors has not been enough to cover basic medicines, let alone other costs associated with various disabilities and inability to work. The sad reality is that we continue to learn about the dangers of chemicals by allowing the chemical industry to expose large numbers of people to them and seeing what happens.

In this way we have learned about dioxin contamination by poisoning American veterans and large segments of the Vietnamese population with Agent Orange. We have learned about asbestos by killing off thousands of workers with lung disease. And we have learned about the long term effects of methyl-isocyanate (MIC) by spewing it across an entire city in India. There are many other examples of this kind of uncontrolled chemical experimentation. In most cases, the industry rarely pays the full cost of the massive damage it has caused.

The abandoned factory site remains essentially the same as the day that Carbide’s employees ran for their lives. Sacks of unused pesticides lie strewn in storerooms; toxic waste litters the grounds and continues to leak into the neighborhood well water supply. The buildings themselves are ghostly, a rotting monument to the excesses of the pesticide revolution in India and the lack of corporate responsibility for its failures.

 

 

Officials at Dow Chemical, the new owners of Union Carbide, claim they have nothing to do with the ongoing disaster in Bhopal – neither the pending criminal case, nor the environmental contamination nor the public health fallout. Yet Dow has set aside $2 billion to address Carbide’s asbestos liabilities, another public health legacy of the former chemical giant.

The chemical industry has always viewed Bhopal purely as a public relations disaster, a powerful symbol that demonstrated the industry was a menace and a threat to people’s health and safety. In order to head off further regulation, the chemical manufacturers created a voluntary programme called ‘Responsible Care’ with the logo of ‘Don’t Trust Us, Track Us’. In this way, the industry has avoided any serious restrictions on its chemicals for nearly 20 years. During this period, we have lost countless lives to environmentally-linked diseases and have learned much more about the chemical industry’s ongoing threat to our health and security.

 

 

If we tested every infant born today, anywhere in the world, we would find that they contain a body burden of industrial toxins such as dioxins, PCBs, mercury, phthalates, pesticides and other dangerous substances which pass through the placenta and into the foetus during pregnancy. If we tested every woman, anywhere in the world, she would be carrying a body burden of these same chemicals and passing them onto her breastfeeding infant. If we tested every man, he also would carry these chemicals, many of which affect not only him, but also reproductive functioning that may impact the developing fetus.

If these chemicals had bio-markers attached to their cell structure, we could understand that our bodies are chemically ‘branded’ with the byproducts of Dow, DuPont, Monsanto, Bayer, BASF, Syngenta, 3M, and host of other chemical companies.

In the past three years, the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has released two bio-monitoring studies detailing chemical loads among the American public. The CDC’s second National Report on Human Exposure to Environmental Chemicals looked at 116 environmental chemicals – including lead, mercury, cadmium and other metals; dioxin, furans and PCBs; and 37 pesticides – in the bodies of 2,500 participants. The conclusions are startling. Without our informed consent, all of us carry the products and byproducts of the chemical industry – carcinogens, reproductive toxins, neuro-toxicants, mutagens and chemicals that impact on a broad set of bodily systems.

In a separate bio-monitoring study, Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, in collaboration with Environmental Working Group and Commonweal (coordinator of the Collaborative on Health and the Environment), found an average of 91 industrial compounds, pollutants and other chemicals in nine study volunteers. Seventy-six carcinogens were found among the participants, 62 nervous system toxicants and 55 reproductive toxicants. A total of 167 separate chemicals, including dioxins, were found in the group (www.ewg.org/reports/bodyburden). A companion website lists the chemicals found in each participant, which companies make or use those chemicals, and the products that contain them.

 

 

One of the chemicals found in virtually everyone studied was chlorpyrifos, a pesticide that is largely produced by Dow Chemical under the trade names Dursban and Lorsban. This chemical is acutely toxic and linked to neurological damage, especially in children. It is so toxic that the US EPA negotiated with Dow in 1999 to stop the sale of this chemical for household use, yet Dow continues to produce it for agricultural use in the United States and home use in countries like India.

US chemical companies hold licenses to make 80,000 chemicals for commercial use with another 2,000 newly synthesized chemicals annually registered by the US government. Chemical production and disposal waste is mounting. According to US Environmental Protection Agency, US industries reported manufacturing 6.5 trillion pounds of 9,000 different chemicals in 1998 and in 2000, major US industries reported dumping 7.1 billion pounds of 650 industrial chemicals into our air and water. If the industry was compelled to provide this essential Right to Know information for their operations worldwide, the numbers would be staggering.

While scientists have some basic toxicological data on some chemicals, there is very little scientific research on the impact of low levels of these chemicals on the developing foetus nor the synergistic effects of exposing human beings to this complex cocktail of toxic chemicals. And we also do not know how our body burden of chemicals interacts with ongoing exposure to industrial emissions, incinerators, chemicals in food and consumer products and other sources.

Three years ago, the United Nations Human Rights Commission recognized the right to a non-polluted environment as a basic human right. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child protect the child’s right to integrity of person and the right to the highest possible standard of mental and physical health. By anyone’s definition of basic human rights, the fact that infants are starting life with a body burden of chemicals represents a gross violation of human rights and a violation of the sacredness of life itself.

One of the results of the Nuremberg Trials after World War II was a universal agreement that civilized nations should not engage in chemical experimentation on humans, even in times of war. Yet for the last 60 years the chemical industry has engaged in an uncontrolled chemical experiment on the world’s human population and the entire web of life. No one has given their consent for this experiment. Most people do not even know it’s happening. And Dow Chemical, the new owner of Union Carbide, is one of the main players in this chemical experiment.

 

 

If this were not bad enough, the chemical industry’s threat to our lives does not end with its slow and continuous poisoning of life on the planet. The Bhopal disaster demonstrated that chemical facilities can also be deadly to vast numbers of people if they blow up, either through accidents, poor management or because of an intentional terrorist act. Yet in 20 years, the chemical industry has done little to switch to safer substitutes that would provide its neighbours with greater safety and security.

In the aftermath of the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center in New York, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and other US governmental agencies acknowledged that chemical facilities offered terrorists incredibly potent targets to wound or kill millions of people in one single action.

 

 

According to US federal government sources, there are 112 chemical facilities nationwide that could kill at least one million people if they accidentally exploded or were attacked by terrorists. Some of these chemical factories are located in major American cities and put as many as eight million people’s lives at risk. Yet the chemical industry continues to resist any meaningful regulation that would require them to replace the most dangerous chemicals with safer alternatives. A recent ‘60 Minutes’ expose vividly showed that many of these facilities lack even the most basic security protection, yet the government is spending billions of Americans’ tax dollars looking for chemical terrorists overseas.

We don’t have to look in Iraq for weapons of mass destruction. They are right here, in our neighbourhoods, in our food and in our bodies.

Recently, it’s become even harder to track the chemical industry, since it has been working with the Bush administration behind the veil of homeland security to conceal information about the ‘worst case disaster’ for its facilities and the health threat posed by its products. The industry has behaved like a small child that covers his face and pretends that he cannot be seen.

Again, Dow Chemical is one of the main actors in this chemical security threat. Dow operates 49 facilities in the US that put more than 10 million people at risk in the event of a ‘worst case’ disaster. This does not include the hundreds of rail cars that run through US cities filled with chlorine, which could wipe out an entire city if they exploded or were attacked by terrorists. Rather than support various chemical security measures, Dow (and the rest of the chemical industry) has spent considerable money undermining legislation in the Congress that would require the industry to evaluate safer alternatives to these chlorine-base compounds. A similar chemical security threat exists at chemical facilities all over the world.

 

 

The Bhopal saga reveals a consistent pattern of negligence and human rights abuse by an industry that considers the poisoning of people and the environment to be ‘acceptable’. The industry can afford to maintain this stance because it has almost never paid the full costs of its transgressions and trespasses.

After the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz was liberated and the full horror of its activities were exposed, the world learned for the first time that Germany’s largest chemical company, IG Farben, had not only supplied the poison gas to the Nazis to murder millions of people, but had also used the slave labour at the camps to build its chemical factories.

After the Vietnam War, when the full extent of the chemical warfare campaign waged by Dow Chemical, Monsanto and the US government came to light, the world learned that these companies knew a great deal about the potential health effects of dioxin-contaminated Agent Orange, yet continued to supply this poison to the US government for its war effort.

Years after the Bhopal disaster, when lawyers for the survivors were able to secure documents from Union Carbide’s files, the world learned for the first time that the company knew it was sending ‘unproved technology’ to India to set up its pesticide factory. Later the company cut back on essential safety systems and training for employees that made the gas disaster all but inevitable.

 

 

In these and other examples from around the world, we have learned that the chemical industry operates completely devoid of an ethical framework. It is an industry that has come of age in the West working in concert with military regimes that have committed massive violence and human rights abuses. Rather than being an exceptional blemish to its history, Bhopal stands as a touchstone in the industry’s consistent history of chemical poisoning and profound neglect for human life. It is no surprise that an industry that can walk away from poisoning millions of people in Vietnam and gassing an entire city in India would find northing wrong with trespassing into the womb of every women on the planet. The chemical industry has ‘normalized’ the harm it has created and has managed, until now, to get away with it.

So what can we do to hold the chemical industry accountable for Bhopal and the widespread chemical poisoning that it continues to perpetrate? There are several steps that need to be taken:

1. Reclaim our fundamental rights. We need to assert the right of children to be born chemically free and the right of women to breastfeed their infants without passing dangerous chemicals onto them. We cannot let the chemical industry ‘normalize’ its violence against the web of life as an inevitable cost of doing business.

2. Expand international human rights law to include corporations as accountable actors. We need to expand the international human rights frame-work to include environmental health rights as fundamental to other rights. International law also needs to be reformed so that corporations can be held accountable for violations of human rights.

3. Ensure criminal liability for corporate leaders. If Union Carbide officials like former CEO Warren Anderson are allowed to evade criminal charges in Bhopal, it sends the message to other potential corporate criminals that they can get away with murder. We need to create international legal frameworks that can enforce criminal liability against corporate leaders regardless of the country in which they reside or where the corporation is legally registered.

4. Pressure governments, financial and other institutional investors and business companies to divest from companies that violate people’s fundamental rights. In the case of Bhopal, if Dow Chemical does not own up to its responsibility to settle Carbide’s debts in Bhopal, then the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal should pressure all sorts of investors to divest from Dow. Similarly, investors, banks and government and corporate purchasers of chemical products should be encouraged and pressured to divest from chemical companies that chemically trespass into people’s bodies and violate their fundamental rights. We need to create the political pressure and societal consensus that isolates chemical companies as being outside the pail of acceptable ethical norms and cuts off their funding and markets.

5. Develop alliances with progressive businesses and other downstream users to implement procurement policies that support ethical business practices and safer chemicals and products. By working with both small and large scale consumers, we can drive the market for safer materials and products that serve life, rather than remain addicted to dangerous chemicals that destroy life and livelihoods.

6. Revoke the charters for companies to conduct business. In the case of massive violence and human rights abuses, society needs to exercise the legal option to prevent companies from continuing to exist. In the case of chemical giant IG Farben and its collaboration with the Nazis, the company should have been disbanded and its assets distributed to the victims. (Instead, the company was split into three parts – BASF, Bayer and Hoechst – which continue to operate to this day). In the case of Bhopal, Union Carbide officials should have been imprisoned and its assets fairly distributed to the hundreds of thousands of disaster victims.

 

 

This is a large agenda for the environmental health movement, but there is already progress along several of these threads of activism.

On this 20th anniversary of the Bhopal disaster, survivors in Bhopal will march and make speeches and demand their basic rights to be free of chemical poisons, to be compensated for damages, and to hold Dow Chemical and Union Carbide responsible for the world’s worst industrial disaster.

Despite their ongoing victimization, people in Bhopal have not given up. Their protests are testimony to the triumph of memory over forgetting and the celebration of the human spirit over the rationalized tyranny of corporate profit margins and criminal evasion of responsibility.

The Bhopal survivors are not only speaking for themselves, but for us as well. In the last two decades, Bhopal has come much closer to home. Their struggle for health and justice has become our own. The chemical terror they experienced and the lack of care and respect they have received is a haunting reminder that we also live under a similar poison cloud and share a common fate.

 

 

Last year I had the chance to visit Bhopal. When I walked through the rusting ruins of Carbide’s abandoned pesticide factory, everything looked as if company officials ran away yesterday, even though more than 19 years have passed since that fateful night when the company gassed an entire city. The facility is hideous and rotting; piles of toxic waste lie in piles and seep into the groundwater, the control room remains cluttered and chaotic. It is a powerful scene of one of the worst corporate crimes against humanity in the 20th century. Yet in the middle of this scene of devastation and toxic contamination a tulsi tree has grown up. In India the tulsi tree is sacred. It represents the divine healing power of creation and is used for many medicinal purposes by people throughout India. Tulsi is also used in the Sambhavna Trust clinic that has been serving the medical needs of the survivors for the last seven years. All across India people grow tulsi trees in their home gardens. It connects them to the Earth and to God.

The tulsi tree that has grown up amidst the ruins of the Bhopal factory is like the survivors who have continued to fight for their basic rights to health and justice for 20 years – they continue to rise up hopeful and proud out of the toxic ashes, proclaiming the regeneration of the Earth and their defence of the sacredness of life.