The Story of Stuff - Annie Leonard [71]
The fact that twenty years later, environmental racism persists and, in fact, has increased is shameful for all of us. This cannot continue. Of course, the answer to environmental racism is not some sort of “equitable pollution” in which we all share the toxic burden equally; the answer is to clean up our production processes and environmental governance so that no one—regardless of age or race or income, regardless of whether they are living now or in generations to come—has to subsidize the creation of Stuff chock-full of chemicals with his or her health and well-being.
We need to demand strong environmental health laws for everyone and the elimination of double standards in which whiter or richer communities get preferred treatment. And when I say for everyone, I don’t just mean Americans. One of globalization’s worst trends has been wealthy (often predominantly white) nations exporting the filthiest, most poisonous factories and facilities to countries that have weaker environmental, health, and worker protection laws; less capacity to monitor and enforce those standards that do exist; and, very important, less public access to information and involvement in the decision process. Hazardous industries follow the path of least resistance; they go to those places perceived as lacking the political, economic, educational, or other resources to resist them. Metals smelting, electronics production, PVC production: all these industries are increasingly being shut down in the United States while the number of facilities is expanding in developing nations. We’re happy to take the products; we just don’t want the mess. That’s what is happening. And that is not okay.
If a particular industrial process is too toxic for U.S. communities, for American children, then it is too toxic for any community, for every child. Motivated both by a sense of global responsibility and justice, as well as by growing evidence that exported pollution still comes back to haunt us via air currents, food, and products, a growing number of communities are moving beyond NIMBY (not in my back yard) to NOPE: not on planet Earth. I’m right there with them.
Union Carbide on the Other Side of the Fence
From the massive chemical facilities in New Orleans to the diesel-exhaust-filled neighborhoods of the Bronx to the slums of Port-au-Prince to the belching refineries of Durban, I’ve seen for myself how communities that are poor, illiterate, and nonwhite are treated as expendable. But probably nowhere on earth is it more dramatically in evidence than in Bhopal, India. Bhopal, the City of Lakes and the City of Mosques, is best known today as the site of the world’s largest chemical industrial disaster ever. What a claim to fame.
Late on the night of December 3, 1984, the poisonous gas methyl isocyanate (MIC) leaked from a factory owned by the U.S. multinational Union Carbide Corporation. The gas killed more than eight thousand people immediately, with a death toll now at twenty thousand and still counting, as people continue to succumb to related health impacts, averaging one more death each day over the last two decades.154
The stories I heard from survivors about “that night” haunt me: People woke in the darkness to the sound of screams, with the invisible gas burning their eyes, noses, and mouths. At first some thought a neighbor was burning too many chili peppers. Others thought the day of reckoning had arrived. Many began vomiting and coughing up froth streaked with blood. Not knowing where the gas was coming from, they just ran. Whole neighborhoods fled in panic, families were separated, many who fell were trampled, and others convulsed and fell dead. Within hours, thousands of dead bodies lay in the streets. Many people never found their missing family members and could only assume the bodies were among those hastily