This essay was first published in the American radical ecological journal Fifth Estate , shortly after the Bhopal chemical explosion, a day of death that is still killing to this day. Childern are born deformed or dead, land destroyed. Those who survived the initial massacare - industrial refugee families who fled the chemical cloud are watching each other slowly die of cancer and other pollution/stress related diseases .

We all live in Bhopal - This is War
The cinders of the funeral pyres at Bhopal are still warm, and the mass graves still fresh, but the media prostitutes of the corporations have already begun their homilies in defence of industrialism and its uncounted horrors. Some 3,000 people were slaugtered in the wake of the deadly gas cloud, and 20,000 will remain permanently disabled. The poison gas left a 25 square mile swathe of dead and dying, people and animals, as it drifted southeast away from the Union Carbide factory. We thought it was a plgue, said one victim. Indeed it was a chemical plague, an industrial plague, Ashes, ashes, all fall down!

A terrible, unfortunate, accident, we are reassured by the propaganda apparatus for Progress, for History, for Our Modern Way of Life. A price, of course, has to be paid - since the risks are necessary to ensure a higher Standard of Living, a Better Wy of Life.

The Wall Street Journal, tribune of the bourgoisie, editorialized, It is worthwhile to remember that the Union Carbide insecticide plant and the people surrounding it were where they were for compelling reasons. India s agriculture has been thriving, briging a better life to millions of rural people, and partly because of the use of modern agricultural technology that includes the applications of insect killers. The indisputable fact of life, according to this sermon, is that universal recognition that ndia, like everyone else, needs technology. Calcutta-style scenes of human deprivation can be replaced as fast as the country imports the benefits of the West s industrial revolution and market economics. So, despite whatever dangers involved, the beneits outweigh the costs. (12/13/84)

The Journal was certainly right in one regard - the reasons for the plant and the people s presence there are certainly compelling Capitalist market relations and technological invasion are as compelling as a hurricane to the small communities from whichthose people were uprooted. It conveniently failed to note, however, that the countries like India do not import the benefits of industrial capitalism those benefits are exported in the form of loan repayments to fill the coffers of the bankers and corpoate vampires who read the Wall Street Journal for the latest news of their investments. The Indians only take the risks and pay the costs in fact, for them, as for the immiserated masses of people living in the shanty towns of the Third World, there areno risks, only certain hunger and disease, only the certainty of death squad revenge for criticizing the state of things as they are.

Green Revolution a Nightmare
In fact, the Calcutta-style misery is the result of Third World industrialization and the so-called industrial Green Revolution in agriculture. The Green Revolution, which was to revolutionize agriculture in the backward countries and produce greater rop yields,has only been a miracle for the banks, corporations and military dictatorships who defend them. The influx of fertilizers, technology, insecticides and bureaucratic administration exploded millennia-old rural economies based on subsistence farmng, creating a class of wealthier farmers dependant upon western technologies to produce cash crops such as coffee, cotton and wheat for export, while the vast majority of farming communities were destroyed by capitalist market competition and sent like rfugees into the growing cities. These victims, paralleling the destroyed peasantry of Europe s Industrial Revolution several hundred yeaars before, joined either the permanent underclass of unemployed and underemployed sl! um dwellers eking out a survival on the tenuous margins of civilization, or became proletatrian fodder in the Bhopals, Sao Paulos and Djakartas of an industrializing world - an industrialization process, like all the industrialization in history, paid fo by the pillage of nature and human beings in the countryside.

Food production goes up in some cases, of course, because the measure is only quantitative - some foods disappear while others are produced year round, even for export. But subsistence is destroyed. Not only does the rural landscape begin to suffer the cosequences of constant crop production and use of chemicals, but the masses of people - laborers on the land and in the teeming hovels growing around the industrial plants - go hungrier in a vicious cycle of exploitationm while the wheat goes abroad to buyabsurd commodities and weapons.

But subsistence is culture as well culture is destroyed with subsistence, and people are further trapped in the technological labyrinth. The ideology of progress is there, blared louder than ever by those with something to hide, a cover-up for plunder an murder on levels never before witnessed.

Industrialization of the Third World
The industrialization of the Third World is a story familiar to anyone who takes even a glance at what is occurring. The colonial countries are nothing but a dumping ground and pool of cheap labour for capitalist corporations. Obsolete technology is shippd there along with the production of chemicals, medicines and other products banned in the developed world. Labor is cheap, there are few if any safety standards, and costs are cut. But the formula of cost-benefit still stands the costs are simply borne y others, by the victims of Union Carbide, Dow, and Standard Oil.

Chemicals found to be dangerous and banned in the US and Europe are produced instead overseas - DDT is a well-known example of an enormous number of such products, such as the unregistered pesticide Leptophos exported by the Velsicol Corporation to Egypt hich killed and injured many Egyptian farmers in the mid-1970 s. Other products are simply dumped on Third World markets, like the mercury tainted wheat which led to the deaths of as many as 5,000 Iraqis in 1972, wheat which had been imported from the US.Another example was the wanton contamination of Nicaragua s Lake Managua by a chlorine and caustic soda factory owned by Pennwalt Corporation and other investors, which caused a major outbreak of mercury poisoning in a primary source of fish for the peopl living in Managua.

Union Carbide s plant at Bhopal did not even meet US safety standards according to it s own safety inspector, but a UN expert on international corporate behaviour told the New York Times, A whole list of factors is not in place to insure adequate industral safety throughout the Third World. Carbide is not very different from any other chemical company in this regard. According to the Times, In a Union Carbide battery plant in Jakarta, Indonesia, more than half the workers had kidney damage from mercury exposure. In an asbestos cement factory owned by the Manville Corporation 200 miles west of Bhopal, workers in 1981 ere routinely covered with asbestos dust, a practice that would never be tolerated here. (12/9/84)

Some 22,500 people are killed every year by exposure to insecticides - a much higher percentage of them in the Third World than use of such chemicals would suggest. Many experts decried the lack of an industrial culture in the underdeveloped countriesas a major cause of accidents and contamination. But where an industrial culture thrives, is the situation really much better?

Industrial Culture and Industrial Plague
In the advanced industrial nations an industrial culture (and little other) exists. Have such disasters been avoided as the claims of these experts would lead us to believe?

Another event of such mammoth proportions as those of Bhopal would suggest otherwise - in that case, industrial pollution killed some 4,000 people in a large population center. That was London, in 1952, when several days of normal pollution accumulated n stagnant air to kill and permanently injure thousands of Britons.

Then there are the disasters closer to home or to memory, for example, the Love Canal (still leaking into the Great Lakes water system), or the massive dioxin contamination at Seveso, Italy and Times Creek, Missouri, where thousands of residents had to bepermanently evacuated.

And there is the Berlin and Farro dump at Swarts Creek, Michigan, where C-56 (a pesticide by-product of Love Canal fame), hydrochloric acid and cyanide from Flint auto plants had accumulated. They think we re not scientists and not even educated, said oe enraged resident, but anyone who s been in high school knows that cyanide and hydrochloric acid is what they mixed to kill people in the concentration camps.
A powerful image industrial civilization as one vast stinking extermination camp. We all live in Bhopal, some closer to the gas chambers and to the mass graves, but all of us close enough to be victims. And Union Carbide is obviously not a fluke - the posons are vented in the air and water, dumped in rivers, ponds and streams, fed to animals going to market, sprayed on lawns and roadways, sprayed on food crops, every day, everywhere. The result may not be as dramatic as Bhopal (which then almost comes toserve as a diversion, a deterrence machine to take our mind off the pervasive reality which Bhopal truly represents), but it is as deadly. When ABC News asked University of Chicago professor of public health and author of The Politics of Cancer, Jason Epsien, if he thought a Bhopal-style disaster could occur in the US, he replied I think what we re seeing in America is far more slow - not such large accidental occurrences, but a slow, gradual leakage with the result tha! t you hav excess cancers or reproductive abnormalities.

In fact, birth defects have doubled in the last 25 years. And cancer is on the rise. In an interview with the Guardian, Hunter College professor David Kotelchuck described the Cancer Atlas maps published in 1975 by the Department of Health, Education an Welfare, Show me a red spot on these maps and I ll show you an industrial center of the US, he said. There aren t any place names on the maps but you can easily pick out concentrations of industry. See, it s not Pennsylvania that s red, it s just Phildelphia, Erie and Pittsburgh. Look at West Virginia here, there s only two red spots, the Kanawha Valley, where there are nine chemical plants including Union Carbide s, and this industrialized stretch of the Ohio River. It s the same story wherever you lok.

There are 50,000 toxic waste dumps in the United States. The EPA admits that ninety per cent of the 90 billion pounds of toxic waste produced annually by US industry (70 per cent of it by chemical companies) is disposed of improperly (although we wonde what they would consider proper disposal). These deadly products of industrial civilization - arsenic, mercury, dioxin, cyanide, and many others - are simply dumped, legally and illegally, wherever convenient to industry. Some 66,000 different componds are used in industry. Nearly a billion tons of pesticides and herbicides comprising 225 different chemicals were produced in the US last year, and an additional 79 million pounds were imported. Some two per cent of chemical compounds have been tested or side effects. There are 15,000 chemical plants in the United States, daily manufacturing mass death.

All of the dumped chemicals are leaching into our water. Some three to four thousand wells, depending on which government agency you ask, are contaminated or closed in the US. In Michigan alone, 24 municipal water systems have been contaminated, and a thosand sites have suffered major contamination. According to the Detroit Free Press, The final toll could be as many as 10,000 sites in Michigan s water wonderland alone (4/15/84).

And the coverups go unabated here as in the Third World. One example is that of dioxin during the proceedings around the Agent Orange investigations, it came out that Dow Chemical had lied all along about the effects of dioxin. Despite research findings hat dioxin is exceptionally toxic with a tremendous potential for producing chlor-acne and systemic injury, Dow s top toxicologist, V.K.Rowe, wrote in 1965, we are not in any way attempting to hide our problems under a heap of sand. But we certainly o not want to have any situations arise which will cause the regulatory agencies to become restrictive. Now Vietnam suffers a liver cancer epidemic and a host of cancers and health problems caused by the massive use of Agent Orange there during the genocidal war waged by the US. The sufferings of the US veterans are only a drop in the bucket. And the dioxinis appearing everywhere in our environment as well, in the form of recently discovered dioxin rain.

Going to the Village
When the Indian authorities and Union Carbide began to process the remaining gasses in the Bhopal plant, thousands of residents fled, despite the reassurances of the authorities. The New York Times quoted one old man, who said, They are not believing thescientists or the state government or anybody. They only want to save their lives.

The same reporter wrote that one man had gone to the train station with his goats, hoping that he could take them with him - anywhere, as long as it was away from Bhopal. (12/14/84) The same old man quoted above told the reporter, All the public has gn to the village. The reporter explained that going to the village is what Indians do when trouble comes.

A wise and age-old strategy for survival by which little communities always renewed themselves when bronze, iron and golden empires with clay feet fell to their ruin. But subsistence has been and is everywhere being destroyed, and with it, culture. What ae we to do when there is no village to go to? When we all live in Bhopal, and Bhopal is everywhere? The comments of two women, one a refugee from Times Creek, Missouri, and another from Bhopal, come to mind. The first woman said of her former home. This as a nice place once. Now we have to bury it. The other woman said. Life cannot come back. Can the government pay for the lives? Can you bring those people back?

The corporate vampires are guilty of greed, plunder, murder, slavery, extermination and devastation. And we should avoid any pang of sentimentalism when the time comes for them to pay for their crimes against humanity and the natural world. But we will hae to go beyond them, to ourselves subsistence, and with it culture, has been destroyed. We have to find our way back to the village, out of industrial civilization, out of this exterminist system.

The Union Carbides, the Warren Andersons, the optimistic experts and the lying propagandists all must go, but with them must go the pesticides, the herbicides, the chemical factories and the chemical way of life which is nothing but death.

Because this is Bhopal, and it is all we ve got. This once nice place can t be simply buried for us to move on to another pristine beginning. The empire is collapsing. We must find our way back to the village, or as the North American natives said, bac to the blanket, and we must do this not by trying to save an industrial civilization which is doomed, but in that renewal of life which must take place in its ruin. By throwing off this Modern Way of Life, we won t be giving things up or sacrificing, ut throwing off a terrible burden. Let us do so soon before we are crushed by it.

Civilization is like a Jetliner

Civilization is like a jetliner, noisy, burning up enormous amounts of fuel. Every imaginable and unimaginable crime and pollution had to be committed in order to make it go. Whole species were rendered extinct, whole populations dispersed. Its shadow on the waters resembles an oil slick. Birds are sucked into its jets and vaporized. Every part, as Gus Grissom once nervously remarked about space capsules before he was burned up in one, has been made by the lowest bidder.

Civilization is like a 747, the filtered air, the muzak oozing over the earphones, a phony sense of security, the chemical food, the plastic trays, all the passengers sitting passively in the orderly row of padded seats staring at Death on the movie screen. Civilization is like a jetliner, an idiot savant in the cockpit, manipulating computerized controls built by sullen wage workers, and dependent for his directions on sleepy technicians high on amphetamines with their minds wandering to sports and sex.

Civilization is like a 747, filled beyond capacity with coerced volunteers-some in love with the velocity, most wavering at the abyss of terror and nausea, yet still seduced by advertising and propaganda. It is like a DC-10, so incredibly enclosed that you want to break through the tin can walls and escape, make your own way through the clouds, and leave this rattling, screaming fiend approaching its breaking point. The smallest error or technical failure leads to catastrophe, scattering your sad entrails like belated omens all over the runway, knocks you out of your shoes, breaks all your bones like egg shells.

(Of course civilization is like many other things besides jets- always things-a chemical drainage ditch, a woodland knocked down to lengthen an airstrip or to build a slick new shopping mall where people can buy salad bowls made out of exotic tropical trees which will be extinct next week, or perhaps a graveyard for cars, or a suspension bridge which collapses because a single metal pin has shaken loose. Civilization is a hydra. There is a multitude of styles, colors, and sizes of Death to choose from.)

Civilization is like a Boeing jumbo jet because it transports people who have never experienced their humanity where they were. to places where they shouldn t go. In fact it mainly transports businessmen in suits with briefcases filled with charts, contracts, more mischief-businessmen who are identical everywhere and hence have no reason at all to be ferried about. And it goes faster and faster, turning more and more places into airports, the (un)natural habitat of businessmen.

It is an utter mystery how it gets off the ground. It rolls down the runway, the blinking lights along the ground like electronic scar tissue on the flesh of the earth, picks up speed and somehow grunts raping the air, working its way up along the shimmering waves of heat and the trash blowing about like refugees fleeing the bombing of a city. Yes, it is exciting, a mystery, when life has been evacuated and the very stones have been murdered.

But civilization, like the jetliner, this freak phoenix incapable of rising from its ashes, also collapses across the earth like a million bursting wasps, flames spreading across the runway in tentacles of gasoline, samsonite, and charred flesh. And always the absurd rubbish, Death s confetti, the fragments left to mock us lying along the weary trajectory of the dying bird-the doll s head, the shoes eyeglasses, a beltbuckle.

Jetliners fall, civilizations fall, this civilization will fall. The gauges will be read wrong on some snowy day (perhaps they will fail). The wings, supposedly defrosted, will be too frozen to beat against the wind and the bird will sink like a millstone, first gratuitously skimming a bridge (because civilization is also like a bridge, from Paradise to Nowhere), a bridge laden, say, with commuters on their way to or from work, which is to say, to or from an airport, packed in their cars (wingless jetliners) like additional votive offerings to a ravenous Medusa.

Then it will dive into the icy waters of a river, the Potoma perhaps, or the River Jordon, or Leth? ? ?
?? ? . And we will be inside, each one of us at our specially assigned porthole, going down for the last time, like dolls heads encased in plexiglass.