Bhopal, Barriers, and Boundaries

Aside from the usual themes of general dismay and guilt, this week's readings were interwoven by a theme of barriers and boundaries.  In Nicholson and Wapner we touched upon the North-South divide, inequality, and environmental racism and injustice.  Whether you subscribe to either the historical or the time-slice principle as laid out by Singer, no one can disagree on the fact that there is and always has been inequity in who benefits and who pays the costs of environmental harms.  Agarwal and Narain focus in on this point in their chapter on "environmental colonialism," and while they highlight data discrepancies and clearly support a "polluter pays" principle, it is a bit sad that they perpetuate continuing the divide by concluding their arguments: "Who's future generations are we seeking to protect - the Western World's or the Third World's?" (237).  Granted, the Third World bears the burdens of this imposed divide and so this question is a reaction to injustices.  It is just saddening that the question is framed so that future generations are separate and the protection of the two groups is mutually exclusive.  I cannot argue that there is no divide or that actions and policies have been equal, I just think that this is not the future than we want.  The authors are forcing a choice that we should try to eliminate.

Koval gives an interesting perspective to the Bhopal disaster and a lens through which to examine a number of other environmental accidents and disasters. Here too we continue the theme of boundaries, now in regards to capital.  Koval argues that responsibility for the Bhopal disaster lies directly with Union Carbide, but indirectly within the capitalist system.  Essentially every factor that led to the release of poisonous gas into a community could be linked to Carbide trying to lower its costs as a result of system pressures for more profit (34) and a corporate culture that incentivizes putting profits before all else, including safety.  I have read a lot of literature on other "accidents" such as Deepwater Horizon and Rana Plaza as well as project management theories on operating in the high-risk realm of hazardous technologies and subsequent "normal accident" space, so it was intriguing to see how similar the factors leading up to each tragedy were.  As Koval says, "an "accident" is merely the statistically unpredictable end of a chain of circumstances" (36) and may point to a larger question of the destructiveness of the system itself in normal functioning.  Bhopal may be Koval's specific example, but the chain of circumstances and failures related to cutting corners and lowering costs are at the core of countless other "accidents" as well, from BP to the sinking of the Sewol ferry.  The fact that these individual catastrophes regardless of their location, industry, or type of operation, have such similar ties to costs and capital actually give Koval's arguments strength without the commonalities even needing to be explicitly stated.  He could create a new paradigm through which to analyze industrial and ecological disasters.  In any case, the author is ultimately a system transformer, claiming that we cannot survive in the capitalist system wherein money dissolves all relationships and ignores any boundary that cannot be monetized.  He sees the irony - and the struggle that most system transformers face - in the fact that this realization must work within the capitalist system that it seeks to tear down.  As an individual raised and living in the capitalist system, it is much easier to comprehend the evils of greed, blame companies for the repercussions of their callousness and cost-cutting for profits, and support action within the society that we have built.  Despite the images of a massive hamster that inherits (or inhales) the earth and the metaphor of growth as a cancer, limits seem so extreme and counterintuitive to all that we know.  For this, I appreciate Wapner's reframing of limits as freedom and environmental sacrifice as a "politics of more" rather than of less.  But can we collectively agree on this reframing?