In Bhopal, India, in 1984 chemicals spilled out of an industrial plant, killing and damaging tens of thousands of people. The long-term death toll is about 16,000 people, making it the worst human-caused environmental disaster in history.
It’s important to understand why that happened. In the high-tech society we strive to be, it is essential that we learn the causes of disasters so that we can correct our mistakes. Technology lessens many of life’s risks, but handled badly it adds other serious risks.
Academics wrote the following sentence — which is representative of how most journalists and commentators got Bhopal exactly wrong, mostly because they applied a crude ideological template to environmental issues rather than doing any investigating:
“Internationally, wealthy countries of the North increasingly ship hazardous wastes to poorer countries of the South, resulting in such tragedies as the disaster at Bhopal.”
(Laura Westra and Peter S. Wenz, eds., Faces of Environmental Racism, Rowman & Littlefield, 1995)
So: What actually happened at Bhopal and why?
Related: My full Open College podcast series.