FILMS
Bhopali
Film directed by Van Maximilian Carlson and produced by Kirk Palayan. (2011)
Bhopali is a feature documentary about the survivors of the world’s worst industrial disaster, the 1984 Union Carbide gas leak in Bhopal, India. Today the suffering continues, prompting victims to fight for justice against Union Carbide, the American corporation responsible for the disaster.
Chemical Valley
An Appalshop documentary directed by Mimi Pickering and Anne Lewis. (1991)
On Dec. 3, 1984, the worst industrial accident in history occurred when a toxic gas known as MIC leaked from a Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, India. At least 3,500 people were killed, and over 50,000 were permanently disabled. The tragedy in Bhopal brought international attention to the predominantly African-American community of Institute, West Virginia, site of the only Union Carbide plant in the United States that manufactured MIC.
Chemical Valley begins with Bhopal and the immediate response in the Kanawha Valley, an area once dubbed by residents “the chemical capital of the world” because of the many plants operating there. The program then follows events in the valley over the next five years as lines are drawn and all sides heard in the debate between those who fear for their livelihood and those who fear for their lives. Chemical Valley explores issues of job blackmail, racism, and citizens’s right to know and to act as it documents one community’s struggle to make accountable an industry that has all too often forced communities to choose between safety and jobs.
Toxic Soup
A Man Bites Dogs film directed by Rory Owen Delany. (2008)
It’s the politics of pollution as giant corporations manipulate the system to delay environmental reform, endangering the health of communities across the world. “toxic soup” shares the stories of everyday folks fighting to keep their air, water and blood free from pollution and features interviews with Bill Clinton and Morgan Spurlock.
BOOKS
Dumping In Dixie: Race, Class, And Environmental Quality
By Dr. Robert D. Bullard; Westview Press; 3 edition (March 24, 2000)
To be poor, working-class, or a person of color in the United States often means bearing a disproportionate share of the country’s environmental problems. Starting with the premise that all Americans have a basic right to live in a healthy environment, Dumping in Dixie chronicles the efforts of five African American communities, empowered by the civil rights movement, to link environmentalism with issues of social justice. In the third edition, Bullard speaks to us from the front lines of the environmental justice movement about new developments in environmental racism, different organizing strategies, and success stories in the struggle for environmental equity.
Five Past Midnight in Bhopal: The Epic Story of the World’s Deadliest Industrial Disaster
By Dominique Lapierre, Javier Moro; Grand Central Publishing (June 2002)
On the night of December 3, 1984, a cyanide cloud drifted over the streets of Bhopal, India, set loose by a leak in a nearby chemical plant. When the deadly fog lifted untold numbers of the city’s residents–perhaps as many as 30,000, by some accounts–lay dead, while half a million others were injured. Dominique Lapierre, a French journalist and longtime champion of India’s poor, joins with Spanish writer Javier Moro to recount the terrors of that night, about which the whole truth may never be known. The deaths are but one part of the authors’ long, sometimes elaborate tale, which relates how the industrial conglomerate Union Carbide had come to build its vast chemical complex at Bhopal, one meant to be a glory of technology and, ironically, to save thousands of lives brought low by insect-wrought starvation. There are few villains but many heroes in the authors’ account, which explores the margins at which good intentions conflict with the profit motive, at which cost-cutting omissions yield horrifically unintended consequences. It all makes for a thoughtful and disturbing book.– Gregory McNamee
