Critical Anthropology Now: Unexpected Contexts, Shifting Constituencies, Changing Agendas

7 Locating Corporate Environmentalism Synthetics, Implosions, and the Bhopal Disaster

7 Locating Corporate Environmentalism Synthetics, Implosions, and the Bhopal Disaster Kim Fortun Considered from an empirical point of view, every myth is at once pristine in relation to itself and derived in relation to other myths; it is situated not in language and in a culture or sub-culture, but at the point of articulation of cultures with other languages and cultures. Myth is thus never in its language ; it is a perspective on another language. —Claude Lévi-Strauss Corporate environmentalism promises to help us clean up the past and manage future risks, while continuing to provide “better living through chemistry.” The promise circulates in glossy brochures sent to shareholders, at meetings in which citizens chat with plant managers, and within the enclaves of corporations themselves. A guidebook written for managers expresses the logic: “The myth of corporations and consumers destroying the planet gives way to a more complex insight: that the consumer society that has evolved over the past century is efficient at delivering whatever higher social expectations consumers want, including a cleaner environment. When the consumer wants environmental protection, the consumer will get it” (Piasecki 1995:ix). The logic of corporate environmentalism is a claim to both continuity and change, to be realized through initiatives that transfigure but sustain our ways of desiring , responding, and understanding. Corporate environmentalism is, then, a vehicle of culture. Like a Lévi-Straussian myth, it can be located at points of articulation with other languages and cultures, deriving its meaning through constant interchange with the world around it. 203 Like other contemporary processes of political economy and culture , corporate environmentalism operates globally, linking issues, people , and institutions that only a few years ago were not imagined as related. In this essay, I attempt to provide a sense of how corporate environmentalism is constituted and how, as an ethnographer, I have tried to observe and, at times, critique it. My focus is on corporate environmentalism as part of the legacy of the December 2–3, 1984, Bhopal disaster , which I have tracked in its myriad manifestations in both India and the United States. Disaster is, then, the context for my study. The essay is organized around a series of excerpts, which, together, demonstrate the “cumulative effect” of the politics of environmental hazard. CONVENIENCES AND INDIRECTIONS The Bhopal case was dismissed from US courts by Judge John Keenan on May 12, 1986, on the grounds of forum non conveniens, a legal doctrine which posits that significant decisions leading to the case were made elsewhere, making it inconvenient to secure witnesses and evidence in the proposed forum, and that there is an adequate, alternative forum wherein justice can be adjudicated. In Judge Keenan’s synthesis, it would have been “sadly paternalistic, if not misguided” for his court to evaluate the operation of a foreign country’s laws. He did acknowledge that double standards of industrial safety are not to be encouraged , but also noted that “the failure to acknowledge inherent differences in the aims and concerns of India, as compared to American citizens, would be naive, and unfair to the defendant.” His judgment concluded with the argument that retention of the case in US courts “would be yet another act of imperialism, another situation in which an established sovereign inflicted its rules, its standards and values on a developing nation…To deprive the Indian judiciary [of] this opportunity to stand tall before the world and to pass judgment on behalf of its own people would be to revive a history [of] subservience and subjugation from which India has emerged” (quoted in Cassels 1993:134).1 Plaintiff lawyers, journalists, and environmental activists read the Bhopal case differently, challenging the obviousness of national boundaries and recognizing asymmetry between First and Third Worlds. They KIM FORTUN 204 articulated connections between Union Carbide India Limited (UCIL) and Union Carbide Corporation (UCC), including stock ownership, shared executives and directors, and decisions taken in Danbury, Connecticut, that, paternalistic or not, directly affected events in Bhopal. Among these were the decision to site the Bhopal plant barely two kilometers from the main railway station; the decision to switch to a production process for synthesizing the pesticide Sevin that relied on methyl isocyanate (MIC), the gas released in Bhopal; and the decision to use an “open circuit process” requiring bulk storage of MIC. Additionally, when India did “stand tall” and litigate the Bhopal case, UCC was...