Shortly after 11:30 pm on Dec. 2, 1984, an operator at a pesticide plant controlled by Union Carbide Corporation (UCC) in Bhopal, India, detected the first signs of a toxic gas in the atmosphere. It took 90 minutes for the plant to activate a warning siren, which was muted after a few minutes, and plant staff did not notify local police, who only became aware of the leak because nearly two hours later, a police officer happened to observe large numbers of people fleeing their homes, suffering from coughing fits and severe burning in their eyes. The gas immediately killed at least 3,800 people and thousands more over time.

When the police contacted the plant manager for UCC, a US corporation, he said that he was unaware of any toxic gas leak. UCC did not immediately divulge the name of the leaked gas. It was only after a district-level official came to the plant early the next morning that its superintendent finally revealed the gas to be the evaporate of methyl isocyanate (MIC), a toxic, highly flammable liquid. The company eventually admitted that some 24,500 kilograms of the liquid had spilled, along with “reaction products.” UCC was acquired by Dow Chemical (Dow) in 2001, but to this day neither company has disclosed the make-up of the “reaction products.”

The massive gas leak eventually killed more than 22,000 people, and more than 550,000 suffered debilitating illnesses. Those who survived the UCC plant accident experienced numerous health conditions, including tuberculosis, neurological and neuromuscular damage, gynecological disorders, mental health issues, and cancer. The toxic waste that remains in and around the abandoned plant – which UCC and Dow have refused to properly clean up – has contaminated the groundwater and soil for the past several decades, leading to high rates of cancer, birth defects, growth retardation, and ill-health across multiple generations. No US company or individual has yet been held accountable.

The deleterious environmental and health impacts of the UCC plant in Bhopal did not begin with the 1984 leak. The plant opened in 1970, after the US government forced the Indian government to ignore its own regulations for foreign and pesticide manufacturing companies, in part to minimize harm to local communities. Right from the start, when the plant began manufacturing pesticide from imported MIC, it was a constant source of environmental pollution. By February 1980, it was manufacturing MIC on site, along with other noxious chemicals. Internal documents later revealed that UCC was aware of numerous incidents at its Bhopal plant that caused serious environmental harm, including highly polluting operational and waste disposal practices.

UCC’s engineers warned in 1973 that the design of its Bhopal plant posed a “danger of polluting sub-surface water supplies in the Bhopal area” and that new ponds would need to be built every two years to deal with the issue. These measures were not taken, however. Other reports revealed that soil and groundwater around the plant site were contaminated, but UCC did not warn surrounding communities nor take substantive action to clean the site. Later, the company ignored tests that showed chemical dangers inside the plant.

Even back then, the Indian government had sufficient regulations (given the publicly available scientific knowledge in the 1970s and 1980s) that could have helped curb the environmental pollution. The problem then, as now, was a lack of corporate accountability.

While the Indian government instituted both criminal and civil proceedings against UCC in India and attempted to do so in the US as well, these attempts have largely failed because UCC refused to appear in Indian courts (Dow appeared for the first time in 2023 to contest jurisdiction) and because US courts dismissed all cases prior to reaching any deliberation on the merits.

Over the past 40 years, however, the survivors of the Bhopal disaster have mobilized to seek restorative justice, asking for corporate accountability, proper environmental remediation and cleanup, and just compensation and healthcare for the original survivors and successive generations who are still suffering. They have won small, but important, victories. For example, in 1991, they won the reinstatement of criminal charges against UCC and other corporate actors in India, which had been dropped following an out-of-court settlement with the companies involved (without consultation with the impacted communities).

In 1994, given the failure of governmental institutions to adequately conduct research or provide them with healthcare, the survivors fundraised for their own clinic and pushed for proper research on the pollution caused by the UCC plant.

When survivors of the Bhopal disaster asked the Alliance of South Asians Taking Action (ASATA), a San Francisco Bay Area anti-oppression group that I’m a member of, to connect them to local environmental justice activists during their trip to the Bay Area later this month, I saw this as an opportunity to bring together communities and organizations engaged in similar battles. I am a scientist, lawyer, and grassroots changemaker, and as I spoke to various other activists, the need became apparent for a platform enabling changemakers across movements, ethnicities, geographies, and focus areas to synergize and collectively disrupt the larger exploitative system that most of us live under.

This is why I’ve created the Ecosymbionts Regenerate initiative, to bring together and facilitate synergies between grassroots changemakers, innovators, and knowledge-holders working to regenerate systems that preserve and promote human-ecological interconnectivity (symbiosis).

During the inaugural Ecosymbionts Regenerate synergy meeting in September 2024, about 50 diverse grassroots changemakers representing over 30 organizations from Bhopal and the Bay Area will begin the process of sharing approaches and generating actionable strategies that can be implemented individually and collectively. On Sep. 25, a small number of these changemakers will share insights gleaned from their work and the synergy meeting during From Bhopal to the Bay, a public panel in Oakland, California. This panel will feature Indigenous leaders from North America, climate justice and carceral activists, waste and trade experts, community organizers, artists, lawyers, and others.

While the courage and activism of the Bhopal survivors is inspiring, most impacted communities battle the same phenomenon: a globally institutionalized, corporate-extractivist system that exploits humans and ecosystems. The only way forward in achieving restorative justice for the harms government-backed corporations have perpetrated and refuse to be held accountable for is to disrupt this system that enables them. And that can only be achieved if impacted communities and their allies come together to formulate and implement synergistic disruptive strategies.