No Fear

They came to me complaining of green tongues. They told me about
bleeding from every orifice. Their husbands could no longer perform.
The sheet on his side of the bed would be black in the morning from
whatever it was that oozed from his pores while he tried to sleep. Some
had only photographs of their husbands who had died at the age of fifty
but had looked like ninety-five. There were reports of many dead and
more dying. The company would not help. The company would not even
let them see their own X-rays. It was an American company, so they had
come to me. For them, I was America. I worked for the United States
Environmental Protection Agency, and America had sent me to them in
joy and celebration at the end of apartheid. America had come to help
them and to help their new government succeed.


These were the miners’ stories in Brits, South Africa. It was 1995,
and I was representing the EPA as the executive secretary of the United
States–South Africa Binational Commission (BNC) Environment
Working Group to the White House. Also known as the Gore-Mbeki
Commission, the effort was convened in Pretoria to aid in the transition
to the new government of Nelson Mandela, in the years following the
suffering, brutality, and crimes that had been committed against blacks
by whites in pursuit of the abundant minerals that enabled industrialism
and produced prodigious capital. In Brits, this pursuit came in the
form of the mining of vanadium, a mineral that when added to steel
enabled enhanced physical properties, much more strength, and many more products. The victims were only so much collateral damage. There
were millions more available in the townships.


The company allegedly responsible for the crimes reported to me
was Union Carbide, which had decades of experience in disregard for
human life. It had become adept in morphing itself into different legal
entities since it had killed thousands of Indians in their sleep with a poisonous
cloud in what has become known as the Bhopal disaster. Union
Carbide had been astute in slipping liability and feinting beneath jurisdictions,
while maintaining the same location for its corporate headquarters
in Danbury, Connecticut.


The Dow Chemical Company, with legal problems of its own after
providing the US military with oceans of Agent Orange during the Vietnam
War, looked fondly on the proposed acquisition of Union Carbide
in 2001 and became its proud new parent. Perhaps it was diplomatic
insensitivity that brought IBM and Dow into the Binational process—
both companies would later face criminal charges in US courts for having
supported the apartheid regime.


The motive, whatever it was, was well beyond my pay grade. But it
now appears that an ulterior design for the environment committee of
the BNC was to provide cover for the same US multinational companies
that had participated in the repression of South Africans during
apartheid. Under a new green banner, they were seeking to continue
the previous relationships they had enjoyed while Nelson Mandela had
languished in prison for three decades.


At the time, I was sure my EPA supervisors would feel the same
outrage, would be as eager to help, and would want as much as I did
to make Union Carbide come clean this time. This was our watch. In
seeming contrast to US policy all through the apartheid years, America
now had a progressive president in Bill Clinton. This was America
under the watchful environmental eyes of Al Gore. The BNC’s mission
was to make things right this time and to get the United States on the
right side of...