India Environment Portal Knowledge for change

About us Contact us
downtoearth-subscribe

Browse by subjects

Life after death

  • 14/01/1997

What did Bhopal teach us? In his book, Corporate Environmental Strategy: The Avalanche of Change Since Bhopal (John Wiley and Sons, New York, 1995), author Bruce W Piasecki has explored the genesis and extent of corporate change in environmental policies of representative multinationals (including Union Carbide or UC).

Bhopal served to rock the collective conscience of the entire global business community, but India remains unmoved even today. In his book, Piasecki provides the metaphor of an avalanche to illustrate his point. According to him, an avalanche serves to "utterly change the landscape' as well as separate "the different kinds of survivors....' One of the attractions of the book, says Piasecki, is that it is "more about leaders, about individual drives, about uniqueness and oddities of human creativity than about personless organizations or business per se , which brings us, for the last time, to George Orwell's wasp.

George Orwell, the British novelist, had written while reviewing a book (Piasecki finds this the most astonishing review that he had ever read), "I thought of a rather cruel trick I once played on a wasp. He was sucking jam on my plate. I cut him in half. He paid no attention, merely went on with his meal, while a tiny stream of jam trickled out of his severed oesophagus. Only when he tried to fly away did he grasp the dreadful thing that had happened to him. It is the same with the modern human. The thing that has been cut away is his soul. There was a period

Related Content