hello friends i'm dr j street and i'm the founder of beyond holistic and i'm here to talk to you about why we all live in bhopal i'm board certified in occupational and environmental medicine as well as family and community medicine in december of twenty fourteen we marked the thirtieth year of the union carbide gas disaster in bhopal this is considered the world's worst industrial disaster in history i actually volunteered there we haven't served justice in bhopal yet and that's one thing i want to tell you about is the history and the current situation in bhopal but i also want to make it clear that we are all at risk for being exposed to an industrial accident at any time and as i go through this presentation you'll see why so before again i'd like to just make an invocation to set my intention so with this endeavor i seek to feel one with all things i ask for the blessing and forgiveness of the earth and the poorest among us and from my heart and with my body i wish that each and every one of us be relieved of all our suffering and even for just a moment feel peaceful joyful and beautiful so originally i had very academic sounding objectives for sprees and taishan but actually i want you to be horrified by the historical facts of the world's worst industrial disaster i want you to be shocked by the intergenerational legacy that it left i want you to be incensed by the toxic mess left behind in bhopal i want you to be concerned about the potential risks in your own locality and i want you to recognise that restoring justice in bhopal is a preventive measure for your own safety and i want you to participate in preventing the next disaster so we're  mogul and hindu culture there's a thriving arts community there there's a medical college an engineering college and of course there's because there's i t everywhere in india so what happened nine hundred sixty nine union toxin it's a nerve poison so it's poisonous to insects to the nervous system of insects but it's also poisonous to the nervous system of humans and it's also known to be carcinogenic which means it's also known to cause highly toxic subs and everywhere else in the world there's a limit on how much you can store and how full that storage tank can be so in india in bhopal union carbide was storing forty tons of metal eye society eight and that's twice as much as little as allowed in the rest of the world they were also keeping that storage tank eighty seven percent full and the maximum everywhere else in the world is fifty percent now there were alternative process is available that don't require the use of m i c but they're more expensive and so they weren't used in bhopal so what happens is when water comes into contact with m i c it creates a it creates a heat generating reaction called an exit thermic reaction and so that's exactly what happened at one point somebody was cleaning out the pipes and some water got into the storage tank and this heat generating exothermic reaction started and basically a toxic cloud of gas was released over the entire neighborhood surrounding the factory  also when m i see as he did it generates it generates hydrogen cyanide and hydrogen cyanide is also very toxic so when they did studies on the survivors and the people who died they found that their mean concentration of cyanide in their blood was significantly higher than those people who were never exposed to the toxic gas and they also on autopsy noticed the cherry red organs of the people and there was a bitter allman smell when they opened up the chest cavity and those are also signs that cyanide poisoning was also part of the problem but in the toxic exposure so basically city was saying that it was too dangerous a plant to build in such a densely populated area they were suggesting that you know carbide build their plant further out in away from the city but union carbide really wanted to be close to the railway station and you know easier access to the work force so on their forth application for the permit they were finally granted permission to build the plant now i do not know what happened between application number three and application number four but it's your guess as well as mine so then there were a team there was a team of inspectors who came from the headquarters in virginia and west virginia and went to india to inspect the plant maybe three or four months prior to the accident and they found all kinds of safety hazards but that report actually never reached india they they found all these problems but they never sent the report to management in india then on the night of the disaster which was the night between december second and december third one thousand nine hundred eighty four this toxic cloud the toxic reaction this exothermic reaction was happening inside of the storage tank and basically the alarms were had been shut off in the factory and what why had they been shut off because they had been going off to frequently in the months prior to the accident there was also refrigeration unit to keep the storage tank cold in case of generating reaction and the freon that was supposed to be used in that refrigeration unit was being used somewhere else to save costs and there was a there was a supposed to be a soda to neutralize any gas that takes escaped and there was no soda in the so discover and then they also had a fuller tower that was meant to burn off any gas that would exclaim and there was no connecting pipe to flare tower and then on top of all of that emergency personnel had no idea what was happening at the plant they had no idea what kind of substances were being used at the plant what their talks the city was what the antidote were the emergency room doctors had no idea what the effects of  metal i sign it were or what the effects of exposure to the toxic cloud would be so it was really a disaster that was waiting to happen so about five hundred thousand people were exposed that night and the official numbers are now revised to ten thousand people died within the first few days there were one hundred eighty thousand outpatients in the first week and there were eleven thousand patients in a one thousand bed hospital and i can tell you i'm really glad i was not on call that night  there were also animals that were dead and dying in the streets the count was somewhere around two thousand buffaloes cows dogs cats birds just dead  and today there's been about twenty five thousand people who have died from the impact of the disaster and there's about one hundred twenty thousand people who are still chronically ill so it's response at th time at the time of the disaster was that this level i society was just a minor irritant and there was nothing to worry about however when people were dying in the streets there was also and they would come into the emergency room they were finding that their i were burned from the chemicals so the chemical the toxic cloud came in contact with the moisture and the eyes and caused the heat generating reaction and same in the g i tract so there was gastrointestinal bleeding bleeding from the intestines in the stomach and there were even some bleeding inside the head as well so i won't go into all the you know intense health effects in detail but i'll show you the slide of the you can go back and slide the slide of the people with the bandages over their eyes immediately after the disaster so some of the health effects that people have suffered from one is the bhopal i syndrome so again these ocular burns those actually healed up pretty well but what was left over is this chronic irritation and chronic tearing which is what they're calling ice and it's like a hyper responsiveness to everything it's like having chronic allergies all the time for the last thirty years and then the lung tissue got really damaged so there was the burns and then the burns got scarred and the lungs and the lungs became stiff and so people are short of breath for the last thirty years there's so there's also they're finding that there's chromosomal abnormalities so the d n a of people who have been exposed is damaged and that has implications for the next generation of people and the following generations of and then it also has implications for the incidence of cancer which we are finding there is a higher incidence of cancer especially lung and breast it's also found that the immune system of the survivors isn't functioning well so they have low t cell counts the same low t cell count that we have with people who are infected with hiv so they cannot actually fight infections very well so the incidence of  population of gas exposed people is three or four times what it is in the rest of india and the rest of india is quite high already and then of course there's like psychiatric problems and psychological problems if you live through such a disaster you're going to have some some anxiety some depression some people lost their whole entire family in one night some people like were carrying their babies and you know their babies died right in their arms and they just had to leave the baby on the ground and and keep running to save their lives so there's a lot of trauma to go through and there's still suffering that same anxiety and depression and worry about their health and their future generations health and then there's also because m i c is a nerve poison there's actually the nerves have been poisoned so they do have tingling and numbness in the hands and feet and they have problems with their balance and some cognitive impairment so then the other thing is that there has been some concerns about the pregnancy outcomes so initially nine months after the disaster they did a survey of about three thousand families and found eight hundred sixty five women who were pregnant at the time of the ghastly only four hundred eighty six gave birth to live babies that's like forty four percent pregnancy loss but that's huge and then recently they did a study of a survey of those four hundred and eighty six live births one hundred twenty eight of them died within five years so that's what they call a five year infant mortality rate of twenty six percent whereas in the rest of india it's about ten percent so it's two and a half times and  hundred few years later they did a survey of about one hundred thousand households and they say they found two hundred two thousand five hundred pregnant women and they had a pregnancy loss that was close to twenty five percent so that's that's a huge impact on the reproductive outcomes for these for the survivors so the indian council of medical research was responsible for conducting the studies  on the population of people that were exposed to the gas and they did their studies until nine hundred ninety four and then they abruptly stopped doing the studies and they did not give any reason why they stopped doing the studies and studies but and they and the government built this beautiful institute the national institute of research on environmental health and well paul but of all the proposed studies that they're supposed to be doing in the last four or five years only one of them is actually happening so this is really a lost opportunity because thank goodness that the world's worst industrial disaster don't happen that often but when they do th to find out what the impact of these chemicals are on our health and well being and because you don't want to do these kinds of studies in a controlled you don't want to cause these disasters and then study study the impact you need to if it happens you need to be on it and look at look at what the impact is and that that determines also what kind of compensation people get what kind of rehabilitation  e what kind of medical treatment they get you know out of the seventy thousand chemicals that are and used today very few of them actually have been studied properly so this is this is a really it's a global issue  and you know used to think that this was just because it was the indian government and this inefficiency of the third world and you know corruption and this and that and that that was why the studies didn't get done however when i was looking around i noticed that you may remember the chemical disaster in love canal in niagara falls new york this was a major disaster in the united states and basically what happened in falls was that there was a man who wanted to william love he wanted to build a canal between the upper branch of the niagara river and the lower branch of the niagara river and he wanted to build a canal in between so that water could flow through and it could make electricity to power up an ideal community and so he started building the canal and about partway through he ran out of money and suddenly we just had this ditch in the ground and there was not going to be any electricity and ideal community happening there so  chemical along with the u s military started dumping their toxic waste there and they just kept filling it up and filling it up and finally the whole ditch was filled up and they were dumping the chemicals there from like one nine hundred twenty to nine hundred fifty three they covered it up and then a nearby school district decided they wanted to buy the land and so chemical sent it to them for a dollar and they told them there's toxic chemicals underneath and they wanted to be released from that there were a lot of congenital birth defects and he found that he so he started covering it in the media and then a housewife in the area started the neighborhood organization to do grassroots popular epidemiology and take a look at what was going on and they found that almost fifty six percent of the kids were being born with congenital anomal with birth defects and then it took the new york state health department until nine hundred ninety six to actually start doing any studies so from one nine hundred seventy six to one thousand nine hundred one nine hundred ninety six the new york state health department didn't do anything and then it took them until two thousand and eight to actually publish any reports about this that is a really long time and that's in the united states the richest country in the world so i think that there's more going on than just third world inefficiency there's something else that is deterring our governments from looking into the toxic effects of these disasters and the impact on our population so back in back in bhopal they had a civil suit against new carbide and they indian government chose to be the sole representative of the survivors and victims in the union carbide guest is paul and they made a claim they filed a claim for three billion dollars now at that time the international standard for a disaster of this size would have been to claim ten billion dollars finally in the end they settled out of court for four hundred seventy million dollars which is hardly anything and the day after that settlement union carbide stock rose two dollars per share because they everybody knew that they had just gotten off really easy so basically shareholders paid forty three cents per share for a resolution of that case so what that amounted to was that if you had a death in your family you got three thousand dollars if you had a permanent injury you got fifteen hundred dollars if you had a temporary injury you had eight hundred dollars and in between the time that the disaster happened and the time of the settlement the indian government had been paying out some interim payments so that people could eat and live and so all those interim payments were subtracted from the amount that you received so and this is not these figures are not adjusted for today's dollar rate if you adjust the for today's dollar it would be more like every people who died got like five hundred dollars or something so the other thing was that children could not claim compensation and there was no cost of the environmental social economic rehabilitation included in the compensation package now in  and ten the indian government kicked in another two hundred sixty six million dollars but my problem with that i mean i think it's great for the for the survivors that they got some extra money but my problem with that is that that's the in tax payer  coming up with the money that union carbide and and dow should have been responsible for so here's another little bit is that the indian government actually had a twenty two percent stake in the union carbide india ltd and indian government was also the sole representative for the victims in the legal proceedings in india and in the united states so that's like a clear conflict of interest and  know business and government should not be so tied to each other if if justice is really going to be served for the people and if governments are going to take care of people so in it there was a case to extradite the government had requested the united states to extradite warren anderson who was the c e o of union carbide at the time of the disaster so that he would show up in court for the criminal case proceedings in india and that in the united states government never complied with that request for extradition the business business interests had always been pressuring the united states not to comply you know they would send letters saying look you can't comply that will hurt our business prospects in india wrote a letter to the indian ambassador in two thousand and six saying you know drop the request for extradition and we will invest in jobs and industry in india so this is like this whole quid pro quo thing happening between government and business warren anderson passed away in september of twenty four just before the thirtieth year of the disaster and so he will not have to show up in court and india however you will probably answer to a higher court so in my opinion and this is simply an opinion we as a global community have failed in bhopal union carbide and dow chemical have definitely failed the in the indian government and the government have failed to pull paul municipality failed when they gave them the permit the united states government has failed the world health organization has failed epidemiologists have failed the legal profession has failed the medical profession has failed the public health professionals field and the environmentalist have failed we've all failed but you know we still can catch up and figure out how to do better so why do i say that we all paul i say we all live in bhopal because one out of three people in the united states are in the disaster zone of a dangerous chemical facility and four point six million children in the united states go to school one mile from a high risk chemical facility and how do we know this because after the union carbide guest disaster mbo paul the united states put into effect the clean air agencies every five years high risk chemical facilities have to tell the e p a what they're going to do in the event of a disaster and so based on that information we know how many people are at risk of being exposed in the case of a disaster it's one out of every three people in the united states so there's a lovely map put out by greenpeace in which you can put in your zip code and see what if you are in the disaster zone of the high risk chemical facility so i put my zip code in there and i found out that i live in the disaster zone of five high risk chemical facilities so if you want and then here's a map of schools in the bay area so the blue dots are schools and the red dots are high risk chemical facilities and you can  see there's a lot of schools that are within one mile of a high risk chemical facility it's pretty impressive so just a quick review just so you don't think that you know the union car paul was the only major disaster in the world it's the worst but not the only so one of the things i'm really advocating is that we named the company responsible for the disaster so you may have heard of disaster which is generally how it's referred to in the media but i go through the terrible of saying the union carbide gases that are in bhopal because i think that the company who is responsible for the disaster should be named so many of you know about the fukushima nuclear disaster but it's not just the fukushima nuclear disaster it's the general electric nuclear disaster in general electric with the company that buil the plant in conjunction with the tokyo electric power company the kremlin own the nuclear power plant in noble so cheap so was the disasters now i try to limit the major u s disasters to five but actually there are so many that i couldn't limit it to five so if you are grace and company was responsible for and libby montana the frontline of paris own the the s s grand camp on which there was a massive ammonium nitrate explosion in the port of texas in one thousand forty seven it was such a huge explosion that  people felt it over one hundred miles away the british petroleum company was responsible for the oil spill in the gulf of mexico phillips sixty six was responsible for the i saw butane explosion in pasadena texas the u s steel company was responsible for a major air pollution smog do that disaster in pennsylvania that sent about fifteen thousand people to the hospital for difficulty was with breathing i mentioned already the hook or chemical disaster hook or chemical is now owned by occidental so that was a disaster that took place in love canal we often refer to that as the love canal that but i would call it the hooker chemical disaster and love canal and i just love that there is such a juxtaposition of words like a chemical in love canal and the triangle shirtwaist company was responsible for a factory fire in new york that's considered the worst industrial disaster in new york and what's remarkable about that is that that was in one thousand and eleven and garment workers were locked into the factory and if the fire started and they couldn't get out so many people were jumping from the eighth and ninth ward of this building and plummeting to their death on the sidewalk or being burned to death inside the factory well we're still having the same problems in bangladesh and we haven't learned our lessons over one hundred years later so that's why i'm saying we all live in the hall because we need to learn the lessons carbide is responsible for more than just the united more than just the disaster and bill paul they're also responsible for the worst industrial disaster in the united states so they were they were building a tunnel in hawk's nest west virginia and they had about three thousand workers building this tunnel and not not providing them with any master respiratory protection about half of those workers died of acute silicosis because the of the dust exposure serious lung disease that you get from being exposed to too much silica dust they were also responsible for the wide twelve national security complex disaster in oak ridge tennessee so they were refining uranium there and they were using mercury as part of the process so four hundred and seventy five thousand pounds of mercury leaked into a nearby creek thirty thousand pounds leaked into the air and two point four million pounds of mercury went unaccounted for in that disaster that's here in the united states had we missed the dow disasters so i doubt now owns union carbide and dow is responsible for a lot of disasters in the world as well so they are the makers of agent orange which was used to defoliate the trees and vietnam so that the us military could see through the dense jungle they could see where the other fighters were they also and it was banned in the united states but even after it was banned in the united states the dow chemical thought it was ok to sell it in latin america so is also responsible brilliant exposure at rocky flats nuclear facility in colorado they also developed as an anti personnel weapon in vietnam so the agent orange was to defoliate the trees but the napalm was actually to burn the skin of the vietnamese people and then we have some disasters here in the bay area that you may not know which companies are responsible for the company that caused a major refinery fire in richmond california standard oil caused the worst oil spill in the bay in one thousand seventy one had a major gas explosion in san i national semiconductor corp trade core x ray all these companies were responsible for the groundwater contamination in the silicon valley in the one nine hundred eighty s and you may want to know that santa clara county actually has the most number of superfund sites of anywhere in the united states so has a lot of contamination right here happening in the bay area so what's happening back in bhopal thirty years later well basically when your carbide had this disaster they just up and left they didn't even bother to pack up and leave they just left so they left their bins of chemicals to rust out they were just like everything's just they're broken and rusting and leaking so what that means is that the surrounding soil is contaminated so the center for science and environment and greenpeace have done some studies to look at what the contaminants are in the surrounding soil and there's a whole list of them but notably the mercury levels are quite high twenty thousand to six million times higher than expected there's chromium and copper and nickel and le they were taking their toxic waste from the plant and spreading it on what they called soil evaporation poms what is a soil evaporation pond well basically they dug out twenty feet of dirt they laid down some clay and a plastic piece of tarp and then dumped the chemicals and then they laid down a piece of plastic tarp and dumped their chemicals and then the so this is the hazardous waste management system now you might think oh this is you know from india that while they were actually doing the same that's exactly what they did in the chemical disaster in love canal is when they had that big ditch there they la down a layer of clay and laid down a plastic tarp and then started dumping their chemicals so you can see in this photograph there are layers of layers of plastic tarp  you can also see that there's actually very little vegetation growing there even weeds don't want to want to grow there so the groundwater in the surrounding area is also contaminated and about  paul had declared that water was unsafe for drinking and they had put signs up by these hand pumps saying you can't you shouldn't drink this water but a lot of that area is it's a very poor neighborhood and many of those people actually can't read and they also don't have any other choice but to drink that water so that's a major issue is that there's an ongoing environmental contamination that has not been cleaned up and the people do not have access to safe drinking water so this may or may not be having an impact on the second generation there are some concerns that the next generation of kids is coming out with birth defects and some of them are born normal but then develop cerebral palsy type syndrome maybe six months later at some point and  that population has not been properly studied yet we do not have really good data on what is happening to the next generation of kids we just we do have a survey that is still unpublished data as a survey of twenty thousand families and this was conducted by the same clinic where i was volunteering at the same public trust and they found that of those twenty thousand families three thousand children had congenital birth defects they also did a study where they what we call normal can also be a disaster so what we're looking at in bhopal is actually a major disaster but we have farm workers in the central valley of california who are working with pesticides on a daily basis now we consider that just like a normal normal working life but we have studies that show that children are being impacted by by the  by the pesticides exposure to their moms so prenatal exposure to d d t is causing neurodevelopmental plays in children and prenatal exposure to organophosphates is causing mental developmental delays  in children even up to two years of age and certain certain p c babies are also impacting thyroid function in children and that is also impacting their neurological and cognitive development so drinking contaminated water with if your water is contaminated with heavy metals that can cause neurotoxicity in the children that are bor to you like if you're the mom and you're drinking have a heavy metals in your water that will impact your baby nitrates that's a very common thing in fertilizers if that's if there are nitrates in your water that can cause neurological and muscular muscle and bone deform unease and heart problems in the kids chlorine needed and aromatic song solvents they have been shown to cause leukemia and been associated with leukemia  children and cornish and by products they have a range of outcomes and then if you're a mom and you're living contaminated land that has also been shown to cause  central nervous problems birth defects heart defects you know genital problems and in male children fetal deaths low birth weights a very low birth weights small for diagram a diagram from that shows some impact from the cheese so mercury disaster and when i'm out of bed and you'll see why in a minute but the diagram shows in the top figure that's the brain of an adult who has been exposed to mercury and you see a few dots a few lesions in the brain and then the middle diagram is a picture of a child an infant who has been exposed to mercury and there's more dots because children's absorbed children absorb more things from their g i tract and so there's more more lesions in the brain and mercury into the bay for many years and people were eating the fish from the bay and so they were getting exposed to mercury but adults have a little bit more capacity to handle it and they may not show as a severe defect but what was happening is that the kids were getting born they looked normal when they were born and then about six months later they were developing the cerebral palsy legs and people didn't understand what was going on and it took a while to figure out that it was mercury point and basically what they were saying is kids with really deformities and impaired about impaired intelligence  really movement disorders and low muscle tone and they're just basically having a real primitive neurological reflex so  don't know what's happening exactly and bill paul but what strikes me is a lot of similarity between the pictures of the kids in the hall and the pictures of the kids in i mean i'm not a base of the black and white picture is a picture of a kid f what it what it meant was that we put into effect something called the community right to know act which meant that communities have the right to know what hazardous substances are being used in their so that was an issue in because nobody knew what was being used nobody knew how to respond to it you know what they ended and so that's really good they are we also put into effect better emergency planning so better emergency preparedness so that when there is a disaster we know what to do we know how to respond to it that's also wonderful and we put also into effect this risk management plan where high risk chemical facilities have to report every five years what their disaster management plan is well that's all very good and wonderful as well but nowhere in there is anything about actually preventing a disaster it's all about how are going to respond to the disaster so once  exposed that doesn't really help you all that much i mean it helps a little bit but not all that much so what are some things we should be thinking about in primary prevention primary prevention is preventing  before it happens so normally when i gave this talk to a live audiences i would be asking them give me some ideas so one thing is to use less toxic stuff ok so the less pesticides you use the less plastic the less things that you use to that require these toxic process the less we have to be exposed to  them then we should also be putting into effect inherently safer technology so what does that mean that means when you have an alternative to hughes safer chemical or a safer process that you should be required to do so you can't just choose to not use the safer one because you want to cut costs so after after the world trade center tragedy in new  york there was real concern that our chemical facilities in the united states could be vulnerable to attack and there was a push to put into a mandate inherently safer technology and our chemical facilities well that got scuttled by the bush administration and the industry lobbyist and so that never actually happened and so recently when we had the west texas west texas explosion in two thousand and thirteen president obama said we have to get this inherently safer technology in place and so he asked the e p a to come up with a plan within nine months and the a came up with voluntary adoption measures that won't go into won't be required the voluntary measures won't be required until two thousand and sixteen so we all know how they don't go anywhere so currently we really still need to push the e p a to get some mandatory adoption of inherently safer technology in place before president obama leaves office this is really really important you need to move on this because we one out of every three of us is living in the disaster zone of a high risk chemical facilities so those chemical facilities need to be made safer  here is here in california we are leading the way after the chevron refinery fire fire the state of california is putting into measures requirements for refineries to put into place safer technology we need to be doing research on the impacts and we need to restore justice wherever it hasn't been restored because all businesses watch how these disasters are handled all businesses watch how paul is handled and when we restore just a symbol paul it sends a message to corporations that they can't get away with murder so this is why we need to be on top of things even after the disaster we need to make sure that justice is served after a disaster that is actually a primary prevention measure i'm sure there are more primary prevention measures that we could put into place we could have more inspections we could have more oversight and there's many more but i will just leave it at that for now so right now what is needed is we need to clean up we need to restore just we need to have rigorous research we need to look at the reproductive ecology and there should be a registry with the world health organization that tracks how the next generation of kids fare when  we have these disasters whether it's food or service so anything just looking at the current survivors is not good enough we need to look at the impact of our actions on the future generations we should be thinking seven generations ahead at least and we need to have uniform global standards so that people so that corporations can't escape high standards in one country to go to low standards in another country so we need to have uniform global industrial safety and environmental protection and we need to hold governments accountable we need to hold make them have the integrity that they are serving the people and not the corporations so who is needed you are needed we need we need add we need volunteers we need to researchers we need funders we need advocates we need supporters and it is if it's not  could be the disaster in your neighborhood that you are working to prevent so before i leave i'd like to just offer a poem that i wrote for the survivors  not only in bhopal but of survivors of any disaster anywhere i titled the poem bearing the unbearable so when you bear witness to someone bearing the unbearable you recognize that a part of that person has died the part that couldn't bear the unbearable the person who remains alive is the survivor the one willing to include the insufferable as part of her life if you ask her if she is happy she may consider the question and reply yes you may ask her if she is sad and after a moment she will answer yes if you wonder whether she is hopeful she will respond affirmatively when you inquire whether she feels hopeless she feels that too everything is embraced by the survivor of life the astounding exhilarating beauty as well as the horrific heartbreaking injustice the immense love and the deep cruelty the magnificent mystery of the universe includes multifarious criminal imperfection the survivor stands in the presence of what is true without dying without closing off to the whole truth if her heart closes she becomes a crippled instrument for the healing of the world there is nothing we can say to assuage the anguish for those who are tolerating the intolerable but we can stand with them together as survivors ourselves for we are all survivors or will be dead in body or in heart it is our own suffering of whatever type that turns us into instruments of compassion we can stand together a survivors in love we can stand together in the presence of what is true in  rich wondrous entirety of phenomenon we can keep our hearts open in heaven and then hell and allow our hearts to break over and over again the cost of armoring our hearts is too great so we do what we can to relieve suffering our suffering any suffering all suffering an open heart and a clear quiet mind our optimum agents for cultivating the health and unity of the whole we are all we are all part of the same organism so we can have no enemies it is the nature of our beings as individuals that contributes to and creates the quality of our world breath each of us takes affirms the dignity of life all life in the simplest and clearest way possible with each breath we can strive for clarity of mind and share constructive y with each other with each breath we can extend our compassion to all survivors bearing the unbearable we all live in bhopal page there is one another short leg it's w a l i b dot org dot org we all live in bhopal dot org we really need you to be involved in keeping all of us safe