In 1984, a pesticide plant in Bhopal emitted something it wasn’t supposed to, killing thousands of ex-farmers and their families who lived right around it.

Perversely, many of the victims had settled there because of the pesticides the plant was producing. They couldn’t compete with companies using those pesticides to boost productivity, and so the "superfluous labor" settled where they could—where no one else wanted to live.

This is an elegant and horrifying example of how about how we humans are redefining nature. See also this project about Bhopal, the Green Revolution, and the Holocaust, in which we lay bare the insane logic of profits vs people—with an additional example here.

This is an excerpt from The Yes Men Fix the World (2009), in which we meet some of the survivors of the 1984 disaster, some organizers of the campaign for justice, and the journalist who predicted the disaster years before it occurred.