B’eau-Pal for Bhopal: The Yes Men strike
After yesterday’s post about Bhopal, this came across my feed reader from the excellent Groundswell blog.
The culture jamming Yes Men (Wikipedia entry) challenged Dow Chemical with the introduction of a new bottled water brand: B’eau-Pal.
Last week, twenty Bhopal activists arrived at Dow’s London headquarters to introduce the line, discovering that that the entire building had been vacated.
The B’eau-Pal bottle tells its story:
The unique qualities of our water come from 25 years of slow-leaching toxins at the site of the world’s largest industrial accident. To this day, Dow Chemical (who bought Union Carbide) has refused to clean up, and whole new generations have been poisoned. For more information, please visit http://www.bhopal.org.
The launch coincides with the 25th anniversary of the Bhopal disaster and a new report showing ongoing and widespread toxic contamination, notably in newborn children.
The campaign’s website and the Yes Men’s press release contains much more. The Yes Men are also on Twitter.
Information about the ongoing crisis is available through the Bhopal Medical Appeal.
I haven’t looked much at what the Yes Men have done, arbitrarily and indeterminably ignoring their work when I come across it.
Certainly, I’ll be paying more attention ahead.
