Oh the oppression of regulations industries are forced to endure in their determination to make a buck.

Indian athletes will meet on December 5 to decide whether or not to boycott the 2012 London Olympics. The issue is an Olympic sponsorship deal with Dow Chemical, “under fire in India for its ownership of Union Carbide, whose Indian subsidiary was responsible for the Bhopal industrial disaster, … estimated to have killed up to 25,000 people and injured over half a million.”

Diane Wilson is truly an eco-outlaw. And yes, in case you are wondering, I consider that to be a huge compliment. The courage and perseverance she displays in the stories shared in this volume should be an inspiration for anyone concerned about the role of corporations in society or what those corporations are doing to the planet.

We humans find ourselves in an awkward – perhaps fatally awkward – circumstance. We seem unable to safely and morally manage the technologies and systems we are clever enough to invent. From Bhopal to Chernobyl, from Three Mile Island to the Gulf Oil spill, from New Orleans levee failures to the Japan nuclear crisis, we [...]

I’m glad Union Carbide execs will finally see some prison time. But it’s not enough to hold executives accountable 26 years after huge disasters. We need to get more serious about holding corporations — and corporate executives — accountable for their crimes.

With all the concern about the oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, I thought it would be helpful to put the corporate citizenship of BP, Transocean, and Halliburton into perspective. This isn’t the first disaster with corporate sponsorship, after all.