







































Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal 6(2): 197-204, July 2023 

INSIGHTS FROM THE FIELD  

Environmental Racism and the Global Political 
Ecology of  Industrial Disasters 

Mukul Kumar* 

1. INTRODUCTION 

Ruby Martin’s son, Christopher Martin Colorant, worked in a toxic mercury 
thermometer factory in the verdant forests of  Kodaikanal, located in the 
Western Ghats of  southern India. Ruby recalls, “My son started work in 
1986. He soon started experiencing blurring of  vision, headaches, nausea, 
and breathlessness. He would hardly eat any food and would often tell me 
that there were no safety precautions at work” (IPT 2003: 9). At the factory, 
workers distilled mercury and crushed mercury-contaminated glass, often 
without being provided adequate protection. When distilled mercury 
evaporates, it produces a colourless, odourless vapour that disrupts the 
central nervous system, including the brain and spinal cord. Christopher’s 
work at the factory involved checking toxic thermometers, and his health 
had worsened by 1989. Doctors concluded that Christopher’s medical 
conditions—body swelling and weakness, fainting spells, back pain, 
vomiting blood, and kidney and lung damage—were due to mercury 
exposure at the factory. He died at the age of  33. 

Christopher was one of  more than 30 workers who died prematurely due to 
exposure to toxic mercury at the Kodaikanal mercury factory, which 
employed hundreds of  full- and part-time workers from 1983 to 2001. The 
factory’s 25 exhausts also emitted toxic mercury into the atmosphere 
adjacent to the ecologically sensitive Pambar Shola Forest Reserve. As cases 
of  toxic poisoning and fatalities rose, workers and environmental activists 
campaigned against the factory—at the time owned by Unilever, an Anglo-
Dutch multinational corporation—which, they pointed out, had been 
illegally dumping mercury in Kodaikanal. In response, the Tamil Nadu 
Pollution Control Board closed the factory in 2001. Yet, to this day, the 

 
* Assistant Professor, Urban Planning and Public Policy, University of California, Irvine, 
USA. mukulk@uci.edu 
Copyright © Kumar 2023. Released under Creative Commons Attribution © 
NonCommercial 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC 4.0) by the author.  
Published by Indian Society for Ecological Economics (INSEE), c/o Institute of  Economic 
Growth, University Enclave, North Campus, Delhi 110007.  
ISSN: 2581–6152 (print); 2581–6101 (web).  
DOI: https://doi.org/10.37773/ees.v6i2.1043  

mailto:mukulk@uci.edu
https://doi.org/10.37773/ees.v6i2.1043


 Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal [198] 

neurotoxin mercury continues to circulate unevenly within the nervous 
systems of  factory workers as well as in forests through rivers, wildlife, and 
food chains. Ruby’s courageous testimony on behalf  of  her late son is part 
of  an ongoing struggle to hold Unilever accountable. 

By following the struggles of  workers and frontline communities from the 
forests of  Kodaikanal to the shareholder meetings of  global corporations, I 
track the ways in which workers, environmental justice organizations, and 
people’s science movements are challenging the interconnected logics of  
global capitalism and environmental racism. As activists have demonstrated, 
Unilever’s proposed remediation of  Kodaikanal failed to follow the more 
stringent environmental standards of  the United Kingdom and 
Netherlands, where the company is headquartered. Drawing upon 
community-based analyses of  mercury contamination in the factories and 
forests of  Kodaikanal, I argue that peoples’ grassroots science—including 
sampling lichen, moss, water, and sediments—is integral to contesting 
racialized toxicities and hierarchies.   

2. TOXIC RACISM  

Environmental racism within the context of  Kodaikanal does not just refer 
to the disproportionate impacts of  toxic mercury on racial and ethnic 
minorities, but rather to the foundational role of  environmental racism in 
the political, economic, and social structures that make possible the “global 
political ecology” of  toxic mercury (Peet, Robbins, and Watts 2011). 
Environmental racism—the shifting of  toxic waste to the Global South and 
the siting of  hazardous industries on the lands of  Indigenous and frontline 
communities—is integral to what Gill (2021) calls “the political ecology of  
racial capitalism”. Toxic racism is not epiphenomenal to global capitalism 
but constitutive of  contemporary regimes of  capital accumulation and 
dispossession. Indeed, the siting of  the Unilever factory in Kodaikanal is 
part of  a long history of  shifting toxic burdens to the Global South. During 
the 1980s, as environmental standards improved in the Global North, toxic 
factories and waste were increasingly shifted towards the Global South 
(Pellow 2007). In response to this global trend, in 1983, a mercury 
thermometer factory owned by Chesebrough Pond, which was originally 
based in Watertown, New York, shifted its production to Kodaikanal as a 
consequence of  the promulgation of  more stringent environmental 
standards in the United States.  

Unilever, a multinational company known for its consumer products such 
as Lifebuoy and Fair & Lovely, acquired the Kodaikanal thermometer 
factory in 1998. Much like Union Carbide’s industrial disaster in Bhopal, 
Kodaikanal is a site of  what Rajan (2001: 384–389) calls “corporate 



[199] Kumar 

violence”, where Unilever has constantly denied its role in harming workers’ 
health and the environment. Yet, a detailed report by the Ministry of  
Labour and Employment (2011: 127) concluded that workers and their 
newborn children have suffered a range of  illnesses: skin problems, tremors 
and knee pain, loss of  memory and teeth, irregular menstrual periods, 
infertility, and premature births, among others. Racial and ethnic minorities 
in Kodaikanal, including Adivasi and Dalit communities, have been 
disproportionately exposed to illness, disability, and death. 

Although Unilever denied that women worked in the factory’s mercury 
section, women were indeed employed in the packing area as sweepers and 
cleaners, including in mercury areas (Ministry of  Labour and Employment 
2011: 213). Environmental racism and the “embodied urban political 
ecology” (Doshi 2017) of  mercury are deeply gendered: women confronted 
not only toxic pollution at the factory but also social discrimination. As 
Shweta Narayan (Shadaan 2017: 39), a legal researcher involved in the 
Kodaikanal struggle, emphasizes, 

A lot of  women have reported repeated miscarriages, abortions, or 
children born with severe disability. We have documented cases where 
women—because they had repeated miscarriages—were abandoned by 
their husband, or divorced because they could not bear children. There 
have also been cases where in the event of  a child with a disability, the 
responsibility of  the care was primarily on the woman, or cases where the 
woman and the child with a disability were abandoned and basically 
turned away from the
husband’s family. 

The case of  Unilever’s toxic racism in Kodaikanal requires an analysis of  
what Ranganathan (2022: 259) calls “environmental unfreedoms in India” 
and the ways in which “they are sustained along caste, class, and gender 
lines, and that not infrequently, are death-dealing.” 1 

In response to Unilever’s environmental racism, activists planned regional 
and global advocacy campaigns to “build pressure” on Unilever’s 
shareholders and the Tamil Nadu Pollution Control Board (Chennai 
Solidarity Group 2018). Workers staged peaceful protests outside Unilever’s 
shareholder meeting in Mumbai and held up placards exclaiming, “Dear 
Unilever Shareholders, we made you rich and your company poisoned us!” 
(The New Indian Express 2015). After 15 years of  struggle, workers and 
activists announced in 2016 that Unilever had settled with 591 former 

 
1 See also Guru and Sarukkai (2019) and Sharma (2022).  



 Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal [200] 

mercury workers.2 Community-based organizations—the Chennai Solidarity 
Group, Jhatkaa.org, Greenpeace, and The Other Media—spearheaded 
campaigns that involved not only grassroots protests but also litigation, 
advocacy reports, and a viral video campaign featuring the Tamil rapper, 
Sofia Ashraf.3 Although Unilever has compensated its workers, the 
campaign is not over: Unilever has failed to clean up Kodaikanal. “The 
company’s proposed clean-up”, according to the Chennai Solidarity Group 
(2018), “will leave behind 20 times more mercury in the soil than is 
considered safe in the United Kingdom, and 66 times more than levels 
considered safe for soil, plant, and animal life in the Netherlands.” 
Unilever’s failed remediation of  Kodaikanal, which falls woefully short of  
the standards employed in the United Kingdom or the Netherlands, is yet 
another instance of  how the global political ecology of  toxic mercury is 
shaped by the logic of  environmental racism.   

3. PEOPLE’S SCIENCE  

According to Unilever’s estimate, 1.2 tonnes of  toxic mercury have been 
discharged into Kodaikanal—the home of  ecologically sensitive forests and 
endangered species such as the white-bellied Sholakili bird. Mercury 
threatens to seep into the food cycle of  the Sholakili, which subsist on 
shield-tailed snakes and cicadas (Kumar 2021). Yet, there is no publicly 
available data on how mercury has impacted the food chain. The writer and 
activist Nityanand Jayaraman, who has been active in the Kodaikanal 
campaign since 2001, argues, “[a]ny policy for remediation of  contaminated 
sites should be based on sound science. And science is sound when 
scientists and their work are subject to public scrutiny” (Jayaraman 2015). 
Environmental regulators, including the Tamil Nadu Pollution Control 
Board, have refused to carry out an independent assessment of  the ongoing 
mercury contamination in Kodaikanal. 

People’s science rooted in place-based knowledges demonstrates how 
mercury continues to circulate through forests, waterbodies, and villages in 
the hills and plains through the Pambar and Varaha rivers. In 2015, 
Community Environmental Monitoring (CEM)—a community-based 
organization that has also been involved in legal campaigns to hold Unilever 
accountable for its role in the Kodaikanal disaster—collected 14 samples of  
lichen, moss, water, and sediment from 4 locations outside of  the factory. 
Conducted according to the guidelines of  the Bhabha Atomic Research 

 
2 For an analysis of  the limits of  legal settlements within the context of  industrial disasters, 
see Fortun’s (2001) Advocacy after Bhopal.  
3 See Rolling Stone India’s (2015) “Watch: Mumbai-based Rapper Sofia Ashraf’s Kodaikanal 
Won’t”.   



[201] Kumar 

Centre in Hyderabad, the study indicates high levels of  mercury in the 
moss, sediment, and lichen samples. The CEM report is an exemplar of  
what Osborne (2015: 843) calls “public political ecology”—a praxis of  
community-based knowledge production and earth stewardship—at a 
“moment of  ecological crisis.” 

While it is difficult to measure the extent of  mercury contamination in the 
air, lichens serve as a measure of  atmospheric mercury concentration. 
Lichens do not have roots; they absorb wet and dry matter from the 
atmosphere, including mercury. The CEM (2015: 4) study reveals that lichen 
sampled in the Pambar Shola Reserve Forest contained as much as 53 
mg/kg of  mercury, which exceeds the threshold of  1 mg/kg, and indicates 
above-normal mercury background levels. The study also reports that 
sediment samples—collected from a stream that flowed out of  the factory 
site—contained 1.52 mg/kg of  mercury and thus exceeds the higher range 
of  norms used by the US Environmental Protection Agency. Once mercury 
is deposited into waterbodies, it bioaccumulates in flora and fauna across 
the food chain. The high levels of  mercury in sediment samples from the 
Pambar Shola suggest that mercury continues to contaminate the Shola 
watershed through the Pambar river that “runs through several villages to 
join the Varaha River” (CEM 2015: 5). 

The Pambar Shola forests are not empty wilderness but an anthropogenic 
landscape that has long been a source of  livelihood, history, and culture for 
Indigenous communities in the Western Ghats (Morrison and Lycett, 2014: 
159–160). While mercury has now accumulated in the vibrant green and 
white tissues of  the lichens of  the Pambar Shola forest, these lichens have 
been, and continue to be, integral to the livelihoods of  the Palaiyar Adivasi 
(Indigenous) community who depend upon the Sholas. The Palaiyar collect 
edible lichen (kalpasi) growing on rocks and trees, which is used in masala 
powders for cooking. Collecting lichen in forests requires a deep knowledge 
of  the forests and their dangers: from leopards, elephants, and snakes to the 
risks associated with climbing trees during monsoons. All of  this work is 
done with deep reverence for the forests that make life in Kodaikanal 
possible. As the Palaiyar writer, Murugeshwari (2022), observes, 

To collect lichen, the Palaiyars use a small chisel (‘uli’ in Tamil) to get it 
off  the rocks and trees. When they go into the forest, those who lead the 
way break and drop small twigs or large leaves to show the way for those 
who follow. They all gather together and pray to their gods of  the 
forests—asking that they remain safe and also that no damage is done to 
the forest by them. They are very particular that no harm comes to the 
sholas and to the animals and birds living in them. 



 Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal [202] 

The struggle against Unilever’s toxic racism continues. In 2020, Unilever 
clear-felled 425 trees in Kodaikanal, which, as ecologists and 
environmentalists have pointed out, enabled toxic mercury to circulate 
unevenly across the region (Kumar 2021). Environmental racism deems 
particular lives and lands to be worthy of  “environmental protection”, while 
Indigenous and frontline communities like the Palaiyar Adivasis are exposed 
to toxic mercury. In the words of  the Chennai Solidarity Group (2018)—
which continues to fight Unilever’s use of  double standards—Kodaikanal 
remains a site of  “Unilever’s unending racism”. In Kodaikanal, people’s 
science and place-based knowledges demonstrate how the dangerous 
accumulation of  mercury in lichens—a vital ingredient in the lands, 
histories, and cultures of  the Palaiyars—perpetuates interlinked structures 
of  global capitalism and environmental racism, decades after Unilever’s 
thermometer factory closed. 

Ethics Statement: I hereby confirm that this study complies with 
requirements of ethical approvals from the institutional ethics committee 
for the conduct of this research.  

Data Availability statement: The data used to support this research is 
available in a repository and the hyperlinks and persistent identifiers (e.g. 
DOI or accession number) are stated in the paper. 

Conflict of  Interest Statement: No potential conflict of  interest was 
reported by the author. 

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