The Shipbreakers*
William Langewiesche**



 At Alang, in India, on a six-mile stretch of oily, smoky beach, 40,000 men tear apart half of the
    world's discarded ships, each one a sump of toxic waste. Environmentalists in the West are
     outraged. The shipbreakers, of course, want to be left alone -- and maybe they should be.

SHIP Captain Vivek A. Pandey thought he could have been a fighter pilot. Because his father had
flown for the British before Indian independence, Pandey felt he had flying in his blood. When he
was a young man, he took the Indian Pilot's Aptitude Test and astonished the examiners with his
spatial orientation, his instinct for flight instruments, and the sureness of his reactions. They
saw what he already knew -- that he was born with the cool. So when he then went to sea, he was not
running away but making a choice. He explained it to me with a rhyme, "from aviation to
navigation," as if the two were nearly the same. For seventeen years afterward Pandey ploughed the
oceans in cargo ships and tankers, under many flags. He became a captain and lived aboard his
vessels in master's quarters, some of which seemed to him as luxurious as hotel suites. He visited
Norfolk, Savannah, Long Beach, and all the big ports of Europe. He liked the tidiness and power of
a ship's command, but eventually he got married and felt the pull of domesticity. And so, nine
years ago, after the birth of a daughter, he settled in the state of Gujarat, on India's
far-western shore.

I found him there last winter, in the black hours before dawn, on a beach called Alang -- a
shoreline strewn with industrial debris on the oily Gulf of Cambay, part of the Arabian Sea. I'd
been warned that Pandey would resent my presence and see me as a meddlesome Westerner. But he gave
no sign of that now. He was a sturdy, middle-aged merchant captain wearing clean khakis, sneakers,
and a baseball cap. Outwardly he was a calm, businesslike mariner with a job to do. He stood among
a group of diffident, rougher-looking men, some in traditional lungis and turbans, and accepted
offers to share their coconut meat and tea. He checked his watch. He looked out across the dark
sea.

A high tide had raised the ocean's level by thirty feet, bringing the waterline a quarter mile
inland and nearly to the top of the beach. In the blackness offshore two ships lay at anchor,
visible only by their masthead lights. The first was a 515-foot general-cargo vessel named the
Pioneer 1, which hailed from St. Vincent, in the Caribbean. Pandey raised a two-way radio to his
lips and, calling himself "Alang Control," said, "Okay, Pioneer One, heave up your anchor, heave up
your anchor."

The Pioneer's captain acknowledged the order in thickly accented English. "Roger. Heave up anchor."

To me Pandey said, "We'll start off." He radioed the ship to turn away from the coast and gather
speed. "You make one-six-zero degrees, full ahead. What is your distance from the ship behind you?"

"Six cables, six cables."

"Okay, you make course one-six-zero, full ahead."

The masthead lights began to creep through the night. When the captain reported that the ship was
steady on the outbound course, Pandey ordered hard starboard rudder. He said, "Let me know your
course every ten degrees."

The answer came back shortly: "One-seven-zero, Pioneer One." The turn was under way.

"One-eight-zero, Pioneer One." I had to imagine, because I could not see, that great mass of steel
trembling under power and swinging toward the shore in the hands of its crew. The captain called
the changing courses with tension in his voice. I got the impression he had not done this before.
But Pandey was nonchalant. He gazed at silhouettes of sheds that were at the top of the beach. He
sipped his tea. The radio said,

"One-nine-zero ... two-zero-zero ... two-one-zero."

Pandey began talking about the Pilot's Aptitude Test that he had taken years before. He said, "It's
a test for which you can appear only once in your lifetime. Either you have the aptitude to be a
pilot or you don't, so it is a one-time course in a lifetime. And very interesting ..."

"Two-two-zero."

On that test, using mechanical controls, Pandey had kept a dot within the confines of a 1.5-inch
moving square. Now, using a hand-held radio, he was going to ram the Pioneer, a ship with a beam of
seventy-five feet, into a plot on the beach merely ninety-eight feet wide. It was presumptuous of
him, and he knew it. I admired his cool. The lights of the ship grew closer. The radio said,
"Two-three-zero." Pandey said, "Okay, Captain, you are ballasting, no?"

"Yes, sir, we are ballasting. Ballasting is going on."

"Very good, please continue."

The numbers counted up. At "three-one-zero," with the Pioneer now close offshore, Pandey finally
showed some emotion. Raising his voice, he said, "Okay, make three-two-zero, steady her. Okay, now
you give maximum revolution, Captain! Give maximum revolution!"

I went down to the water's edge. The Pioneer came looming out of the darkness, thrashing the
ocean's surface with its single screw, raising a large white bow wake as it rushed toward the
beach. I could make out the figures of men peering forward from the bridge and the bow. Now the
sound of the bow wave, like that of a waterfall, drowned the drumming of the engine. A group of
workers who had been standing nearby scattered to safety. I stayed where I was. Pandey joined me.
The Pioneer kept coming. It was caught by an inshore current that carried it briefly to the side.
Then the keel hit the bottom, and the ship drove hard onto the flooded beach, carried by its
weight, slowing under full forward power until the rudder no longer functioned and the hull veered
out of control and slid to a halt not a hundred yards from where we stood. Anchors the size of cars
rattled down the sides and splashed into the shallows. The engine stopped, the lights switched off
in succession from bow to stern, and abruptly the Pioneer lay dark and still.

I know that a ship is an inanimate object, but I cannot deny that at that moment the Pioneer did
die. It had been built in Japan in 1971, and had wandered the world under various owners and names
-- Cosmos Altair, Zephyrus, Bangkok Navee, Normar Pioneer. And now, as I stood watching from the
beach, it became a ferrous corpse -- in Indian law as well as in practice no longer a ship but just
a mass of imported steel. The seamen who lingered aboard, probing the dead passageways with their
flashlight beams, were waiting for the tide to go out, so that they could lower a rope ladder,
climb down the side, and walk away on dry ground. The new owner would have his workers start
cutting the corpse in the morning.

I asked Pandey if he found this sad, and he answered emphatically that he did not. He was a
powerful state official in a nation of powerful officials: he was the port officer of Alang, a man
who rode in a chauffeured car with a state emblem on the hood, and it was important to him to
appear rational at all times. But the truth, I thought later, might even be that he enjoyed these
ship killings. He told me that during his tenure he had personally directed every one -- altogether
several thousand by now -- and he took me along to his next victim, a small cargo vessel also from
the Caribbean, which he had already sent speeding toward its destruction. He was proud of his
efficiency. He mentioned a personal record of seven ships in succession. He was Pandey the ace, a
champion executioner.

Then dawn spread across his gargantuan landscape -- Alang, in daylight barely recognizable as a
beach, a narrow, smoke-choked industrial zone six miles long, where nearly 200 ships stood side by
side in progressive stages of dissection, yawning open to expose their cavernous holds, spilling
their black innards onto the tidal flats, and submitting to the hands of 40,000 impoverished Indian
workers. A narrow, roughly paved frontage road ran along the top of the beach, parallel to the
ocean. It was still quiet at dawn, although a few battered trucks had arrived early, and were
positioning themselves now for the day's first loads of steel scrap. On the ocean side the frontage
road was lined by the metal fences that defined the upper boundaries of the 183 shipbreaking yards
at Alang. The fences joined together into an irregular scrap-metal wall that ran intermittently for
most of the beach, and above which the bows of ships rose in succession like giants emerging from
the sea. Night watchmen were swinging the yard gates open now, revealing the individual plots, each
demarcated by little flags or other markers stuck into the sand, and heavily cluttered with cut
metal and nautical debris. The yards looked nearly the same, except for their little offices,
usually just inside the gates. The most marginal yards could afford only flimsy shacks or
open-sided shelters. The more successful yards had invested in more solid structures, some of
concrete, with raised verandahs and overhead fans.

The workers lived just across the frontage road, in a narrow shantytown with no sanitation, and for
the most part with no power. The shantytown did not have a name of its own. It stretched for
several miles through the middle of Alang, and had a small central business section, with a few
small grocery stalls and stand-up cafés. It was dusty, tough, and crowded. Unemployment there was
high. The residents were almost exclusively men, migrants from the distant states of Orissa and
Uttar Pradesh. They toiled under shipyard supervisors, typically from their home states or
villages, who dispensed the jobs, generally in return for a cut from the workers' already meager
pay. The workers chose to work nonetheless, because the alternatives were worse. In the morning
light now, they emerged from their shacks by the thousands and moved across the frontage road like
an army of the poor. They trudged through the yards' open gates, donned hard hats, picked up
crowbars and sledgehammers, and lit crude cutting torches. By eight o'clock, the official start of
the workday, they had sparks showering from all the ships nearby, and new black smoke rising into
the distance along the shore.

ALANG is a wonder of the world. It may be a necessity, too. When ships grow old and expensive to
run, after about twenty-five years of use, their owners do not pay to dispose of them but, rather,
the opposite -- they sell them on the international scrap market, where a typical vessel like the
Pioneer may bring a million dollars for the weight of its steel. Selling old ships for scrap is
considered to be a basic financial requirement by the shipping industry -- a business that has long
suffered from small profits and cutthroat competition. No one denies that what happens afterward is
a dangerous and polluting process.

Shipbreaking was performed with cranes and heavy equipment at salvage docks by the big shipyards of
the United States and Europe until the 1970s, when labor costs and environmental regulations drove
most of the business to the docksides of Korea and Taiwan. Eventually, however, even these
entrepreneurial countries started losing interest in the business and gradually decided they had
better uses for their shipyards. This meant that the world's shipbreaking business was again up for
grabs. In the 1980s enterprising businessmen in India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan seized the
initiative with a simple, transforming idea: to break a ship they did not need expensive docks and
tools; they could just wreck the thing -- drive the ship up onto a beach as they might a fishing
boat, and tear it apart by hand. The scrap metal to be had from such an operation could be
profitably sold, because of the growing need in South Asia for low-grade steel, primarily in the
form of ribbed reinforcing rods (re-bars) to be used in the construction of concrete walls. These
rods, which are generally of a poor quality, could be locally produced from the ships' hull plating
by small-scale "re-rolling mills," of which there were soon perhaps a hundred in the vicinity of
Alang alone. From start to finish the chain of transactions depended on the extent of the poverty
in South Asia. There was a vast and fast-growing population of people living close to starvation,
who would work hard for a dollar or two a day, keep the unions out, and accept injuries and deaths
without complaint. Neither they nor the government authorities would dream of making an issue of
labor or environmental conditions.

The South Asian industry took about a decade to mature. In 1983 Gujarat State proclaimed Alang its
shipbreaking site, when it was still a pristine shore known only to a few fishermen, without even a
dirt road leading to it. Twenty-two shipbreakers leased plots and disposed of five small ships that
year. The following year they disposed of fifty-one. The boom began in the early 1990s, as the
richer countries of East Asia continued to withdraw from the business.

Today roughly 90 percent of the world's annual crop of 700 condemned ships now end their lives on
the beaches of Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh -- and fully half of them die at Alang. With few
exceptions, the breakers are not high-born or educated men. They are shrewd traders who have fought
their way up, and in some cases have grown rich, but have never lost the poor man's feeling of
vulnerability. They have good reason to feel insecure. Even with the most modest of labor costs,
shipbreaking is a marginal business that uses borrowed money and generates slim profits. The risk
of failure for even the most experienced breakers is real. Some go under every year. For their
workers the risks are worse: falls, fires, explosions, and exposure to a variety of poisons from
fuel oil, lubricants, paints, wiring, insulation, and cargo slop. Many workers are killed every
year. Nonetheless, by local standards the industry has been a success. Even the lowliest laborers
are proud of what they do at Alang. There is no ship too big to be torn apart this way. More
important, the economic effects are substantial -- Alang and the industries that have sprung from
it provide a livelihood, however meager, for perhaps as many as a million Indians. Imagine,
therefore, their confusion and anger that among an even greater number of rich and powerful
foreigners, primarily in Northern Europe, Alang has also become a rallying cry for reform -- a name
now synonymous with Western complicity and Third World hell.

CAPTAIN Pandey by daylight was less in control than he had seemed at night. He appeared tired, even
fragile. We stood on the beach among the immense steel carcasses. I brought up the subject of the
international campaign, led by Greenpeace in Amsterdam, to reform the process of ship scrapping
worldwide. Although global in theory, the campaign in practice is directed mostly against the
biggest operation -- the beach here at Alang. I had been told that Pandey took the campaign as a
personal attack -- and indeed, at the mention of Greenpeace he struggled visibly to maintain his
composure. His face grew tight and angry. He spoke emphatically, as if to keep from raising his
voice. Very clearly he said, "The purposeful propaganda against this yard should be countered. You
come and look at the facts, and I'm proud of what I have done over here. So there is nothing to
hide." He sounded secretive anyway. He implied that a cabal of shadowy forces was conspiring
against Alang, and that the real purpose of the environmentalists' campaign was to take the
shipbreaking business away from India. He said, "I can show them ten thousand other places outside
India, point them out, which are in even worse condition than this. Why should they talk about my
country alone?"

Pandey had given his squadron of uniformed guards strict orders to turn away any foreigners trying
to enter the yards through the main gate. But determined foreigners kept slipping in anyway. They
worked for environmental and human-rights groups and took photographs of black smoke and red fire,
and of emaciated workers covered in oil -- strong images that, Pandey felt, did not represent a
balanced view of Alang. The moral superiority implied by these missions was galling to many
Indians, especially here on the sacred ground of Gujarat, the birth state of Mahatma Gandhi.
Recently Greenpeace activists had painted slogans on the side of a condemned ship. Pandey must have
taken a special pleasure in running that ship aground.

He was a complex man. He claimed to know that he couldn't have it both ways, that he couldn't
invite the world's ships to Alang and at the same time expect to keep the world out. Yet he
insisted on trying. After the sun rose, he took me to his office, because he wanted to stop me from
wandering through the yards, and then he escorted me away from Alang entirely, because he wanted to
make sure I was gone. I did not mention that I had already been at Alang for more than a week, or
that I knew a side road to the site and intended to return.


Shipbreaking, American Style

THE controversy over Alang started on the other side of the world and a few years back, in
Baltimore, Maryland, along the ghostly industrial shoreline of the city's outer harbor, where old
highway signs warn motorists about heavy smoke that no longer pours from the stacks. Early in 1996
a Baltimore Sun reporter named Will Englund was out on the water when he noticed a strange sight --
the giant aircraft carrier Coral Sea lying partially dismantled beside a dock, "in a million
pieces." Englund looked into the situation and discovered that the Coral Sea was a waterfront
fiasco of bankruptcy, lawsuits, worker injuries, toxic spills, and outright criminality. Of
particular interest to Baltimore, where thousands of shipyard workers had been disabled by
asbestos, was evidence of wholesale exposure once again to that dangerous dust. The U.S. Navy,
which still owned the hull, was guilty, it seemed, at least of poor oversight. Englund's first
report ran as a front-page story in April of 1996. The Sun's chief editor, John Carroll, then
decided to go after the subject in full. He brought in his star investigative reporter, Gary Cohn,
a quick-witted man who had the sort of street smarts that could complement Englund's more cerebral
style.

The two reporters worked on the story for more than a year. Their investigation centered on the
United States, where shipbreaking had become a nearly impossible business, for the simple reason
that the cost of scrapping a ship correctly was higher than the value of its steel. The only reason
any remnant of the domestic industry still existed was that since 1994 all government-owned ships
-- demilitarized Navy warships and also decrepit merchant vessels culled from the nation's
mothballed "reserve fleet" by the U.S. Maritime Administration -- had been kept out of the overseas
scrap market as a result of an Environmental Protection Agency ban against the export of
polychlorinated biphenyls, the hazardous compounds known as PCBs, which were used in ships'
electrical and hydraulic systems. In practice, the export ban did not apply to the much larger
number of U.S.-flagged commercial vessels, which were (and are still) exported freely for overseas
salvage. Hoping somehow to make the economics work, American scrappers bought the government ships
(or the scrapping rights) at giveaway prices, tore into them as expediently as possible, and in
most cases went broke anyway. As a result of these defaults, the Defense Department was forced to
repossess many of the vessels that it had awarded to U.S. contractors. Conditions in the remaining
yards were universally abysmal. The problems existed nationwide -- in California, Texas, North
Carolina, and, of course, Maryland. Englund and Cohn were surprised by the lack of previous
reporting, and they were fascinated by the intensity of the individual stories -- of death or
injury in hot, black holds, of environmental damage, and of repeated lawbreaking and cover-ups.
Cohn especially was used to working in the underbelly of society, but not even he had imagined that
abuses on such a scale could still exist in the United States. Later I asked him if he had been
motivated by anger or moral outrage. He mulled over the question. "I don't know that it was so much
anger. I think we discovered a lot of things that were wrong and needed correcting. But I wouldn't
say that we walked around angry all the time." Nonetheless the subject became their obsession.

At the same time that Cohn and Englund were investigating the story, the Navy and the Maritime
Administration, faced with a growing backlog of rotting hulls, were pressuring the EPA to lift its
export ban. They wanted the freedom to sell government ships for a profit on the South Asian scrap
market. Englund and Cohn realized that their investigation required a visit to the place where many
of these ships would end up if the ban were lifted -- a faraway beach called Alang.

The Sun hired an Indian stringer to help with logistics, enlisted a photographer, and in February
of 1997 sent the team to India. Alang was still an innocent place: the reporters were free to go
where they pleased, to take pictures openly, and to pay no mind to Captain Pandey. The reporters
were shocked by what they saw -- to them Alang was mostly a place of death. And they were not
entirely wrong. Soon after they left Alang, sparks from a cutting torch ignited the residual gases
in a tanker's hold and caused an explosion that killed fifteen workers -- or fifty. Alang was the
kind of place where people hardly bothered to count.

The Sun's shipbreaking report hit the newsstands for three days in December of 1997. It
concentrated first on the Navy's failures inside the United States and then on Alang. A little
storm broke out in Washington. The Maryland senator Barbara A. Mikulski promptly pronounced herself
"appalled" and requested a Senate investigation into the Navy's conduct. She called simultaneously
for the EPA's export ban to stay in place and for an overhaul of the domestic program to address
the labor and environmental issues brought up by the Sun articles. Though Mikulski spoke in stern
moral terms, what she apparently also had in mind was the creation of a new Baltimore jobs program
-- involving the clean, safe, and therefore expensive disposal of ships, to be funded in some way
by the federal government. The Navy had been embarrassed by the Sun's report, and was in no
position to counter Mikulski's attack. It answered weakly that it welcomed discussions "to ensure
[that] the complex process of ship disposal is conducted in an environmentally sound manner and in
a way that protects the health and safety of workers." Mikulski shot back a letter to Secretary of
Defense William Cohen: "Frankly, I was disappointed in their tepid comments. We don't need hollow
promises and clichés. We need an action plan and concrete solutions."

Her opinion was shared by other elected officials with struggling seaports. The Maryland
representative Wayne T. Gilchrest announced that his maritime subcommittee would hold hearings. The
California representative George Miller said, "I feel strongly that contributing to the pollution
and labor exploitation found at places like Alang, India, is not a fitting end for these once-proud
ships." Miller also argued that since the Navy was paying the cleanup costs at its old bases, it
should pay for the scrapping of its old ships as well. It made sense. Certainly the U.S. government
could afford it.

In the last days of 1997 the Navy surrendered, declaring that it was suspending plans to export its
ships. Reluctantly the Maritime Administration agreed to do the same. The government had a backlog
of 170 ships awaiting destruction -- with others scheduled to join them. Faced with the continuing
decay of those ships -- and the possibility that some of them would soon sink -- the Defense
Department formed an interagency shipbreaking panel and gave it two months to report back with
recommendations. The panel suffered from squabbling, but it dutifully went through the motions of
deliberation.

During a public hearing in March of 1998 the speakers made just the sort of dull and self-serving
statements that one would expect. Ross Vincent, of the Sierra Club, said, "Waste should be dealt
with where it is generated."

George Miller said, "A global environmental leader like the United States should not have as a
national policy the exporting of its toxic waste to developing countries ill equipped to handle
it."

Barbara Mikulski said, "We ought to take a look at how we can turn this into an opportunity for
jobs in our shipyards."

Stephen Sullivan, of Baltimore Marine Industries, said, "We have a singular combination of
shipbuilding, ship-conversion, and ship-repair expertise."

And Murphy Thornton, of the shipbuilders' union, said, "Those ships should be buried with honor."

In April of 1998 Englund and Cohn won the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting. That same
month the shipbreaking panel issued its final report -- a bland document that reflexively called
for better supervision of the domestic industry and wistfully maintained the hope of resuming
exports, but also suggested that a Navy "pilot project" explore the costs of clean ship disposal in
the United States. By September of last year an appropriation had moved through Congress, and the
future finally seemed clear: the pilot project included only four out of 180 ships, but it involved
an initial sum of $13.3 million, to be awarded on a "cost plus" basis to yards in Baltimore,
Brownsville, Philadelphia, and San Francisco -- and by definition it was just the start.

This was Washington in action. A problem had been identified and addressed through a demonstrably
open and democratic process, and a solution had been found that was affordable and probably about
right. Nonetheless, there was also something wrong about the process -- an elusive quality not
exactly of corruption but of a repetitive and transparent dishonesty that seemed to imply either
that the public was naive or that it could not be trusted with straight talk. Even the Baltimore
Sun had joined in: in September of 1998, when Vice President Al Gore went through the motions of
imposing another (redundant) ban on exports, an approving Sun editorial claimed that the
prohibition "especially benefits the poorly paid and untrained workers in the wretched shipyards of
South Asia." Patently absurd assertions like that may help to explain why shipbreaking reform,
despite all the trappings of a public debate, including coverage in the national press and even
ultimately the Pulitzer Prize, actually attracted very little attention in the United States. The
people who might naturally have spared this issue a few moments of thought may have had little
patience for the rhetoric. Or maybe the subject just seemed too small and far away. For whatever
reason, the fact is that the American public did not notice the linguistic nicety distinguishing
the government ships in question from the much larger number of commercial U.S.-flagged ships,
which would remain untouched by the reforms. So an argument about double standards, which should at
least have been heard, was expediently ignored. Seen from outside the United States, the pattern
was hard to figure out. India, of course, paid attention to the controversy. At Alang, where plenty
of American commercial vessels still came to die, people couldn't understand why the government's
ships were banned. I could never quite bridge the cultural gap to explain the logic. How does one
say that the process had simply become an exercise in democracy from above? A subject had been tied
off and contained.

Pollution's Poster Child

TIED off and contained in America, that is. As it turned out, the Sun's exposé did affect Alang,
but in a way that no one in Washington had anticipated. The surprise came close on the heels of the
Pulitzer Prize, when the hellish image of Alang landed hard in Scandinavia and the countries of the
Rhine, where it ignited a popular movement for shipbreaking reform. If it seems unlikely that
ordinary people would genuinely care about a problem so abstract and far away, nevertheless in
Northern Europe millions of them did. In The Hague a typically progressive Dutch official explained
to me that his countrymen had less-frantic lives than Americans, and could spare the time for
altruism.

The campaign, which continues today, was led from Greenpeace's global headquarters, in Amsterdam,
by plainspoken activists who started in where American reformers hadn't ventured -- going after the
big commercial shipping lines. By this past spring the activists had muscled their way in to the
maritime lawmaking forums and had begun to threaten the very existence of Alang.

Their task was made easier from the outset by the work of the emotive Brazilian photojournalist
Sebastião Salgado, who came upon the story when it was young, in 1989, and captured unforgettable
images of gaunt laborers and broken ships on the beach in Bangladesh. In 1993 Salgado exhibited his
photographs at several shows in Europe and in his superb picture book Workers, which was widely
seen. An awareness of shipbreaking's particular hardships began to percolate in the European
consciousness, as did the suspicion that perhaps somehow a caring West should intervene. Then, in
1995, Greenpeace had a famous brush with marine "salvage" when it discovered that Shell intended to
dispose of a contaminated oil-storage platform, the giant Brent Spar, by sinking it in the North
Atlantic. Greenpeace boarded the platform, led a consumer boycott against Shell (primarily at gas
stations in Germany), and with much fanfare forced the humiliated company to back down. The Brent
Spar was towed to a Norwegian fjord and scrapped correctly, an expensive job that continued until
last summer. Greenpeace had once again shown itself to be a powerful player on the European scene.

It was powerful because it was popular, and popular because it was audacious, imaginative, and
incorruptible. It also had a knack for entertaining its friends. When the drama of Alang came into
clear view, Greenpeace recognized the elements for a new campaign. The organization was not being
cynical. For many years it had been involved in a fight to stop the export of toxic wastes from
rich countries to poor -- a struggle that had culminated in an international accord known as the
Basel Ban, an export prohibition, now in effect, to which the European Union nations had agreed.
Greenpeace considered the Basel Ban to be an important victory, and it saw the shipbreaking trade
as an obvious violation: if the ships were not themselves toxins, they were permeated with toxic
materials, and were being sent to South Asia as a form of waste. Greenpeace was convinced that
ships owned by companies based in the nations that had signed the accord, no matter what flag those
ships flew, were clearly banned from export. It was a good argument. Moreover, the shipping
industry's counterargument -- that the ships went south as ships, becoming waste only after hitting
the beaches -- provided a nice piece of double talk that Greenpeace could hold up for public
ridicule. And Alang, with its filth and smoke, provided perfect panoramas to bring the point home.
So Greenpeace went to war.

It was October of 1998, a year and a half after the Sun's visit. Captain Pandey was on guard
against trouble, but he must have been looking in the wrong direction. A group of Greenpeace
activists got onto the beach by posing as shipping buffs interested in the story of a certain
German vessel. They said they wanted the ship's wheel. But they also wandered off and took pictures
of the squalor, and they scraped up samples from the soil, the rubble, and the shantytown shacks.
After analyzing those samples, two German laboratories quantified what Greenpeace already knew --
that Alang was powerfully poisonous, particularly for the laborers who worked, ate, and slept at
dirt level there. Greenpeace issued the findings in a comprehensive report, the best yet written on
Alang. The report discussed the medical consequences of the contaminants, and described the risk of
industrial accidents, which were rumored to cause 365 deaths a year. "Every day one ship, every day
one dead," went the saying about Alang, and although the report's authors admitted that there was
no way to verify this, it was a formulation that people remembered.

Greenpeace needed a culprit to serve as a symbol of the European shipping business, and it found
one in the tradition-bound P&O Nedlloyd, an Anglo-Dutch cargo line that was openly selling its old
ships on the Asian scrap market. In the shadowy world of shipping, where elusive companies
establish offshore headquarters and run their vessels under flags of convenience, P&O Nedlloyd was
a haplessly anchored target: it had a big office building on a street in Rotterdam, and a staff of
modern, middle-class Europeans, altruists who tended to sympathize with Greenpeace and would
quietly keep it apprised of P&O Nedlloyd's intentions and movements. Also, because a related
company called P&O Cruises operated a fleet of English Channel ferries and cruise ships, P&O
Nedlloyd was likely to be sensitive to public opinion. In November of 1998 Greenpeace staged a
protest at the company's offices, erecting a giant photograph of a scrapped ship at Alang along
with a statement in Dutch: "P&O Nedlloyd burdens Asia with it." The press arrived, and eventually a
company director emerged from the building to talk to the activists. He did not appear to be afraid
or angry. He said it wasn't fair to single out P&O Nedlloyd, and he made the argument that
coordinated international regulation was needed. International regulation was exactly what
Greenpeace wanted -- but when the next day's paper came out with a photograph captioned "P&O and
Greenpeace agree," Greenpeace denied that there had been any understanding.

The truth was that Greenpeace needed resistance from P&O Nedlloyd, and it would have had to rethink
its strategy if the company had submitted to its demands and obediently stopped scrapping in Asia.
But of course P&O Nedlloyd did not submit -- and, for that matter, could not afford to submit.
After its brief attempt at openness, it went into just the sort of sullen retreat that Greenpeace
might have hoped for. Greenpeace staged a series of shipside banner unfurlings, and it dogged a
doomed P&O Nedlloyd container vessel, appropriately called the Encounter Bay, as it went about the
world on its final errands. Millions of Greenpeace sympathizers watched with glee. P&O Nedlloyd was
so unnerved by the campaign that in the spring of last year it apparently painted a new name on a
ship bound for the Indian beach, in order, perhaps, to disguise who owned it. Greenpeace found out
and shouted in indignation. When P&O Nedlloyd then refused to comment, it began to look like an old
man turned to evil. This made for good theater -- especially against the backdrop of the ubiquitous
pictures of Alang. With public opinion now fully aroused, the Northern European governments began
to move, introducing the first dedicated shipbreaking initiatives into the schedules of the
European Union and the International Maritime Organization -- the London-based body for the law of
the seas. In June of last year the Netherlands sponsored an international shipbreaking conference
in Amsterdam -- a meeting whose tone was established at the outset by an emotional condemnation of
the industry by the Dutch Minister of Transport. It was obvious to everyone there that the movement
for reform was gathering strength. It was hard to know what changes would result -- and which
shipbreaking nations would be affected. But the reformers were ambitious, and their zeal was
genuine. I thought Pandey had reason to be afraid.

IN London last fall I met an affable Englishman named Brian Parkinson, who worked as a trade and
operations adviser for the International Chamber of Shipping, an umbrella group of national
shipowner associations. Parkinson had a natural appreciation for the anarchy of the sea and an
equally natural aversion to the Greenpeace campaign. He said, "Shipping gets blamed for everything.
Global warming. Why the British don't have a decent football team." For lunch we went to a dark
little pub that should have been on the docks. Parkinson told me that he was near the end of his
career and was looking forward to retirement. Meanwhile, however, he was struggling gamely to keep
pace with the times. He said, "A ship registered in Panama, owned by a Norwegian, operating in the
U.S., and sold in India is not an export -- but we're not making that argument." He said, "Maybe
there are things that shipowners can do." First, he had in mind a nice bit of public relations:
"We're looking at creating an inventory of hazardous components, a good-housekeeping guide. We want
to know how we can present the ship to the recyclers in the best possible way." I complimented him
on the word "recyclers," and he said yes, right, it was rather good, wasn't it? But he was toying
with something a bit more real as well -- a proposal for voluntary self-regulation, under which the
industry would inspect and certify the yards at the Asian beaches and then factor in good behavior
when choosing which ones to use. He mentioned that Shell had already sent an inspector to a yard at
Alang, and that he was said to have written an in-house report. As evidence of progress, this
seemed pretty slim. I asked Parkinson what was to keep his scheme from becoming a two-tiered
arrangement, whereby a few image-conscious companies would accept the expense of working with
certified yards while all the other shipowners continued with business as usual, selling their
vessels to the highest bidders. He said he worried about that too.

At the central train station in Amsterdam a few days later I met Parkinson's opponent, a leader of
the Greenpeace campaign, Claire Tielens, a young Dutch woman with a walker's stride and an
absolutist's frank gaze. We went to the station café and talked.

I asked her if she had visited India yet, and she said no, but that for several years she had been
a reporter for an environmental news service in the Philippines, so she knew about Third World
conditions. I said, "Why did you choose Alang? Why does it seem worse to you than the other
industrial sites in India?"

She answered, "Because here there is a very direct link with Western companies."

"But if it's Western companies at Alang, versus Indian companies somewhere else, what difference
does it make to the world's environment?"

"Because those Western companies pretend to us here with glossy leaflets that they are so
environmentally responsible. And it is a shame when they export their shit to the developing
world."

"But from your environmental point of view," I asked, "what difference does it make who the
polluter is, and whether he's a hypocrite or not? I mean, what is it about shipbreaking? And what
is it about Alang?"

I kept phrasing my questions badly. She kept trying to answer me directly, and failing, and going
over the same ground. Without intending to, I was being unfair. She should have said, "We needed to
make some choices, and so we chose Alang. It was easy -- and look how far we've come." I think that
would have been about right. Instead she said, "Even by Indian standards, Alang is bad." But India
has a billion people, and it is famously difficult to define.

Dark Satanic Mills

NEW Delhi sprawls on dirty ground under ashen skies. It is an immense capital city, a noisy
expression of the Indian democracy, not quite the anarchy that at first it appears to be but a
conglomeration of countless private worlds. I found myself there last winter at late-night dinners
and garden parties among the city's large middle class -- professionals who drove when they might
have walked, and inhabited houses like little forts with guarded gates and shard-topped walls. They
worried about crime -- partly, I think, because they could defend against it. The larger assaults
on a life in New Delhi were simply overwhelming. A friend of mine with a small trucking company was
concerned about the progressive failure of the city's infrastructure and what that meant for his
business. He took me to visit New Delhi's chief urban planner, a powerful official who sat defeated
at an empty steel desk in a big bare office, and out of boredom and loneliness detained us with
small talk and offers of tea. After we escaped, my friend said, "It's incredible, no? I wanted you
to see this. It's like he's sitting there at the end of the world."

But to me it was the pollution in New Delhi that seemed apocalyptic. The streams were dead channels
trickling with sewage and bright chemicals, and the air on the streets was at times barely
breathable. In the heat of the afternoons a yellow-white mixture hung above the city, raining
acidic soot into the dust and exhaust fumes. At night the mixture condensed into a dry, choking fog
that enveloped the headlights of passing cars, and crept with its stink into even the tightest
houses. The residents could do little to keep the poison out of their lungs or the lungs of their
children, and if they were poor, they could not even try. People told me it was taking years off
their lives. Yet New Delhi was bursting its seams, because newcomers from rural India kept flooding
in.

The big port city of Bombay has a reputation for being just as dirty, but on the day I got there,
an ocean breeze was blowing, and in relative terms the air was clean. When I mentioned this to
Pravin S. Nagarsheth, the shipbreaker I had come to see, he grew excited and said, "Yeah! Yeah!"
because relativity was precisely the point he wanted to make to me. Nagarsheth was a nervous little
man with a round and splotchy face and some missing teeth. He had been scrapping ships for nearly
thirty-five years, first with a small yard here in Bombay, and then in a bigger way at Alang. He
was also the president of the Indian shipbreakers' association, and as such he had taken the lead
in the industry's defense. He had traveled to the Amsterdam shipbreaking conference to counter the
reports of abuses at Alang. In his speech there he said, "All these write-ups, I would say, are
biased, full of exaggerations.... One, however, wonders whether such reports are deliberately
written for public consumption in affluent Western societies only.... The environmentalists and
Greenpeace talk of future generations, but are least bothered about the plight of the present
generation. Have they contributed anything constructive to mitigate the plight of the people living
below the poverty line in developing countries? ... Living conditions of labor in Alang should not
be looked at in isolation. It is the crisis of urbanization due to job scarcity. Large-scale slums
have mushroomed in all cities.... The fact remains that workers at Alang are better paid and are
probably safer than their counterparts back in the poor provinces of Orissa, Bihar, and Uttar
Pradesh. To provide housing and better living conditions ... is financially impractical for a
developing country like India, where forty-five percent of the population is living below the
poverty line."

We met in the lobby of a shabby hotel in central Bombay. Nagarsheth kept leaning into me, grabbing
my arm to punctuate his arguments. He said, "Everybody knows this is bad! It is not a point of
dispute! What Greenpeace is saying is even excellent! But their ideology does not provide
solutions! This generation cannot afford it!"

Nagarsheth seemed to worry that I would understand the country in some antiseptic way -- for its
computer industry, its novelists, or maybe even its military might. But the India he wanted me to
see was a place that related directly to Alang -- an India drowning in the poverty of its people.
And so, rather than talking any more about shipbreaking, he insisted on showing me around Bombay.
He guided me into the city's slums, which are said to be the largest in the world. Then he led me
back toward the city center, for miles through a roadside hell where peasants lived wall-to-wall in
scrap boxes and shacks, and naked children sat listless in the traffic's blue smoke as if waiting
to die. Nagarsheth said, "Do you see this? Do you see this? You need to remember it when you get to
Alang."

He was making a valid point about relative levels of misery. I saw another level a few days later
in Bhavnagar, the nearest city to Alang, at a re-rolling mill, where hull plates from the ships
were being torch cut, heated, and stretched into reinforcing bars. Bhavnagar is an uncrowded city
by Indian standards, with a population of perhaps 600,000 in a physical shell that to a Westerner
might seem better suited for perhaps a fourth of that. The re-rolling mill I visited was one of
many there. It stood on the north edge of town, on a quiet dirt street wandered by cows, at the end
of a crumbling brick wall, beyond the dust and din of the city's auto-rickshaws. The mill had a
sagging iron gate. A traveler would normally pass it by, perhaps seeing it as a poor but peaceful
scene. But I went inside, past an old brick building where clerks sat idle behind bulky typewriters
on an outside porch, and on into the dark heart of the mill -- a large, open-sided shed where
perhaps a hundred emaciated men moved through soot and heavy smoke, feeding scrap to a roaring
furnace leaking flames from cracks in the side. The noise in there was deafening. The heat was so
intense that in places I thought it might sear my lungs. The workers' clothes were black with
carbon, as were their hair and their skin. Their faces were so sooty that their eyes seemed
illuminated.

The furnace was long and low. The men working closest to the fire tried to protect themselves by
wrapping heavy rags around their mouths and legs. They cut the steel plates into heavy strips,
which they heaved into the inferno and dragged through the furnace before wrestling them free,
red-hot, at the far end. Using long tongs, they slung the smoking metal, still brightly glowing,
through a graduated series of rollers, which squeezed and lengthened it incrementally into the
final product -- the reinforcing rods, which were piled together and allowed to cool. It was a
punishing and dangerous procedure, requiring agility, strength, and speed, and also the calculation
of risk. The workers were quite obviously exhausted by it. Some, I think, were slowly starving,
trapped in that cycle of nutritional deficit all too common in South Asia, by which a man may
gradually expend more calories on his job than his wages will allow him to replace.

On the Beach

I TRAVELED from Bhavnagar to Alang, thirty miles to the south, on a narrow road crowded with
jitneys and trucks, choked with blue exhaust, and battered by the weight of steel scrap. The road
ran like an industrial artery across plains of denuded farmland, on which impoverished villages
endured in torpor and peasants scratched at the parched earth. Along the way stood a few open-air
cafés, where truck drivers could stop for soft drinks and food, and a few small factories, where
oxygen was concentrated into steel bottles to be mixed later with cooking gas for use in the
cutting operations farther south. But otherwise the roadside scenery remained agricultural until
several miles before Alang. There, next to a small house on the right, a collection of lifeboats
listed in the dirt. The lifeboats marked the start of Alang's roadside marketplace, where
specialized traders neatly sorted and resold secondary merchandise from the ships. There were yards
for generators, motors, transformers, kitchen appliances, beds and other furniture, wires and
pipes, cables, ropes, life rings, clothing, industrial fluids, and miscellaneous machinery. The
traders lived among their goods. The buyers came from all over India.

The marketplace continued for several miles to Alang's main gate. But the best way to the beach for
a Westerner, given Captain Pandey's concerns about foreigners, was a small side road that branched
off a few miles before the main gate and wandered again through rural scenery. I passed a boy
herding cows, three women carrying water, a turbaned farmer hoeing. The heat was oppressive. The
air smelled of dung and dust. For a while it was almost possible to forget that the ocean was near.
But then the road made a turn, and at the far end of a field an immense cargo ship rose above the
trees. Behind it, fainter and in the haze, stood another. The ships seemed to emerge from the
earth, as if the peasants had found a way to farm them.

My base at the beach was Plot 138. It was a busy patch of ground, bounded at the top by one of the
standard sheet-metal fences. I threaded through piles of sorted scrap, past the smoke of cutting
crews, past chanting gangs carrying heavy steel plate, past cables and chains and roaring diesel
winches, to the water's edge, where the hulk of a 466-foot Japanese-built cargo ship called the Sun
Ray, once registered in the Maldives, was being torn apart by an army of the poor. Four hundred men
worked there, divided into three distinct groups -- a shipboard elite of cutters and their
assistants, who were slicing the hull into multi-ton pieces; a ground crew of less experienced men,
who winched those pieces partway up the beach and reduced them there to ten-foot sections of steel
plate; and, finally, the masses of unskilled porters condemned to the end of the production line,
where, piece by piece, they would eventually shoulder the entire weight of the hull, lugging the
heavy plates to the upper beach and loading them into trucks -- belching monsters painted like
Hindu shrines -- which would haul the scrap away. And that was just for the steel. Everywhere I
looked stood the piles of secondary products awaiting disposal -- the barrels of oil and hydraulic
fluid and all the assorted equipment destined for the roadside marketplace. In either direction I
could look down the coast at a line of torn ships fading into the smoke of burning oil.

Alang at first is a scene of complete visual confusion; it begins to make sense only after about a
week, when the visual impact fades, and the process of breaking a ship by hand sorts itself out
into a series of simple, brutal activities. The first job is to shackle the ship more firmly to the
ground. Using motorized winches and a combination of anchor chains and braided steel cables looped
through holes cut into the bow, the workers draw the hull as high onto the beach as the ship's
draft and trim allow, so that ideally the bow stands on dry ground even at high tide. The winches
are diesel-powered machines each the size of a small bulldozer, staked firmly to the ground about
halfway up the beach. The stress on the cables during the winching operation is enormous. They
groan and clank under the load, and sometimes they snap dangerously. The workers are ordered to
stand clear. Nonetheless, some winch operators sit unprotected by safety cages, and gamble that a
broken cable will never recoil directly back at them. It's easy to imagine that sometimes they
lose.

After the initial dragging is done, the crews climb aboard with ladders and ropes and begin to
empty the ship's fuel tanks: they pump the good oil into barrels for resale, and slop the residual
sludge of no commercial value onto dry ground, where it is burned. The empty tanks continue to
produce volatile vapors, and pose a risk of explosion until they are aerated -- a tricky process
that often involves cutting ventilation holes. The most experienced cutters are used for this work,
because they are believed to have developed noses for dangerous vapors. Even so, there are
explosions and fatalities -- though fewer now than before, because of slowly improving safety
standards. On some ships the tanks can be sliced off whole, dropped into the water, and winched
above the tide line for dissection and disposal. Cutting on hard ground is easier than cutting on
the ship, and because the workers are therefore more likely to do the job right, it is also safer.
But either way, the yard must demonstrate to Gujarat officials that the fuel tanks have been
secured and neutralized before they will give the final authorization to proceed with the
scrapping.

With the risk of explosion diminished, the breakers turn their attention to the ship's
superstructure, the thin-walled quarters that typically rise five or six levels above the main
deck, and in which, because of combustible wiring and wood paneling, the chance of a deadly fire
cannot be ignored. The superstructure is like a ghost town, still full of the traces of its former
inhabitants. Scattered about lie old books and magazines in various languages, nautical charts from
faraway oceans, company manuals, years' worth of ship's logs, newspaper clippings, national flags,
signal flags, radio frequency lists, union pamphlets, letters, clothes, posters, and sometimes a
much-appreciated stock of liquor, narcotics, or pornography. The scrappers spread through the
quarters like hungry scavengers, quickly removing the furniture and galley equipment, tearing into
the wood paneling and asbestos insulation to get at the valuable plumbing, stripping out the wires,
electronics, and instruments, and making a special effort to save the ship's bell, always in demand
for use at Hindu temples. These treasures are roped down the side and hustled to the top of the
beach by ground crews.

Then the cutting begins. It is surprising how few men are needed to handle the torches: by working
simultaneously on the port and starboard sides, a dozen competent cutters, backed up by a larger
number of assistants, can demolish an entire superstructure within two weeks. Gravity helps.
Starting with the overhanging wings of the bridge, the cutters slice the superstructure into big
sections. There is an art to this, because every ship is different. The decisions about where to
cut are made by the yard's owner and the all-important shipboard supervisor. Within the logical
demolition sequence (which with variations runs roughly from front to back and from top to bottom)
the general idea is to cut off the largest section that can be cleared away from the ship by the
shore-based winches. The height and geometry of the superstructure is a crucial consideration,
because it affects the way the sections fall. If the work has been done right, when the final cut
on a section is made, it falls clear of the hull. It lands on the tidal flat with a dull thump. The
ground crew walks out to it, attaches a cable, and winches it higher onto the beach to carve it up.
Meanwhile, the shipboard crews may already have dropped another section. At this early stage it can
be gratifying work. If the superstructure is flimsy, the crews can make the metal rain.

But the work slows when they come to the hull, where the steel is heavier and harder to cut. At
that point, even for veteran workers, there must be a moment of hesitation at the audacity of the
business. Using little more than cooking gas and muscle power they will tear apart this immense
monolith, which towers above the crowds on the sand. It will take six months or a year to finish
the job; men will be injured, and some may die. Almost all will to some degree be poisoned by smoke
and toxic substances -- and more seriously, no doubt, than they would have been on the streets of
India's cities. Nonetheless, the poor cannot afford to be timid.

They go after the hull by cutting off the forward section of the bow, opening the ship's cavernous
forward hold to the outside, and making room for an expanded force of shipboard cutting crews. Half
of them continue to cut at the forward section, slowly moving aft; the other half burrow directly
back through the ship, cutting away the internal bulkheads, until they come to the engine room,
near the stern. The ship's engine is not usually saved, because generally it is worn out, and in
any case it is often too large to be removed whole. The crews open ventilation holes through the
sides of the hull, unbolt the engine, disconnect it from the shafts, and cut it apart crudely on
the spot. They drag the pieces forward through the length of the ship with the help of small
winches placed aboard for that purpose.

To understand why it is important to remove the engine early in the process, consider that the ship
continues in part to float throughout the scrapping process, and that high tides lift it, allowing
the progressive winchings by which, as the hull is consumed, it is drawn onto the beach. From the
start the ship's trim is a consideration. If the angle at which the keel is floating does not match
the slope of the ocean floor, the ship may hang up offshore. The trick is not to get the bow to
ride high, as one might assume, but, rather, to keep the stern of an unladen ship from riding too
low. The stern naturally rides low because of the weight of the superstructure, the engine, and the
machinery installed there. Once the scrapping is under way, the correct trim can be maintained only
by the judicious removal of weight. Cutting away the superstructure and removing the heavy bronze
propeller does not fully compensate for the subsequent loss of the bow section, whose weight,
because it lies so far forward of the ship's center of gravity, has a disproportionate effect on
the trim. That is why the breakers must go in from the opened bow and take out the engine.
Afterward the demolition proceeds so predictably, from bow to stern, that it is possible to mark
its conclusion precisely when the ship's rudder lies at last on dry ground, submitting to the
torches. The workers do not celebrate the achievement, because if they are lucky, the next ship has
already arrived.

Plot 138, the yard that I settled into, was the domain of Paras Ship Breakers Ltd., a company owned
by a man named Chiman Bai, who began his career as an errand boy in the ancient Bhavnagar market
and rose to become a shopkeeper selling rice and wheat. Bai got into the shipbreaking business in
1983, when he responded to an obscure notice in the newspaper about the availability of plots at
Alang. I never met him, I think because he felt awkward with foreigners; it was said that he still
worked from a back office in the market and that he presided over an extended family of
thirty-five, all of whom lived in a single house in Bhavnagar and ate their meals together in the
traditional way, sitting on the kitchen floor. His younger brother, Jaysukh Bai, ran the
shipbreaking operation day to day. He was a square-jawed, gray-haired man with a Hindu cloth
bracelet and a diamond ring. He did business at an office in Bhavnagar every morning, and in the
afternoon made his way to Alang, where he sat among his sons and nephews on a porch overlooking the
yard. I sat with him sometimes, drinking the Indian cola called Thumbs Up, breathing the acrid
smoke from the final cutting of ship parts, some of which was done nearby. Jaysukh Bai did not seem
to notice the smoke. One of his nephews figured that I did. He distrusted me, and repeatedly made
that clear. Once he said nastily, "The question I want to ask the environmentalists is if you
should want to die first of starvation or pollution."

I said, "They say you don't have to make that choice."

He said, "That's bullshit."

In a place like Alang, he was probably right.

Sometimes I wandered across the road, into the crowded shantytown where the workers lived, a place
with shacks built of wood and ship's paneling, some on stilts over a malarial marsh that bordered
the beach. There were no latrines at Alang, in part because few of the men would have used them.
They preferred simply to relieve themselves in nearby bushes, as they had in the farming hamlets
from which they came. But of course Alang was much larger than a hamlet, and as a result the air
there was filled with fecal odors, which mixed with the waves of smoke and industrial dust to
permeate the settlement with a potent stench. People got used to it, as they did to the mosquitoes,
and the flies. Discomfort was an accepted part of living in Alang, as was disease. Thousands of
workers who were sick, injured, or unemployed lingered in the shantytown during the day, lying on
scavenged linoleum floors by open doorways, or sitting outside in the thin shade of the walls.
There were almost no wives or children. As in other migrant camps, drunkenness, prostitution, and
violence were never far away.

Nonetheless, a semblance of normalcy was maintained. For instance, Alang had a good drinking-water
system, a network of communal cisterns supplied by truck, which was Captain Pandey's pride. It also
had Hindu shrines, informal cricket fields, and enough spare power for its commercial district to
run refrigerators and gay little strings of lights. Each evening when the workday was done, the
settlement came to life. The workers cooked outside their shacks in small groups intent on the
food, and afterward, feeling renewed, they gathered in the light from the cafés and talked. They
laughed. They listened to music. Sometimes they held religious processions. Sometimes they danced.
And then on Sundays, when by law all the shipbreaking yards were closed, they washed, dressed up,
and strolled among friends, looking fresh and clean-cut.

One evening a small group from Plot 138 invited me to sit with them outside their shack, and one of
them went off into the slum and came back with a man who could translate. It was awkward for
everyone. The men were formal with me. I asked about their work. They knew it was risky and could
make them sick, but they seemed more interested in letting me know they were cutters, and stood
high on the scrapyard scale. I asked about their bosses, and they named some of the supervisors who
had given them jobs. They said that in other yards some of the supervisors were abusive. They
offered no opinions about Jaysukh Bai, maybe because they had seen me with him.

After a week Pravin Nagarsheth arrived from Bombay to check on his shipyard, a few plots down from
Plot 138. A ship lay there half consumed on the beach. Nagarsheth brought his son-in-law with him,
a slim city boy in undersized Ray-Bans who slipped carefully around the workers and confided to me,
"The first time I came here, I was totally zapped." He meant he was surprised. He seemed a bit
precious. But Nagarsheth was not like that, and neither was Jaysukh Bai. They were direct men who
walked willingly among their laborers; and though they had grown wealthy on the backs of the poor,
they had maintained a connection to them nonetheless. The alternative seemed to be the
disengagement I had witnessed in New Delhi and Bombay, where the upper levels of society were
floating free of the ground, aided by the airlines and the Internet, as if the poverty in India
were a geographic inconvenience. Nagarsheth's own daughter had graduated from the University of
Chicago with a degree in computer science, and he was proud of her. But standing beside him on the
beach, in the midst of his piles of scrap, I suspected he knew that shipbreakers were unfashionable
among the Indian elites. He may even have been able to see himself as they did -- an angry little
man with a propensity for mucking around in the world's garbage. In the foreign press I had
discerned an undertone of mockery about such things, a vestige of the old colonial amusement at the
very idea of native kings. Even the Baltimore Sun had indulged in the fun, quoting an interior
decorator from Bombay who ridiculed the flamboyant tastes on exhibit in the shipbreakers' big
houses in Bhavnagar. Such public amusement was of course noticed elsewhere in India, especially
among the ruling classes, who were so successfully joining the "global" (meaning Westernized)
society. Now, in Bombay and New Delhi, a young and soon to be powerful generation was returning
from European and American universities speaking the language of environmentalism. And Alang was
becoming an embarrassment.

The Future of Alang

ALANG has become a metaphor in the crucial struggle of our time -- that between the First World and
the Third, the rich and the poor. Beneath our perspectives on a shrinking world lurks an opposing
reality, hidden in the poverty of places like South Asia, of a world that is becoming larger -- and
unmanageably so. Do we share a global ecology? On a certain level it's obvious that we do, and that
therefore, at last, a genuine scientific argument can be made for the imposition of Western
knowledge. But making this argument is difficult, full of political risk and the opportunity for
self-delusion. In practice, the world is as much a human construct as a natural one. The people who
inhabit it have such radically different experiences in life that it can be almost surprising that
they share the same air. This is inherently hard to accept from a distance. Too often we have a
view of what is desirable for some other part of the world which is so detached from daily
existence there that it becomes counterproductive, or even inhumane. Alang is a typical case.
Resentful Indians kept saying to me, "You had your industrial revolution, and so we should have
ours." I kept suggesting in return that history is not so symmetrical. But of course they knew that
already, and viewed Alang with more complexity than they could express to me, and were using a
simplified argument they felt I might understand. On the ship-scrapping beach at Chittagong, in
Bangladesh, I met an angry man who took the simplest approach. He said, "You are sitting on top of
the World Trade Center, sniffing fresh air, and talking about it. You don't know anything."

He was angry about the West's presumptuousness and its strength. He was angry about people like
Claire Tielens, at Greenpeace. When I talked to Tielens in Amsterdam, she was unyielding about
Greenpeace's demands. She said, "Ships should not be scrapped in Asia unless they are
decontaminated and they don't contain toxic materials. New ships should be built in such a way that
they can be scrapped safely -- so without hazardous materials if possible. The export of
toxin-containing ships from Western countries to developing countries should be stopped. And if
possible, ships should be cleaned throughout their lifetime. If they export clean steel, that's
fine with us."

I said, "But ships will always contain toxic wastes. Is it economically possible to ..."

"'Economically'? Well, of course that's a very flexible term."

I thought the economics might be less flexible than she believed. One of the twists in this story
is that the U.S. government, an entity that Greenpeace has a prerogative to dislike, has become
without question the world's most principled shipowner, and as such is leading the way in
establishing the real costs of doing things right. I spent an afternoon last winter at an anchorage
run by the Maritime Administration on the James River in Virginia, climbing through floating wrecks
among the ever-growing number of government derelicts awaiting a proper domestic disposal. On one
ship a workman had painted SINK ME! as a way of tempting fate. All these ships were rusting
through. The annual costs for routine monitoring, pumping, and patching amounted to an average of
about $20,000 per vessel. That may not seem like much, but many of the hulls were in such poor
condition that to keep them from sinking, they would soon have to be dry-docked for million-dollar
repairs -- only to be towed back to their moorings to continue rusting. The ships could now be
bought for a mere $10 each, but even at that price there were no takers. At the Maritime
Administration's headquarters in Washington, D.C., people recognized the absurdity of the situation
and could laugh about it. All they could do was hope for congressional funding to pay for the
scrapping of the ships.

Meanwhile, the Navy was proceeding with its four-ship, $13.3 million pilot project. Dockside at
Baltimore Marine Industries the next day I visited a small frigate named the Patterson that was
being meticulously dismantled by a crew of fifty-four specialists working under the close
supervision of a former Navy diver, who informed me, when I asked about the schedule and cost, that
safety and a clean environment were his main concerns. His ship had space-suited workers,
positive-pressure filtered ventilation, sealed hazardous-materials bins, color-coded placards, and
micron socks hanging from the scuppers to purify the rainwater that drained from its immaculate
decks. I realized I was in the presence of a shipbreaking pioneer. He understood the ethical need
to spend millions more on a useless ship than its steel was worth. He consulted with chemists,
liaison people, and all sorts of engineers. He shared information openly with his competitors, and
expected them to do the same. He enforced a wide range of regulations, and fairly. He worked well
with unions. He even took time to respect the memory of the Patterson's sailors. His shipbreaking
mission was so righteous it was practically Calvinistic.

That was true of Greenpeace's mission too. But there was a strange reversal. The U.S. Navy for once
was concentrating on its own local problem, while Greenpeace was insisting that it had a mandate
from "the global society" and "citizens of this planet." Words like those can come across as direct
threats of conquest -- all the more so in weak and uncertain places like the impoverished parts of
India that are already suffering from the disengagement of the elites.

I don't think Claire Tielens worried about such sensitivities. She told me that she had chosen her
path because she wanted to fight injustice. She was a true idealist. But she did not feel reluctant
to say "The recycling of toxic waste is such a hazardous activity that you cannot leave it to a
developing country to do that. People say 'Why don't we export our knowledge and technology, and
they can improve their conditions, and everything will be fine.' But nothing will be fine, because
it's not just a matter of know-how and technology. Because to successfully export our environmental
knowledge to India, you would also have to export the whole way society is organized." She was
right about that, of course. But whereas others might hesitate over the implications of such ideas,
she was not about to question the Greenpeace crusade. Her terms were unconditional: if she had her
way, India would have to lose.

WHAT Greenpeace wants from shipbreaking must seem in the tidy confines of Holland to be perfectly
fair -- essentially, to treat shipping as if it were any other orderly industry, and to hold it
responsible for its toxic by-products and the safety of its workers. The problem is that shipping
is like the larger world in which it operates -- an inherently disorderly affair, existing mostly
beyond the reach of nations and their laws, beyond the dikes and coastal horizons, and out across
the open seas. It is not exactly a criminal industry, but it is an amoral and stubbornly anarchic
one. And it admits as much about itself: at last June's shipbreaking conference in Amsterdam one of
the all-important London-based maritime insurers raised the fear that if somehow the reforms go
through, even assuming they apply only to the most visible European shippers, there will be a
corresponding increase in mysterious sinkings.

But others in the business told me that the more likely effect of the reforms, as long as money can
be made in Third World scrap, would simply be a new and less direct route to Asia: ships would pass
through more hands, would maybe live longer plying faraway waters under new names and flags, and
would still end up dying on some filthy beach. Such changes are already happening, though it will
be a year or more before Greenpeace's campaign results in any new laws in the European Union and at
the International Maritime Organization. There is evidence that some European shippers have begun
to find new foreign buyers for vessels that they would normally have sold directly to scrappers,
and Shell has recently decided to re-inspect and retain certain aging tankers rather than face the
wrath of Greenpeace again. Paradoxically, such policies may lead to an increase in hull failures
and spills -- currently a big problem on the oceans. The lovely coast of Brittany will suffer for
many years because of the loss of the Erika -- a decrepit Maltese-registered tanker, overdue for
scrapping, that broke in two off Brest last winter. Greenpeace protested the lax enforcement of
European port controls -- to good effect. But on the scale of the world, shipping is terribly
difficult to police.

Few observers seriously believe that as a result of Western pressures, South Asia as a whole will
now lose the scrapping business. But this offers little solace to the scrappers at Alang, because
there is serious competition within the region, especially from Bangladesh. At Chittagong
starvation wages are paid and labor and safety regulations are utterly lacking, so a shipbreaker
can send a thousand barefoot men to tear apart a single vessel and scrap even a supertanker in six
months. Bangladesh is not so much a nation as a condition of distress, and any attempt to regulate
the industry there would obviously be futile. As a result of this commercial advantage, the
Bangladeshis can pay top dollar for ships. During my stay at Alang such international competition
had forced the bidding level for scrap ships above the price necessary to break even within India,
and the scrappers currently acquiring vessels were having to gamble on a significant rise in the
Indian metal market. It was a dangerous time.

Pravin Nagarsheth was not sanguine about Alang's prospects. He worried that the Indian beach had
been singled out for special criticism, and that the publicity of the Greenpeace campaign was
exacerbating the existing competitive pressures. There was evidence, he said, that some of the
biggest shippers had begun quietly to shy away from India entirely, and to direct their ships to
more discreet beaches. He worried also about the process within India whereby the European campaign
seemed to be changing domestic attitudes toward Alang -- a change that in the end may prove more
threatening to the work there than the eventual enactment of foreign laws. Either way, Nagarsheth
wanted me to know how little it would take to destroy Alang.

Jaysukh Bai, the boss of Plot 138, was a relief to me, because he seemed almost unaware that his
work might be considered wrong. He was a simple man, who knew the mechanics of the trade. As if I
might not have heard, he said, "There are certain Western lobbies who are interested that
shipbreaking not continue." But he never once mentioned any concern for safety or the environment.
He never once mentioned his workers. He said, "I am worried about the future. What is important is
the turnaround time. If there are too many rules to comply with, we will waste time." It was a
statement of fact, hard to argue with. I asked him how many ships he had broken. He counted on his
fingers, because he remembered every one. Eventually he answered: thirty-eight. He told me they
included the biggest ship ever grounded at Alang, a French supertanker of 52,000 tons. Those were
the good old days. With that ship Captain Pandey must have had great fun.

The one here now, the old Sun Ray from the Maldives, was only 15,000 tons, but it seemed very big
to me. Jaysukh Bai told me he could do the job on it, start to finish, in a mere four months. That
was very fast, and he may have been bragging. But only one month into it the superstructure and
fuel tanks had been cut up and hauled away, and the lightened hull was being winched forward on the
high tides and consumed with voracious efficiency. Even the birds joined in, pecking through the
debris along the waterline, as alert as any man on the shore to the shreds of opportunity -- a
shard of torn plywood, pieces of wire for nest building, splinters of steel. I went down to the
ship when I could, past the ground crews who by now had grown used to my presence. At the torn bow
I climbed through the broken bilge into the huge forward cargo hold, now open to the sky. The ship
was mine to wander -- up precarious ladders to the main deck high above, through passageways and
equipment rooms where the peeling paint and rusted steel gave evidence of the years of wandering
and hard use, and ultimately of neglect. Nonetheless, I felt a sort of awe, and was never in a
hurry to leave. After climbing back down from the main deck into the hold, I sometimes walked
deeper still into the depths of the ship. It was eerie and dim on the inside, an immense man-made
cavern filled with hoarse warning cries, the hiss of torches, sparks, smoke, heavy hammering, the
sound of falling debris. It had paths made of narrow beams with oil-slick footing, and sudden
gaping holes that seemed to emerge out of nowhere. If you fell there, you could certainly die. But
after the glare and heat outside, it was also pleasantly cool. The workers did not seem to mind my
presence, or even to wonder about it. They appeared sometimes like ghosts, moving fast and in file
without speaking. They were very dirty. They were very poor. But they lacked the look of death that
I had seen on the men in the Bhavnagar re-rolling mill. They were purposeful. Toward the stern,
where sunlight streamed through rough-cut ventilation holes and struck the oil-blackened walls, the
towering engine room had the Gothic beauty of a cathedral.


William Langewiesche is a correspondent for The Atlantic. He is the author of Sahara Unveiled: A
Journey Across the Desert (1996) and Inside the Sky: A Meditation on Flight (1998).

*The Atlantic Monthly; August 2000; The Shipbreakers - 00.08; Volume 286, No. 2; page 31-49.