Narrating a Past for New Futures

Jody Roberts, Chemical Heritage Foundation

The takeaway: How do we narrate stories that help us to understand how our remaking of this world, and ourselves, is not over, but a process; a process open to our efforts of remaking.

Here’s the setup: When I first began narrating toxics I told simple stories. They had simple questions (do you know what’s in that plastic container?). They had simple plots (we’ve only recently started to understand how these chemicals interact with our bodies, but it changes everything). They gave me a simple role (there’s Jody again, telling us how toxic everything is; why’s he such a downer?). They had simple morals (Stay away from plastic! Don’t eat that! Buy this instead!).

These simple stories had an obvious, fatal flaw: their simplicity failed to match the complexity of the world around me.

A few quick examples:

In 2009 and 2010, we took advantage of the possible reform of the U.S.’s framework for chemical management as an opportunity to unpack the construction of a system for regulation that is simultaneously invisible as well as essential across the broadest swath of our nation’s commercial industries. Rather than digging into the debates around the Toxic Substances Control Act that pitted industry lobbies on one side (the ACC, SOCMA, e.g.) and environmental and health advocates on the other (EDF, the Safer Chemicals Healthy Families Coalition, e.g.) we wanted to experiment with how historical methodologies might disrupt an ongoing and entrenched dialogue in ways that might provide a shift in how the problems and solutions are perceived. We wanted to know how the architects of the law and those responsible for its implementation understood their experience with TSCA. What did they learn about its successes and failures? What was it like to be charged with implementing a law that was widely deemed broken before it even became real?

Sarasota Herald Tribune, 30 October 1977, Page 1.

Here’s what we learned along the way: what counts as “safe” or “toxic” is as much a result of science as it is politics. Right: no surprise there. But the shifting nature of those two pillars combined with the concrete, if momentary, inscription that the law produces creates a jarring effect that is far more disruptive than the process by which these two worlds are brought into alignment. The politics of management are different now. The science, too, has changed in remarkable ways (key indicators, endpoints, and tools for understanding risk, exposure, hazard, etc.). But while the science and politics have changed, the law itself has remained remarkably unchanged due to factors not simply attributable to one of these pillars.

A second experiment: how does historical memory and experience frame one’s experience of and approach to superfund cleanups? Working with researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, we have been engaged with a community north of Philadelphia in the midst of a second superfund cleanup of asbestos waste. The goal has been to find ways to highlight the different historical frames brought by community members to the issue to better understand how risk is framed, what cleanup means, and what success would look like.  Again, perhaps not surprisingly, differences across the community emerged based on: how long the individual or family has lived in the community; what section of the community the individual lives (or lived) in [the community is cut by three different local municipalities of varying wealth, etc.]; and the proximity of the waste site(s). We then experimented with bringing these stories back to the community: through a small exhibition, newspaper insert, and series of original one act plays based on the interviews. Community members came to hear (simultaneously) stories about the joys of sled riding down white hills in summer; fears of increased gentrification and loss of home; and Mary Ambler, the heroine namesake of the community who saved dozens following a trainwreck in the 19th century in conversation with community activists about their responsibility to their neighbors.

What we’re learning: material and cultural legacy are deeply entangled in this community (and those spanning the rustbelt). What is toxic comes with answers that are multiple and simultaneous, and not easy to prioritize. Endurance is not a passive exercise, but an active pursuit of something else…something after.

Leslie Nevon Holden and Pat Lamborn in The White Mountains; photo credit: Conrad Erb, 2015

Where I’m returning to: I take to heart the provocation provided by my colleague Nick Shapiro who suggests we avoid the low hanging fruit of toxicity to see what else may lie beyond. We are now asking: what is “toxic” a proxy for in these communities, histories, stories?

In my own story, I am returning, quite literally, home.

Photo credit, the author

The experience of life on the brink remarkably reshaped how I thought about “the toxic”: what I knew; what needed to be done; what a post-toxic future might look like. But these experiences have also brought a renewed commitment to moving beyond both the simple narratives that I once used and the overly-simplistic dichotomies that informed them. Our entanglements endure. We are all exposed, but not equally. Escape is not an option, especially for many who are most commonly exposed. Our endurance must be an active one that sees beyond what is to what is becoming. For me, I need new narratives to begin reimagining what still could be. Denied the luxury of disengagement, how do we become more materially entangled in ways that are of this (molecular) world and not an imagined past one? How do we tell stories in which becoming less toxic means becoming with rather than without?

Essentially Late Industrial

Kim Fortun, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Ads from an American Chemistry Council campaign in the mid 2000s called essential2life, a "360(degree) communication effort" to show “how connected we all are and how central chemistry is to the health and growth of our nation.”

With many apologies for posting late…. I’ll wrap my comments here around the concept of “late industrialism,” which I’ve worked to empirically ground and theorize over the last few years – striving to weave environmental problems – particularly problems with toxics – into sociocultural theory. A key premise of this work is that late industrialism harbors a key contradiction: while characterized in notable and sobering ways by environmental degradation, it remains notably difficult to make environmental sense – to recognize, name and address environmental degradation as a defining problem of our times.  One way to explain this is by drawing out how “industrial logic” actively marginalizes and disavows environmental problems by privileging production and products – what goes on inside factory fence lines and our beloved electronics and plastics – while discounting polluting byproducts (what off gasses and leaks – what isn’t essential).  This explanation builds from a common argument in feminist and postcolonial theory: that systems of production (of goods and meaning) both produce and depend on subalterns – which can’t be articulated in dominant forms of representation. Environmental problems, then, are subaltern– systematically produced but disavowed by industrial logic. And these environmental problems (cultural as well as technological) – produce raced bodies: bodies that are different not because of some originary difference but because they live and come to be what they “are” in toxic conditions.  Exposure produces identity.  Context and bodies are entangled.  And context is always historically sedimented.  History endures, often in a nonlinear, hard to capture way akin to the action of toxics in bodies.

This, then, begs an important question: if, in late industrialism, environmental problems have trouble being articulated, how does this implicate articulations of race and inequality more generally? This is one of the question that I want pursue.

Lead Exposure and the Entanglements of State Protection and Neglect

Sara Smith, Yale University

In the 1970s, the United States introduced a series of federal and state regulations to reduce lead exposure. Health officials were concerned by the widespread distribution of lead in the environment and the toxic threat that it posed to the public. Lead was used extensively in a variety of industrial applications throughout the twentieth century. As a result, lead, a neurotoxin and probable carcinogen, became widely dispersed in natural and built environments, embedding itself into the air and soil, municipal water systems, and American homes.

Legislation banning the use of lead in gasoline and in residential paints sought to protect Americans from everyday, low-level lead exposure. Screening programs were developed to identify communities at high risk for lead poisoning by monitoring blood lead levels (BLLs) in children. Lead-contaminated paint, dust and soil were determined to be the most commonplace sources of lead exposure. The Residential Lead-Based Paint Hazard Reduction Act of 1992 spurred national prevention efforts to eliminate these health hazards from homes built before 1978.[1] By 1999, these protections had contributed to the significant decline of average blood lead levels in the United States. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) regards this feat as “one of the most significant health successes of the last half of the 20th century.”[2]

However, vast disparities still persist along racial and class lines. Between 2007 and 2010, black children had, on average, blood lead levels that were 38.5% higher than white children.[3] Moreover, children from low-income families living in older and dilapidated housing are more likely to have elevated BLLs than children from families who can afford the steep costs of lead paint abatement. Thus while the state has decreased the overall amount of lead in Americans’ blood over the past 40 years, it has done far less to actually alter the distribution of lead exposure. As the residents of Flint, Michigan, St. Joseph, Louisiana and other black-majority cities experiencing lead poisoning disasters know all too well, the history of lead exposure protections is entangled in the ongoing violence of state racism and neglect.

This abiding tension between state protection and neglect is a hallmark of American technocracy. State protections localize biology by safeguarding the blood and bodies of some citizens, while leaving politically and economically disenfranchised communities overexposed.[4] When a child in Flint drinks tap water, the lead entering her body binds itself to molecules, transporting the toxic byproducts of environmental racism and institutional violence into her brain, kidneys, liver and other vital organs. Seen in light of state efforts to protect Americans from lead, the very possibility of lead poisoning itself raises important questions about how the entanglement of molecules, chemical economies, bodies, juridical systems and infrastructure sustain the disproportionate exposure of vulnerable populations to toxins. This has led me to wonder about the different conceptualizations of “protection” (as distinct from “rights”). What are the types of relationships that notions of protection contain, inhibit, or foster? And how might ideas about protection augment theories of justice and modes of caring for human and non-human life?

[1] See TITLE X of the Housing and Community Development Act of 1992 (Public Law 102-550). Lead-based paints were banned for residential use in 1978. Most homes built before 1978 are assumed to have some amount of lead-based paint.

[2] Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 2005. Preventing Lead Poisoning in Young Children. Atlanta: CDC.

[3] Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 2013.“Blood Lead Levels in Children Aged 1–5 Years, United States, 1999–2010.” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 62 (13): 245-248.

[4] Here I refer to Margaret Lock’s notion of “local biology” and Adriana Petryna’s concept of “biological citizenship.”

Excerpt from Videoteca Fin del Mundo, a short story

Ava Tomasula y Garcia

H. Moon // Flickr, Creative Commons

…What I’m trying to say is that yo estaba viviendo bien until I realized I wasn’t. My hot water, my clean air, my right of free movement, my microwave, my strawberry jam on bread this morning. This is how I am alive, or, better, how I am not. —I don’t mean anything supernatural, but just that it is possible to die in an everyday kind of way. Life transfigured into something else just as an ordinary course of events. I feel smudged out, not really dead but some state that makes you ask if this is life, after all. Like a title that stays on the screen for so long that when you close your eyes you can still see it, vibrating on the underside of your lids. I walk around earth, taking in the end that won’t end. Just watch:

Here is the Pájaro Valley, home to three million acres of strawberry fields and fourteen million pounds of pesticides a year. People who are sin papeles spray the crops with chloropicrin, a gas used to kill people during World War I. There is Ajena Verdeja, too, emerging out of a poisonous cloud with a bandana over her mouth and nose, like in the movies when the aliens touch down and the UFO opens up with a tsssssssssssssssssss and a high-powered fog machine. Euro settlers hundreds of years ago, moving in clouds of smoke, burning down the crops already there and replacing them so they could eat their own bread and see their own animals. Their own little paraíso. When I go to the grocery store I see rows and rows of stacked berries in bright plastic packages printed with a picture of a red barn and a rising sun and maybe even photos of the blonde Evan Family—Strawberry Farmers for Three Generations—with grins ear to ear. All the particulars are stripped away, replaced by the same great big smile. This is how meaning is made; this is how you abstract value into existence. Rattle it off like a drug ad: may cause neurological deterioration, reproductive health problems, developmental disabilities, cancer, metabolic disorders, sexual assault on job site, wage theft, deportation. Money and markets scrape away most of it. Now you can say things like “product” and “equivalent.” Pronounced universality and occluded relationality that allows “fair labor” to suddenly emerge out of nowhere and strawberries to taste so good. Ajena goes back inside her cloud, invisible.

These are facts you live with and learn to fade to background, if you can….

Fabled Endurance: Black Women and/in Speculative Fictions

Phoenix Alexander, Yale University

HeLa cell

Harriet Washington’s recent and exhaustive book, Medical Apartheid, chronicles the history of medical experimentation on African Americans from the antebellum period to the present. The work is particularly startling in its bringing to light the multiple and shifting scripts assigned to Black women in the service of racial science and political theory – scripts that center on the concept of endurance. From the gynaecological experiments of J. Marion Sims – who conducted painful and invasive procedures on un-anaesthetized enslaved women, believing them to be more inured to pain than whites – to the ‘social science’ studies denigrating the figure of the Black matriarch in the infamous Moyhnihan report, to the extraction of cancerous cells from Henrietta Lacks, Black women’s bodies have been cast and recast as sites of potent, hardy, and exploitable scientific resources.

It is this latter case that resonates eerily in the science fiction of Octavia Butler: a towering figure in African American letters. Her imprisoned protagonist, Lilith, of Wild Seed (1980) – the first in Butler’s Seed to Harvest trilogy – wakes in an alien holding chamber with a mysterious scar on her stomach. She comes to learn that cancerous cells have been removed from her by her captors: self-titled ‘gene-traders,’ the Oankali. Paralleling yet another historical figure (Fannie Lou Hamer, whose unwitting hysterectomy in 1961 galvanized her to become a key figure in the Civil Rights Movement), Lilith’s cells are taken as a ‘gift’: a remarkably mutable – and durable – biological resource that allow the Oankali to somewhat parasitically draw from other life forms to improve and develop their own genetic line.

It is a hallmark of Butler’s writing to blur the lines between complicity and coercion through the various degrees of power and powerlessness with which her protagonists struggle. But it is significant that the genre of science fiction becomes the paradigm for writing new fables of endurance: ones that place Black women at the center of imagined resistance, and expose the speculative fantasy of racial and social sciences that, for decades, have oriented themselves around spurious, white supremacist logic. By fictionalizing an alien ‘immortal cell line’ – a description applied to HeLa cells, the cells taken unwittingly from Henrietta Lacks in 1951 – Butler renders the violences involved in such a process even more visible. The myth of ‘immortality’ is exposed to involve a removal of agency and identity; the truncation of Henrietta’s name, HeLa, to name the cells perpetuates in turn a erasure of the woman at the same time as it insists upon the endurance of her essence, here disembodied to the most abstract level: that of genetic material. Black feminist writers and intellectuals have written, and continue to write, new fables of resistance; in a world in which ‘we were never meant to survive’, endurance is reclaimed through the challenge to reimagine and rebuild – and through the remembrance that, in the words of June Jordan, ‘some of us did not die.’