Inevitably Toxic: Historical Perspectives on Contamination, Exposure, and Expertise - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822966123 ISBN 13: 9780822966128

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019

Synopsis

Not a day goes by that humans aren’t exposed to toxins in our environment—be it at home, in the car, or workplace. But what about those toxic places and items that aren’t marked? Why are we warned about some toxic spaces’ substances and not others? The essays in Inevitably Toxic consider the exposure of bodies in the United States, Canada and Japan to radiation, industrial waste, and pesticides. Research shows that appeals to uncertainty have led to social inaction even when evidence, e.g. the link between carbon emissions and global warming, stares us in the face. In some cases, influential scientists, engineers and doctors have deliberately “manufactured doubt” and uncertainty but as the essays in this collection show, there is often no deliberate deception. We tend to think that if we can’t see contamination and experts deem it safe, then we are okay. Yet, having knowledge about the uncertainty behind expert claims can awaken us from a false sense of security and alert us to decisions and practices that may in fact cause harm.
 

  

About this title

About the Author:

Brinda Sarathy is a professor of Environmental Analysis and director of the Robert Redford Conservancy for Southern California Sustainability at Pitzer College. She holds a Ph.D. in Environmental Science, Policy, and Management from the University of California, Berkeley. In addition to the books, Pineros: Latino Labour and the Changing Face of Forestry in the Pacific Northwest(UBC Press, 2012) and Partnerships for Empowerment: Participatory Research for Community Based Natural Resource Management(Earthscan Press, 2008), Sarathy has published articles in Journal of Forestry, Society and Natural Resources, Policy Sciences, Race Gender & Class, and Local Environment.

Vivien Hamilton is an associate professor of history of science and director of the Hixon-Riggs Program for Responsive Science and Engineering at Harvey Mudd College. Her work examines the history of medical technologies, focusing on questions of authority, expertise and cross-disciplinary collaboration. She holds a PhD in history of science from the University of Toronto and is currently completing a book examining the role of physics in the early history of radiology. She is a member of the History of Science Society, The Canadian Society for the History and Philosophy of Science and the Society for the Social Studies of Science.

Janet Farrell Brodie is a professor of U.S. history at Claremont Graduate University. Her recent scholarship focuses on secrecy in the nuclear era with articles in the Journal of Diplomatic History and The Journal of Social History.. She is currently finishing a book about the history of the site of the first atomic bomb test in New Mexico and how it became a national historical landmark. She has a Ph.D. in history from the University of Chicago.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Introduction
Toxicity, Uncertainty, and Expertise
Vivien Hamilton and Brinda Sarathy
 
            Almost every year, students taking Environmental Justice at Pitzer College go on a toxics tour of their backyards in the Inland Empire of Southern California.  This trip usually includes a visit to the Stringfellow Acid Pits, California’s first site to be designated as a Superfund in 1983.[i] Millions of gallons of chemical waste were dumped there from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, and authorities estimate it will take at least 400 years to clean up this contamination. Having learned about the history of this site in class (see Chapter 5 of this volume), students anxiously anticipate seeing for themselves what this toxic disaster zone actually looks like.  When they get to the site, however, most students are taken aback. It is not what they expected. There are no open pits of discolored or smoldering liquids, there is no acrid smell in the air. There are not even any noticeable signs alerting them to the contaminated landscape upon which they stand. Some students note that they have driven past Stringfellow on various occasions, but would never have guessed that this barren canyon on the side of the highway has a history of contamination by chemical wastes.  At the end of the day, one of the most impactful lessons for the class is that toxic environments are often invisible or appear innocuous, and that such spaces are more prevalent in our day-to-day lives than we either know or care to admit.
The questions that haunt students after a visit to the Stringfellow site are the questions that motivate this book. To what extent do we know about the processes resulting in contaminated places like Stringfellow, and do we in fact even recognize such spaces for what they are?  How is it that toxic environments have become so pervasive, while at the same time remaining invisible, overlooked, or ignored?  Why do conditions of normalized toxicity fail to rouse mass outcry? Numerous scholars from a broad range of academic disciplines, from environmental history to public health, from sociology to geography, and from science and technology studies to environmental philosophy, have tackled such questions in their rich and diverse writings on toxic environments. This substantive and growing body of interdisciplinary scholarship, however, tends to be written by and for the consumption of other academics, who are themselves experts in their fields and who engage around toxicity through shared theoretical concepts.[ii]  The extension of Michel Foucault’s concept of biopower, for example, asking us to pay attention to the ways in which states count and control populations, has generated much productive thinking and writing about toxicity at multiple scales.[iii] In Science and Technology Studies (STS), Sheila Jasanoff’s seminal work on the co-production of scientific knowledge and social norms has made room for scholars to more explicitly focus on the inextricable and complex ways in which scientific knowledge and public policy are shaped together, elucidating the proposition that how “we know and represent the world (nature and society) are inseparable from the ways we chose to live in it.”[iv] As academics ourselves, we use these kinds of intellectual frameworks in our own research and analysis.
Yet, as professors of the liberal arts, we are also keenly aware that there is a broader audience to be engaged. In tackling the emergence of toxic environments in multiple sites across the 20th century and into the 21st, we have therefore purposely written this book for a non-expert audience. For us, this has meant limiting academic jargon, clarifying terms when they are used, and imbuing theory implicitly into the very telling of our stories.  We have often found compelling storytelling to be the most effective means of capturing our students’ imaginations and sparking critical conversations. We hope that by conveying histories of toxicity in this intellectually rooted and evocative manner, a broader audience will be similarly engaged.
The stories in this volume draw attention to a diverse set of toxic spaces in the United States, Canada and Japan, spaces filled with x-rays, nuclear radiation, industrial waste, pesticides and other chemical contaminants. Given the often- imperceptible nature of these agents, our first goal with this collection is simply one of illumination. Taken together, these essays show us the ways in which exposure to toxicity has become routine, as toxic spaces have become increasingly interwoven into the economic structures and fabric of everyday life. Even more, these stories demonstrate that the burden of exposure continues to fall disproportionately on those already marginalized by class, race and structures of colonization.  Illuminating this reality, however, is just the first step. Our ultimate hope is that uncovering the histories of these spaces will make complacency impossible.
Given the pervasive nature of toxic spaces and the urgent need for action, it might be surprising that most of the work in this book is historical rather than contemporary. Why examine x-ray rooms in the 1920s or pesticide use in the 1970s when we need to address water contamination from fracking right now? If we know the current state of contamination at the Stringfellow site, why delve into archives to pull out debates and decisions that are over half a century old? We suggest that this kind of historical analysis is powerful precisely because it disrupts the sense that our current predicament is inevitable. Understanding how it is that these spaces came into being can help us identify contemporary institutions and modes of thinking and acting that continue to allow environments of toxicity to persist. This seems especially urgent given the current political climate of deregulation in the United States, in which calls to "grow the economy" have become routine, and are decoupled from any meaningful analysis of the ecologically unsustainable, socially exploitative, and violent processes through which capitalist relations operate. Careful historical analysis can illuminate these realities and inspire us to see how we can intervene to stem the tide of toxic spaces now and in the future. 
In this introductory chapter, we first briefly outline the broader context in which environments of toxicity have been produced by modern imperatives of technological progress and economic growth. We then turn to consider the ways in which institutions of scientific expertise often work to hide—whether intentionally or not—the uncertain nature of knowledge about toxicity, excluding the experiences of those exposed to toxic agents. Despite deep and persistent uncertainties, scientific experts and other authority figures have often been called on to mitigate concerns about harmful substances, thus facilitating industrial and military expansion. We contend that this general pattern—articulated uniquely in different times and places—has resulted in conditions of environmental contamination and, often, disproportionate harm to already marginalized groups.  Finally, in our roadmap to this volume, we highlight some common themes across and between chapters, and reflect on the larger context of contestation and struggles for environmental justice in response to toxic environments.

Situating Toxicity
            Toxic environments may be situated as an outcome and characteristic of our political-economic system and, more broadly, represent what sociologist Anthony Giddens has termed “manufactured risks:” risks created by “the very progression of human development, especially by the progression of science and technology for which history provides us with very little previous experience.”[v] Historian of science Michelle Murphy helps us further conceptualize the manufactured risks associated with toxic substances in relation to the historical emergence of “a chemical regime of living,” in which toxics pervade environments at multiple scales, from individual bodies and ecologies, to geographic terrains and processes of production and consumption.  The fact that toxics traverse so many kinds of boundaries, Murphy argues, requires “us to tie the history of technoscience with political economy.”[vi]  Scholarship in environmental history, in particular, has traced the extent to which conditions of pervasive toxicity have resulted from technological hubris and manipulations of scientific uncertainty.[vii] The case studies in this volume build upon this work and harness ways of thinking critically about toxicity at multiple scales, to more explicitly lay bare the political-economic foundations, modes of logic, and bases of knowledge upon which toxic spaces have been produced and obscured.
On the one hand, these cases could be read as proof of an increasing awareness of the toxic landscapes we inhabit, demonstrated by attempts to regulate and manage toxic substances, to study their circulation in the environment, and to create structures of safety to minimize exposure and keep bodies safe.  Such actions are indicative of what sociologist Ulrich Beck has termed a “risk society,” in which we anticipate, organize around, and respond to manufactured risks.[viii]  Yet, a closer look reveals just how inadequate and compromised these processes of regulation have been almost from their very inception.[ix] As far back as the early 20th century, toxic experiments were real time practices, in the sense that new toxic agents were actively implemented in social and ecological contexts, and not studied first in isolation to assess possible negative impacts.
Scholars elsewhere and in this volume show how this trend has continued, evident in the development and deployment of nuclear weapons and technologies during and after World War II, the marketing of pesticides—initially developed for military uses—to consumers in newly concocted battles against insects and weeds, and the eventual ways in which these substances have been disposed of.[x] 
The proliferation of nuclear technologies and subsequent contamination, moreover, has been uniquely hidden by a culture of Cold War secrecy. Scholars have only recently started to show us the widespread global impacts of this vast nuclear complex, uncovering for instance the ways in which scientists and politicians have made decisions about where to dump nuclear waste.[xi] The experiences of individuals impacted by these decisions are increasingly coming into focus, including stories about growing up near secret weapons facilities, working in plutonium plants, and surviving nuclear disasters like Chernobyl.[xii] The struggle for recognition and reparation is ongoing for multiple communities impacted by the nuclear industry globally.[xiii]
In all of these cases, individuals in positions of authority— among them scientists, military officials, and politicians— have been willing to take risks with new toxic technologies for the sake of growth and progress, waiting to deal with the consequences later.  In writing about toxic substance regulation in the United States, Sheila Jasanoff once asserted that the issue “is not whether expertise detracts from political processes, but how it is harnessed and steered to serve some political interests over others.”[xiv] The majority of stories in this volume attend to this question.  Chapters highlight the inherently political ways in which scientific expertise has been wielded in contexts of uncertainty to facilitate dominant economic and military interests, often at the expense of environmental and human health.

Expert Knowledge and Uncertainty
            Understanding the ways in which toxic landscapes have become unremarkable and ubiquitous requires an examination of the development of modern institutions of scientific and technical expertise. Most of us know very little about the chemical and physical properties of particular toxic agents, their physiological impacts or the ways in which they circulate in different ecological systems. But we feel confident that chemists, physicists, toxicologists, epidemiologists, and safety engineers have that knowledge and have worked with legislators to put adequate regulations in place to keep bodies and spaces safe. This division of labor and deference to the special knowledge of experts, then, is a crucial component of societal complacency. Institutions of expertise and patterns of science communication, however, tend to mask the uncertain, tentative or disputed nature of expert knowledge claims, while excluding the voices of those most impacted by toxicity.
Uncertainty is a central and disconcerting feature of histories of toxicity,[xv] wielded differently depending on the interests of government and industry. Recent historical work has shown, for instance, that appeals to the uncertainty of experts have been extremely successful in nurturing social inaction, even in the face of the increasingly evident links between smoking and cancer and carbon emissions and global warming.[xvi] Those stories reveal the conscious efforts of a small group of influential scientists to “manufacture doubt.” Our stories, however, are rarely ones of deliberate deception. Many of the cases in this collection focus on the judgments of scientists, doctors, and engineers who have been called on to decide whether a health impact exists, or whether a given space is safe. In the course of passing judgment, developing protocols, and shaping regulations, these experts often unintentionally obscured all that was still unknown about a particular toxic agent. Such actions led to an appearance of safety, certainty, and consensus even when none existed. In this way, many of the essays in our collection study the production of ignorance as much as the production of knowledge, contributing to the project outlined in Robert Proctor and Londa Schiebinger's Agnotology.[xvii] The imperceptibility and also proliferation of different kinds of toxic substances, the difficulty of untangling causes and clusters of symptoms, and the inevitable messiness of scientific measurement outside of a lab have worked together to make simple statements about the impact of toxic exposure rare.[xviii] 
            Stabilizing any scientific phenomenon and creating scientific consensus is always messy, but knowledge about toxicity is particularly incoherent. In part, this has to do with structures of national and industrial secrecy that have restricted the free communication of information about new chemicals, radioactive isotopes and industrial waste products. The nuclear weapons development of the Manhattan Project in World War II ushered in a new era of classified military research and regimes of secrecy that have continued to structure contemporary institutions, hampering the circulation of knowledge about toxicity, and nuclear technologies in particular.[xix]
While classified knowledge and military-industrial secrecy are inherently exclusive, broader patterns of science education and communication have al...

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 0822966123
• ISBN 13: 9780822966128
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 280
• Editor: Sarathy Brinda, Hamilton Vivien, Brodie Janet Farrell