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Chemical Colonialism: Environmental justice and industrial epidemics

In Fabian Scheidler’s The End of the Megamachine, he draws on the work of environmental historian Lewis Mumford to show how certain forms of social organization seem machine-like, even if, in the end, they are made up by people. To recognize that the totalizing systems we are forced to engage with daily are not inexorable machines, but the results of an infinite number of decisions by an enormous number of people, can both be depressing or hope giving, depend on how this fact is viewed.

Scheidler’s diagnosis of the megamachine is important, because he focuses on the military need for mining, which lead to industrialization, which has also driven the chemical industry. The corporate-state complex has been predicated on increased control and manipulation of people and the natural environment – colonialism has occurred at countless levels before it has been able to move on to the next. “Before colonizing the world, Europe itself had been brutally colonized,” Scheidler writes.[1] The missionary purpose of religion, doing God’s work by culling infidels and baptizing more and more converts into the flock, served as the template for colonization, which now takes the secularized face of accumulation to support ever increasing disparities in quality of life and lifestyle.

The irony of instrumentalism, even for the highest conceivable good becomes apparent when we look historically at the collateral damage written out of hegemonic discourse. As Scheidler describes it, “[t]he narrative of a mission to save humanity justifies and allows the destruction of other forms of social organization.”[2] These are the casualties of the war on nature: people, places, relationships; all for the sake of a larger secularized religious project of progress. The pretext for the ‘side-effect’ of pollution has been ‘better living through science’ – the always-delayed promise of trickle-down prosperity making the serial sacrifice of the marginalized worth it. Political theorist Danielle Allen describes the democracy-eroding consequences of requiring certain portions of the population to sacrifice for the collective without equitably distributing the costs and benefits.[3] Too often, the expectation of personal sacrifice for the collective gets codified into systematic expectations, creating hierarchies of dominance congealing into discrimination.   

Of course, the promised exchange of abundance for ecological destruction is nothing new, but in fact has been a central tenet of extractivism since the mining operations of medieval Europe. In order to see the global displacement of harms from economic centers to economic peripheries as not new, but based on the megamachine permanent war economy of maximum exploitation, Carolyn Merchant reminds us in her The Death of Nature that complaints and gaslighting around environmental injustice existed in pre-colonial Europe as well:

most mines occurred in unproductive, gloomy areas.  Where the trees were removed from more productive sites, fertile fields could be created, the profits from which would reimburse local inhabitants for their losses in timber supplies. Where the birds and animals had been destroyed by mining operations, the profits could be used to purchase “birds without number” and “edible beasts and fish elsewhere” and refurbish the area.

Carolyn Merchant [4]

Since the twentieth century, this same logic has been applied to industrialized mining worldwide. Hypothetical future returns justify present damage, including destruction of the ecological basis of local cultures, a phenomenon termed “semiocide” (semiotic ecocide/suicide) for the demolition of meaning that comes from the loss of memory and situatedness associated with habitat destruction.[5]

Phosphorus mining as paradigmatic of extractivism

To see how this plays out in recent times, investigating the case of how mining led to ecological destruction, which despite just compensation in a different currency, led to semiocide and the decline of a once vibrant culture, let’s turn to the mining of phosphorus on the island of Nauru.

Location of the island state of Nauru. © Googlemaps

This fifteenth element on the periodic table accounts for 1% of human body mass, and is crucial for agriculture. In a 1959 essay, Isaac Asimov called phosphorus “life’s bottleneck,” as perhaps more than any other element it determines the carrying capacity for planet earth. Historically, phosphorous-rich human waste was a prized fertilizer, freely available and essential for growing food. Romans used to pay households for collecting their urine to wash the public laundry, as it made an excellent detergent for clothes. But the sanitation revolution killed access to human sources of phosphorous – literally flushing it down the toilet into the sea, where it becomes inaccessible for recapture. This is part of a larger tendency of industrialized humans to take from the earth without giving back, creating what Marx called the “metabolic rift” – the short-circuiting of circular material economies.

Now, we dig up mountains to mine the same precious element we flush down the toilet. With the discovery of mineral deposits of phosphate rock, these nonrenewable resources temporarily lended an unnatural amount of otherwise scarce renewable resources to grow the human population and unsustainable industrialized practices. (The parallels to fossil fuel (especially oil) extraction are manifold.) Between 1950 and 2000, a sixfold increase in global phosphate-rock production has occurred. Yet, even with mining these deposits, demand is rising twice as fast as supply. And this production has come at astronomical costs.

In 1900 phosphate was discovered on the economically poor but culturally and ecologically prosperous central Pacific island of Nauru. The residents were given an offer too good to refuse – partly because they had little choice in the matter of imperial powers hungry for resources – and in a forward-thinking act at the time, a trust was set up for the island’s 10,000 inhabitants, with the accumulated proceeds from mining to provide income in perpetuity. During the height of the almost century of phosphorous exploitation, the people of Nauru had some of the highest incomes worldwide. However, after the resources were exhausted in the 1990s, and the funds in the trust shrank, the social disintegration and ecological devastation which had been momentarily bracketed and tolerated due to the influx of non-renewable quick money, reemerged like whiplash. About 80% of the once-lush island is totally devastated from phosphate strip-mining, and alcoholism, depression, and diabetes plagues the population.[6] In a 2019 exposé, children interviewed would respond to even simple questions with “I want to kill myself.”

Phosphate mining in Nauru, 1968, where four-fifths of the island is now mined. Bettmann Archive.

Even all the money in the world couldn’t put the country of Nauru back together again. This is a basic wound in environmental justice that too easily gets overlooked in settlements and post facto compensatory schemes. The Ponzi scheme of exchanging natural “capital” for financial “capital” and pretending that the denominator is the same, instead of an incommensurable exchange, is partly to blame for Nauru being not an outlier, but the paradigmatic case for extractivism. As historian of the megamachine Robert Proctor calls the structured ignorance that makes such unfortunate ‘mistakes’ so common, ignorance is often actively constructed to instrumentalize some people for the sake of others. In other words, the epistemological foundation such schemes are based on are “made, maintained, and manipulated by means of certain arts and sciences.”[7]

Overcoming Regulatory Whack-a-Mole

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

The relationships entrenched in mining are paradigmatic but not exceptional for chemical pollution and the strategy of the chemical and fossil fuel industries. For example, a globalized world of trade makes too easy the ball-and-cup street trick of carbon accounting, allowing a false sense of accomplishment when all rich countries have done is export their emissions, rather than reducing them.[8] Whereas Europe and the US suffered unbearable pollution in the 1960s and 70s, now it is Accra, Hotan, Manikganj, Delhi, which are the manufacturing centers, suffering locally the pollution from the production of products exported to richer areas. The Environmental Kuznet’s Curve (EKC) was wrong: pollution doesn’t go down when people are rich enough to realize their industrial culture is killing them—it just gets exported.

“Your car, my breath,” by Marta Frej

This logic of displacement has been long noticed by many astute observers. From indigenous critiques of industrial culture to systems theorists wary of the back-slapping self-congratulations of Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich Democratic (WEIRD) countries,[9] sustainability discourse has too often been cover for NIMBYism.[10] If we are to approach a just transition away from ecocide, this requires NIABYism: Instead of “not in my backyard,” when we acknowledge that pollution is linked to preexisting inequality, we realize that what we really need are coordinated policies that render odious industries “not in anybody’s backyard.”[11] And those who wish to fight for the maintenance of environmental injustice-producing contamination have an imperative to move next to those sources of extraction, those disease-causing factories. If they believe in the sanctity of those industries, then the CEOs of those companies and their shareholders ought to become the fenceline communities to these most harmful point sources of pollution.

In dealing with the health and ecological harms from chemical exposures, regulators have been behind the curve, playing a game of eternal catch-up. For every after-the-fact regulated chemical, the chemical industry has another stack of chemicals on the shelf ready to deploy to markets. Such is the case with Monsanto’s (now Bayer) glyphosate, which exposed as associated with Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, has brought out the even more deadly pesticide dicamba as its replacement. Or, DuPont’s replacement of one PFAS[12] product with another – the endocrine-disrupting ‘forever’ chemicals used in GoreTex jackets and Teflon pans have simply switched a molecule in their organofluorine polymers – we now have GenX instead of PFOAs (Perfluorooctanoic acids, also known as C-8). Such unfortunate substitutions cannot be claimed as victories.

To combat the current Sisyphusian role of chemical regulatory agencies playing “chemical whack-a-mole,” chemical researchers have begun calling for a toxic-until-proven-safe rather than safe-until-proven-toxic paradigm.[13] Many of the chemicals we use currently are shortcuts – they allow unsustainable lives at the expense of others—past, present, and future, human and more-than-human. To get to equity and sustainability, we need to rethink the use, purpose, and place of chemicals in our material environments.

©Danielle Ceulemans, developed in cooperation with Alessandra Arcuri and Yogi Hendlin

A truly ‘green’ (biocompatible) chemistry needs a toxic-until-proven-safe framework, working to eliminate the worst known chemicals (especially those that cause reproductive health effects and endocrine disrupters, like organophosphates). Additionally, we need to thoroughly reconsider the trade-offs we’ve implicitly accepted for chemical modernism. If we’re to escape the confines of chemical colonialism, we can’t expect to simply switch out different chemicals in an industrial ecology run on toxins based in inequality.

Biomimicry and indigenous materials science needs to be mainstreamed and funded, in order to find nontoxic ways not just of replacing existing toxic chemicals, but to modulate our material environments to not rely on quick and easy disposable chemical-fueled solutions.


References

[1] Fabian Scheidler, The End of the Megamachine (Ridgefield, CT: Zero Books, 2020), 80.

[2] Scheidler, 79.

[3] Danielle S. Allen, Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown v. Board of Education (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2004).

[4] Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), 38.

[5] Timo Maran, “Enchantment of the Past and Semiocide. Remembering Ivar Puura,” Sign Systems Studies 41, no. 1 (May 17, 2013), https://doi.org/10.12697/SSS.2013.41.1.09.

[6] John M. Gowdy and Carl N. McDaniel, “The Physical Destruction of Nauru: An Example of Weak Sustainability,” Land Economics 75, no. 2 (May 1999): 333, https://doi.org/10.2307/3147015.

[7] Robert Proctor, “Agnotology: A Missing Term to Describe the Cultural Production of Ignorance (and Its Study),” in Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance, ed. Robert Proctor and Londa L. Schiebinger (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2008), 7.

[8] Lawrence Summers, “The Lawrence Summers Memo,” The Whirled Bank Group, December 12, 1991, http://www.whirledbank.org/ourwords/summers.html.

[9] Joseph Henrich, Steven J. Heine, and Ara Norenzayan, “The Weirdest People in the World?,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33, no. 2–3 (June 2010): 61–83, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X0999152X.

[10] Leah Aronowsky, “Gas Guzzling Gaia, or: A Prehistory of Climate Change Denialism,” Critical Inquiry 47, no. 2 (January 2, 2021): 306–27, https://doi.org/10.1086/712129; Stan Cox, The Green New Deal and Beyond: Ending the Climate Emergency While We Still Can (San Francisco, CA: City Lights Publishers, 2020).

[11] Yogi Hale Hendlin, “Surveying the Chemical Anthropocene: Chemical Imaginaries and the Politics of Defining Toxicity,” Environment and Society 12, no. 1 (September 1, 2021): 181–202, https://doi.org/10.3167/ares.2021.120111.

[12] Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances.

[13] Alessandra Arcuri and Yogi Hale Hendlin, “The Chemical Anthropocene: Glyphosate as a Case Study of Pesticide Exposures,” King’s Law Journal, September 19, 2019, 1–20, https://doi.org/10.1080/09615768.2019.1645436.

Cover image: “The Iron and Steel Works, Barrow.” Washington Post illustration; iStockphoto


Yogi Hale Hendlin’s work draws on environmental philosophy, especially decolonial kinds, and public health policy, including the corporate determinants of health, to dismantle industrial epidemics. Hendlin is an assistant professor at Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Erasmus School of Philosophy, and Dynamics of Inclusive Prosperity Initiative, as well as Research Associate in the University of California, San Francisco’s Environmental Health Initiative. As Editor-in-Chief of the journal Biosemiotics, Hendlin explores the biological basis for redesigning human systems biomimetically rather than extractively, benefitting both human and more-than-human nature. www.yogihendlin.com

See Dr. Hendlin’s article “Surveying the Chemical Anthropocene: Chemical Imaginaries and the Politics of Defining Toxicity” in the 2021 issue of Environment and Society: Advances in Research, Pollution and Toxicity: Cultivating Ecological Practices for Troubled Times.

Conference Review

Confronting Legacies of Toxic Goodness: Speculative Reflections from the 4S 2021 Annual Meeting

Renewable energies, green/blue/bio-economies, waste management systems, as well as sustainable agriculture and aquaculture hold within them the possibility of working towards a “Greater Good”, however, “goodness” is frequently built on toxic colonial and capitalist processes that are rendered invisible through sustainability discourse. How can good practices, relationships, and things be cultivated in an environment where toxicants, toxic politics, and toxic relationalities are constantly reproduced? How do toxic production systems—based on extractivism, colonialism, and plantation capitalism—foment new forms of sustainability that cannot be excised from these deadly foundations?

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New Featured Article!: “Placing Plants in Territory”

The latest Environment and Society featured article is now available! This month’s article, “Placing Plants in Territory” comes from Volume 7 (2016), a special issue on people and plants edited by Kay E. Lewis-Jones. In their article, Sarah Besky and Jonathan Padwe use plants to think about territory, a concept that is at once a bulwark of social theory and an undertheorized category of social analysis. Through examples of how plants operate in different domains, they illustrate the analytical potential that a more-than-human approach to territories provides.

Visit the featured article page to download your copy of the article today before it’s gone! A new article is featured every month.

Photograph by Rania Hatzi via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Photograph by Rania Hatzi via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

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Heritage, the Ship of Theseus, and the Song of Homer

What would we say if we heard that the troops from two countries working together were hell-bent on destroying the heritage monuments of a third? In addition to the human lives they took, they destroyed one of the most beautiful groups of buildings in the region, steeped in historical significance. As they did so, they looted fine art treasures to fill the houses of the rich and the museums of the “civilized” world—where they remain. The theft of these treasures caused as much resentment among the descendants of those who lost them as Elgin’s removal of the Parthenon marbles from Athens to Britain. The actions sound like those of the disgruntled Sunni troops of Iraq and Syria in their joint actions, reverting to beheading, blowing up the remains of Palmyra, and selling antiquities to the world market to fund their activities. They also describe the actions of the British and French armies in China in 1860.

One of the British commanders in China was the son of that same Elgin, engaged in a war in which the troops from France and Britain were supposedly trying to free up trade with China by vicious military action—bizarre though that sounds. It was he who was responsible for the destruction of the Summer Palace in Beijing; his troops looted and pillaged the imperial treasures. A much restored version of the Summer Palace is on the UNESCO World Heritage List. Among the features destroyed by the British but now restored is the 728-meter Long Corridor—so long, tourists are told, that it is in the Guinness World Records. In the harsh climate around Beijing, the fabric of the restored corridor requires almost continuous maintenance.

Workers repainting the timbers of the Long Corridor, Summer Palace, Beijing
Workers repainting the timbers of the Long Corridor, Summer Palace, Beijing

The corridor was decorated with more than 10,000 paintings that have also been reconstructed. They, like the Sydney Harbour Bridge, must be repainted on a regular basis. If the corridor is not original and is constantly renewed, and if the paintings have to be repeatedly restored, we might question the basis for the fame of the material heritage of the Summer Palace as it is shown to tourists. Is it anything more than a tourist attraction, a theme park of the Ming Dynasty, like that replica recently constructed 1,000 kilometers from Beijing where equivalent structures and paintings can be enjoyed by even larger masses of tourists?

Unrestored painting in the Long Corridor, Summer Palace
Unrestored painting in the Long Corridor, Summer Palace

What we are talking about here is the “old man’s spade.” You know the story: the old man used to say that he’d had only one spade all his life, and he had only changed the handle five times and the blade twice. Is the old man saying anything other than that he is just a silly old man? This blog considers the question of the authenticity of the Summer Palace, one of the jewels of Chinese World Heritage. Is it any more authentic than the old man’s claim to have had only one spade? The issues relate equally to the much reconstructed Great Wall or the much renovated Forbidden City. Even the Terracotta Warriors have to be reconstructed before they can be displayed in their astonishing variety.

Terracotta Warriors, Xi’an, in various states of reconstruction
Terracotta Warriors, Xi’an, in various states of reconstruction

All over the world, important heritage places (such as the Washington Elm, where George Washington supposedly received his command, on Cambridge Common in Massachusetts) have to be renewed (the original tree died) or they lose their impact as heritage places. Does heritage tend toward theme parks, or is “real” heritage somehow different? This is particularly interesting in the light of a proposal for a park north of Sydney, Australia, where Chinese heritage buildings might be copied but would probably not acquire heritage significance. How important is it, when honoring heritage, to call a spade a spade?

In philosophy, the question of the old man’s spade is known as the ship of Theseus paradox and has been discussed since the time of the pre-Socratic philosophers of Greece (Lowenthal 1989). There is even a version that relates to George Washington’s axe, presumably the one he did or did not use to cut down the cherry tree. The philosophical question turns on the interpretation if the ship carried spare timber for repairs during the voyage, and whether it would be the same ship even if it were completely renewed. Can the old man’s spade (or the ship or the axe) be considered the same one after its history of changes? Various thought experiments have been devised to discuss the relevant options. But whether these thoughts are about the use of the same materials, the way the thing was made, the shape of the thing, or the use to which the thing is/was put, the discussion has centered principally on the essence of the material “thing” rather than the relationship between it and other things, places, or people that surround it. Mike Schiffer (1999) has emphasized this three-way communication between people and things in The Material Life of Human Beings and the centrality to human life of human interactions with materiality. Although heritage values might be related to the (generally material) qualities of the heritage thing or place, the fundamental reason for heritage status of the thing or place is the interactions people have with it.

This quality of the importance of the heritage-bearing people—the consumers of heritage—enables the concept of heritage to extend beyond the material to intangible aspects of culture. The heritage is more than the material thing or place; it is also the narratives and interpretations that people bring to it, or anchor to it. But without the material anchor, who can identify the original or reconstructed parts of the intangible? We could engage in a thought experiment of our own, switching from material cultural heritage to intangible cultural heritage. Beside the ship of Theseus paradox about a materially substantive ship, there is a song of Homer paradox, through which we could debate whether the final (written) version of The Odyssey (whatever it says about ships) was the same as had been originally sung by the first person who called himself (or herself) Homer. By this logic, is West Side Story really a modern version of Romeo and Juliet, and is it the same story in the Vanuatu movie Tanna? It turns out that the legitimation of heritage turns on the interaction of these two paradoxes. There is no paradox of the ship of Theseus provided there is an attached history that sings about the history of replacement of parts. The old man’s spade has been with him all his life because he can tell the story that he has never had to replace both parts at the same time. We know the changes between Shakespeare’s and Bernstein’s stories and the one from Vanuatu because there are material versions of them.

The material cultural heritage experience is (generally) tied to a location and anchored by the materiality of what people constructed there. In all cases there is a narrative about special events in the past, which generally are of interest primarily to the people whose lives have been affected by (and are a product of) the relevant histories. These narratives are subject to the song of Homer paradox—no two versions of the history are quite the same, as in the Rashomon effect—just as the material heritage is subject to the changes of materials described in the ship of Theseus paradox. They become objects of tourist interest through the material things, whether beautiful or not, in their context of either dominated or constructed landscapes. All of these elements are needed to create the heritage experience. The Summer Palace was reconstructed in defiance of its destruction by colonial powers, and the destruction and reconstruction have become part of the narrative “song.” And it was built in the same location, beside the same lake, to which are attached singular narratives. No theme park can replicate that combination of material structure, location, and intangible heritage.

Whenever there is a contest about the preservation of the material remains of cultural heritage, we should remember that all cultural heritage preservation is a political act. It privileges the interests of people who are stakeholders in that heritage over those of others. Those stakeholders may be indigenous people, commonly in Australia and the United States, indeed in most countries that have been the victims of colonialism. Their songs will be the most powerful connection between the material and the people. There are others whose “songs” do not provide the complement to the material culture, whose attitudes, therefore, principally focus on the material. Heritage professionals on one side are key stakeholders defending material heritage, while developers or industry shareholders on the other are often not committed to the material or the narrative. Governments will always have an interest, particularly because the protections are legislated by them and most often the preservation must be funded by them. And then there are the interests of the general public. That general public often has multiple sources of narrative. If they are tourists, often that is quite separate from the dominant narrative of their own lives.

How does this discussion inform our understanding of the destruction of heritage buildings in Palmyra? Nothing can justify the murder of Khaled al-Asaad, the archaeologist most closely associated with the place, but nothing can justify many other killings in wars, nor the associated destruction of heritage. The lesson of this comparison is that the destruction of the material of cultural heritage is a common feature of the clash of ideologies. No particular side has been generally virtuous. Material culture can be restored, but the intangible songs and stories, of the people who are custodians of the heritage, may be more difficult to recover unless they survive in a material form. It is the interplay of material cultural heritage and the intangible heritage associated with it that is strongest. The changing ship of Theseus can be interpreted best when there is, in the same frame, a song of Homer, however much that too changes.



Iain Davidson
is an archaeologist who also works in Cultural Heritage management. Trained in the United Kingdom, he has worked at the University of New England (Australia) and Harvard. He is working on a volume about the evolution of symbolic behavior in Australia.

His two most recent publications are:

Davidson, Iain. Forthcoming. “Stone Tools: Evidence of Something in between Culture and Cumulative Culture.” In Miriam N. Haidle, Nicholas J. Conard, and Michael Bolus, eds., The Nature of Culture. Springer International Publishing.

Tasire, Alandra K., and Davidson, Iain. 2015. A Fine-Grained Analysis of the Macropod Motif in the Rock Art of the Sydney Region, Australia. Australian Archaeology 80: 48–59.

All photos in this posted are credited to the author.



References

Lowenthal, David. 1989. “Material Preservation and Its Alternatives. Perspecta 25: 67–77, doi: 10.2307/1567139.

Schiffer, Michael Brian. 1999. The Material Life of Human Beings: Artifacts, Behavior, and Communication. London: Routledge.



Cite as: 
Davidson, Iain. 2015. “Heritage, the Ship of Theseus, and the Song of Homer.” EnviroSociety. 14 October. www.envirosociety.org/2015/10/heritage-the-ship-of-theseus-and-the-song-of-homer.