The notion of property has had many accolades assigned to it. In some iterations, it is the bringer of freedom (Anderson and Huggins 2003); in others it is a wielder of power (Underkuffler 2003). It is also a way of distinction between culture and nature, boiled down to the ownable and unownable. Land, a cultural prism, has long been an easily divisible and ownable space, whereas the sea, in its distant bubble of “hypernature,” has never been for individual ownership (Helmreich 2011; Jackson 1995). (I speak here of course for our modern Western society; individuals and communities have apportioned and “owned” coastal areas in numerous cultures across centuries [see, e.g., Mulrennan and Scott 2000]).
This post was presented as part of a series recognizing Earth Day, Saturday, April 22, 2017. It is being re-featured on the blog in 2021 as part of the Themed Collection: Pollution & Toxicity.
Coal mining communities in Appalachia have been framed as both victims and villains within the discourses of our emerging Trumpian late industrial narrative. Indeed, the US presidential election of Donald Trump has enacted an existential ratcheting up of the vitriolic moral divisions between “coastal elites” and “flyovers,” unhinged from the banality of previous circulations of those essentialist stereotypes. But a closer look past these inscriptions may reveal a different reality about the relationship between Appalachian coal mining communities and the environments in which they live, one that points to a more distributed agentive collusion between coal mining families, coal, and the toxins that augment the life of the matter within broader Appalachian ecosystems.
On June 17th, 2017, Ferraria de São João (hereafter Ferraria), a small-sized village in central Portugal remotely located at the top of a hill, was encircled by flames. The two available fire engines, one at each end of the village, were unable to refill with water at some point. There were no helicopters either. The tragedy, as the few residents would come to realise the morning after, was of a regional scale. Left to their own devices, the unprepared local population fought the flames by themselves with what they had at hand: garden hoses, water buckets, branches.
Wildfires are common in this region, but this time it was different. Indeed, 2017 was the worst wildfire year in Portugal’s recent history. A record area of over half a million hectares burned, leaving in its wake record damages and fatalities. Two unprecedented wildfire events, before (mid-June) and after (mid-October) the so-called critical fire period, were particularly disastrous, with over one hundred casualties and hundreds of injured people. These events were the first of a new kind recorded not only in Portugal, but also in Europe, in terms of extreme behaviour, intensity and impacts. In a way, Portugal was the “canary in the mine”, providing a stark warning of what the future holds for Mediterranean ecosystems.
Figure 1. Burnt landscape in the aftermath of the 2017 wildfires. Photo Credit: Feli García, via Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)
The roots of the wildfire problem in Portugal, and across Southern Europe more generally, are deep and complex, entangling social, economic, ecological, and political factors, further exacerbated by climate change. These roots date back to the 1960s, when significant socioeconomic and land-use changes radically changed fire regimes.[1] Since then, wildfires have become larger, more frequent, and more destructive. In the wake of a rapid, albeit late, industrialisation process, most rural inland areas of northern and central Portugal witnessed a massive rural exodus that left behind increasingly depopulated and almost abandoned villages. As a result, former agricultural areas have been occupied by fire-prone shrublands and forests. Forest composition has also shifted, due to plantations of native maritime pines and, more recently, non-native eucalyptus trees – two fast-growing, fire-prone species. Adding to this, forest ownership in Portugal is overwhelmingly private. In northern and central Portugal, where wildfires are more frequent, properties are also highly fragmented and small-sized. The owners of many of these properties are unknown, as most properties therein have no official land registry title – an issue that is only now being tackled.
Figure 2. Eucalyptus plantation in Portugal. Photo Credit: Global Forest Coalition (used with permission)
The eucalyptus is a controversial species in Portugal, where it is currently the most common tree. Native to Australia, it was introduced to Portugal in the 1850s, but it was only by the mid-20th century that it became a protagonist, often a vilified one, in the history of Portuguese forests and wildfires. Since then, the area it occupies has rapidly and steadily expanded to feed the booming paper pulp industry, not without protest, creating extensive monocultures, many of which un/mismanaged. Currently, Portugal has the largest land area planted with eucalyptus in Europe and, in relative terms, in the world. It is not only through planting that this species spreads, though. The eucalyptus thrives and takes hold with fire. In other words, wildfires encourage their natural regeneration. As many private properties are left unmanaged or abandoned, eucalyptus trees grow ‘wildly’, rendering landscapes increasingly flammable.
Like most villages in the region, the surroundings of Ferraria were almost exclusively occupied by eucalyptus, all of which burned down in 2017. Closer to the village, however, the flames eventually stopped in a 200-year-old stand of cork oaks, a heritage bequeathed by the ancestors that saved many houses.
Figure 3. The village of Ferraria de São João after the 2017 wildfires, surrounded by cork oaks and, further afield, burnt eucalyptus trees. Photo Credit: Nuno Antunes/Revelamos (used with permission).
After experiencing the wildfires, and inspired by the oaks, the residents realised that something had to change. One week after the wildfires, the Residents’ Association promoted the first of over 20 community meetings with residents and forest owners to discuss what could be done to protect the village from future wildfires. Through a continuous participatory process of discussion and collective decision-making, the unanimous solution arrived at was the creation of a ‘village protection zone’ (VPZ): a 100-metres strip around the village collectively managed, where eucalyptus trees were replaced with more fire-resistant native trees.
The limits of the VPZ were collectively planned and mapped, as were the intervention areas therein. Given that the plots within the VPZ are mostly private, landowners’ consent was needed. The challenge was to identify them, as there was no land registry and many landowners are absentees. Yet, with the help of the residents, the Association was able to identify over 250 plots, mostly with less than 1 hectare, and their respective owners (around 80). Provided with the owners’ consent, the Association registered their lands and started removing eucalyptus trees in a designated area within the VPZ. Afterwards, over 1,000 native trees were planted. The areas and species to plant were also collectively chosen and mapped: fruit trees closer to the village; cork oaks and oaks further away. These plantations were made possible with the help of several volunteers from all over the country, taking advantage of the wave of solidarity that followed the catastrophic wildfires.
Figure 4. The Village Protection Zone of Ferraria, with the different intervention areas. Source: Associação de Moradores da Ferraria de São João (used with permission)
This pioneering and innovative initiative became an example at the national level, to be replicated in other villages, as has already happened in the neighbouring village of Casal de São Simão. These villages were two case studies in a research we conducted on local communities’ responses to the 2017 wildfires in Portugal,[2] as part of a larger interdisciplinary project on wildfire mitigation and adaptation in the country (People&Fire[3]).
With global temperatures on the rise and a projected increase of extreme wildfires due to climatic and land-use changes, to which Mediterranean ecosystems are particularly vulnerable, pressures mount to find ways to learn to coexist with wildfires. In a context of dwindling, aging population and widespread land abandonment, such as Southern Europe, what might this mean? What happened in Ferraria provides some answers. For the residents, it meant being proactive and restoring native landscapes through a bottom-up, participatory process that involved the whole community. The damaged, fiery landscapes of the present are not only “our disaster”, but also “our weedy hope”.[4]
[2] This research focused on ten initiatives that were implemented in one of the most seriously hit regions in 2017 (Pinhal Interior) by local communities, local associations and/or local governments. Drawing upon qualitative research methods (surveys of local government presidents, document analysis, and semi-structured interviews), it explored the underpinning motivations, actions undertaken, opportunities, and challenges.
[3] “People&Fire: Reducing Risk, Living with Risk” is a research project funded by Portuguese national funds through FCT–Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia, I.P. (PCIF/AGT/0136/2017), between 2019 and 2022. It is carried out at the University of Lisbon (School of Agriculture, Institute of Social Sciences, and Institute of Geography and Spatial Planning) and is coordinated by Professor José Lima Santos. The aim of the project is to develop a new analytical framework to support people-centred policies through changing practices and choices at the policy, collective, and individual levels.
[4] Gan, E., Tsing, A., Swanson, H., & Bubandt, N. (2017). Introduction: Haunted landscapes of the Anthropocene. In A. L. Tsing, H. Swanson, E. Gan, & N. Bubandt (Eds.), Arts of living on a damaged planet: Ghosts of the Anthropocene (pp. G1–G14). University of Minnesota Press.
Filipa Soares is a researcher at the Instituto de Ciências Sociais da Universidade de Lisboa. Originally trained as an anthropologist, she holds a DPhil (PhD) in Environmental Geography from the University of Oxford. She has done research in Portugal and the UK on various topics, such as the politics and histories of wildlife conservation, including rewilding, and forest management and human-environment relations. Email: filipafs@gmail.com
Luísa Schmidt is a sociologist and Principal Researcher at the Instituto de Ciências Sociais da Universidade de Lisboa. In Portugal, she pioneered environmental sociology research and outreach. She coordinates OBSERVA–Environment, Territory and Society Observatory and co-founded (2009) the PhD on “Climate Change and Sustainable Development Policies”.
Ana Delicado is a Research Fellow at the Instituto de Ciências Sociais da Universidade de Lisboa. Trained as a sociologist, she works mainly in social studies of science and technology. She has done research on environmental risks, energy technologies, public engagement with science, among other topics. She teaches at the PhD Programme in Climate Change and Sustainable Development and at the Master in Scientific Culture and Science Dissemination.
Consider the Park Avenue Elementary School in Cudahy, located ten miles from downtown Los Angeles. Or shift your attention to the Rani Jhansi Sarvodaya Kanya Vidyalaya in east Delhi, a few miles away from the Indian capital city’s most affluent neighborhoods. Though continents apart, what ties these two schools together is their shared exposure and experience to compounding environmental hazards. The former is built on top of a capped unregulated landfill/dump and the latter is surrounded by a massive, operational landfill, an interstate container depot, and waste processing facilities. Students at both schools have experienced adverse health effects related to chemical contamination— developing chronic asthma or even being hospitalized after a gas leak from a nearby container depot.
Classrooms and educational spaces can be sites of environmental injustice due to toxic chemical exposure, and classrooms can also be sites of disinformation in which environmental injustice is reproduced. First graders in Oklahoma, for example, read stories about Petro Pete, who had a bad dream in which many plastics in his life – his toothbrush, the tires on his bike, his hard hat – go missing. The message is clear: without petrochemical products, life isn’t good. Along the same lines, in New Mexico, the oil and gas industry leverages their investment in public education infrastructure to push science curricula that uses fracking to teach about the slope of a graph. Across the US, bills are underway that ban even the mention of race and gender in classrooms, which also impacts the teaching of environmental justice and climate change. Production of disinformation and apathy in classrooms extends globally: grade 12 students in Bhopal, India, for example, learn little in their classrooms about the 1984 Union Carbide chemical plant disaster which killed thousands in Bhopal (Iyenagar & Bajaj 2011).
Figure 1. First graders in Oklahoma listen to a story about Petro Pete, who dreams that all by-products of the petrochemical industry have disappeared. He cannot brush his teeth or use soap. He cannot go to school because there is no school bus anymore. Source: Oklahoma Energy Resources Board Homeroom website.
My work contends with how teaching and learning produce and reproduce environmental problems and responses. When something is “stuck”— be it a discourse or a literal cog in the machine— we need to ask what it is that confounds our understanding, and what is the way forward? I will describe here an experimental environmental justice education program in the United States that works within the challenges of a pedagogy in late industrialism, a pedagogy of “cascade learning” that interrogates entrenched structures of feeling and thinking, even as it urges into formation communities of thought and practice that activate learners as stakeholders and stewards of shared environmental futures.
Against Estranged Learning
Environmental justice researchers address complex environmental issues with no straightforward answers or solutions. We examine analytic chains linking polluting industries and racialized governance to habits of thinking and doing— examples of what anthropologist Kim Fortun calls “late industrialism”, necessitating “modes of thought, collaboration and practice that we haven’t yet figured out” (Fortun 2012). In my research on the ways scientists, environmental advocates, and entrepreneurs are responding to the enormous socio-ecological and political complexity of air pollution in Delhi, I worked with urban studies scholar Rohit Negi to understand how their responses were shifting habitual ways of thinking and doing science, advocacy, and corporate responsibility (Negi & Srigyan 2021). We were frequently asked to explain our ethnographic research to diverse audiences, with people listening carefully to understand how our expertise can be useful for them. Turning to pedagogy is one way to do that— even more so when spaces of education become critical sites of environmental injustice.
The EcoEd program is a learning collective that started in 2012 at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York, bringing together university-based faculty and undergraduate and graduate students to address the challenges presented by late industrialism. A persistent challenge of late industrialism is to understand environmental injustice as a multi-scalar and complex problem. To respond to this challenge, the program’s evolving list of literacy goals include recognizing complex causation, cross-scalar relations, organization and analysis of information, collaborative tactics, and creative strategies to communicate research findings, developing what anthropologist Angela Jenks calls “justice-oriented civic capabilities” supporting students in their transitions as social agents (Jenks 2022).
And there are compelling reasons to advocate for these literacy goals. Learning to recognize and understand where things get stuck— and how to get them moving towards different ends so that systems (and people) don’t repeat what they always have— is what Gregory Bateson calls deutero learning or “learning to learn.” To understand how pedagogy reproduces environmental injustice, and how it can be a pathway to address it, deutero learning requires deep thinking, doing, and enacting a series of experiments to figure out what can work and what cannot. There are a number of pathways that don’t work: for example, we know through the works of educators Paulo Freire (1968) and bell hooks (1994) that commodification of learning in silo-ed off institutions has produced teachers and learners to become invested in the “banking model of education”, framing an educator as a transmitter and a learner as a passive recipient of knowledge.
The model fails in part because learners are obviously not passive, and educators are always doing more than mere “transfer.” Resistance to learning and teaching emerges in a skewed and stuck dyadic relationship. It also fails because it positions learners as opposed to one another, where the possession of knowledge becomes something that causes worry rather than excitement. Learning theorists Jean Lave and Ray MacDermott (cite) call this “estranged learning”, reading Marx’s theory of estranged labor to understand how alienation (of work from the worker’s body, of time from narrative, of the self from the world, of categories from their meanings) produces subjectivities of learning and teaching that actively resists coming together for reflection and conversation. In places where settler/colonial logics have set forth racialized, classed, and gendered ways of thinking and being (Grande 2015, Shange 2019), estranged learning maintains barriers that prevent collective reflection and action.
Estranged learning means that students are learning that petrochemical products are here to stay, and are being socialized to ignore or tolerate compounding factors. They are not learning about how their bodies and neighborhoods are affected by the oil and gas industry. They are not learning to dream about alternatives to fossil fuels. Combined with the banking model of education’s skewed-and-stuck knowledge transfer paradigm, estranged learning means that learners will in fact be resistant to such change—which is one reason why “straight facts” don’t work, especially in a post-truth age where “which truths count and which are ignored is a central question” (Davies & Mah 2020). Cultivating justice-oriented civic capabilities is then a matter of undercutting mechanisms that produce estranged learning. The question then becomes: which pedagogical tactics cultivate this capacity?
Cascade Learning in EcoED
The EcoEd program enrolled undergraduate students to be mentors to elementary and middle school students. In their roles as mentors, undergraduate students developed and communicated research projects about environmental issues through undergraduate courses like Sustainability Education. By analyzing existing environmental education programs and curricula in the US, they designed curriculum modules and lesson plans that connected local issues to global networks. A curriculum module for K-5 on watersheds and environmental sustainability, for example, also provided a lesson on local, regional, and global flows of resources by having students “visualiz[e] problems, consequences, sources, and solutions for watershed pollution in their towns” (Balas 2012). This lesson was followed up with a poster presentation session where students communicated their findings about watershed pollution with a message on why water conservation is important. As a whole, the module cultivated creative research and communication skills, and positioned K-5 students as environmental stakeholders.
Figure 3. A group of second grade students write out the plot of children’s book “Michael Bird Boy” and show how air pollution is in the book. Source: The Asthma Files.
By activating the capacity of a learner to see themselves as stakeholders with investment in an environmental issue, cascade learning sets off “communities of practice” (Lave & Wenger 1991) with shared literacy and research goals. Picture books and news shows created and curated by elementary and middle school learners cultivate storytelling practices that are also imaginative and speculative spaces to inscribe and enact responses and solutions. Consider the picture story produced by elementary school students Nicholas and Andrew: based on the illustrated story Michael Bird-Boy by Tomie dePaola, the story “Nicholas Bird-Boy” considers a range of solutions to address the air pollution coming from a factory that makes teddy bears and dolls in their town.
By learning how to identify the problems of late industrialism with K-5 learners, undergraduate students become researchers and educators in their own right, seeing where things become stuck through pedagogical practice. This is “cascade learning”, “wherein university students come to really understand the conceptual and cultural challenges posed by environmental problems by really thinking through how to cultivate capacity to deal with those challenges in younger students.” (Reddy & Fortun 2014).
Figure 4. Grad student teaching first and second grade students the children’s book “Michael Bird Boy” and the environmental aspects of it. Source: The Asthma Files.
Placed in cascading communities of practice— as researchers, journalists and storytellers— learners come to see themselves as social and political agents, learning how their research findings are meaningful to diverse publics, both anticipated or unanticipated. By co-designing curriculum modes and enacting them with younger learners, undergraduate students learn to see environmental issues as pedagogical problems that will not be resolved merely by putting the facts out there, or assuming knowledge will go where it is supposed to go, reach who it is supposed to reach, or be learned and taught in specific ways.
Teaching Outside the Lines
Organizing programs like EcoED requires significant investment from a community of researchers, educators, and parents willing to cultivate life-affirming, civic-oriented, experimental sensibility in themselves as learners and in people they will teach. The unsettling of sedimented ways of thinking and being that this process induces could itself produce inertia. In I Love Learning; I Hate School, anthropologist Susan Blum notes the extractive desire constitutive of estranged learning: students want to get “learning” out of their way to get to somewhere else, and teachers aim to get “learning” out of students to see their role as educators fulfilled (Blum 2017). The challenge of cascade learning is to be in productive tension with this extractive desire and reorder it to reflect critically on how we learn to learn and to teach.
Intersecting injustices produced by the abandonment of communities to extractive resource and governance relations actively undermine capacity building in communities. As educators, we need to teach our students to analyze sources of mistrust, disinformation, and active harm in their communities. We also need to teach them how to find ways of moving forward. The challenge in cascade learning is to push back against entrenched and internalized characterizations of communities and their residents.
Environmental justice pioneer Charles Lee calls this the challenge of “second-generation environmental justice”, identifying, characterizing, and integrating the analysis of disproportionate burdens, systemic racism, and cumulative impacts that renders communities highly vulnerable to environmental harm (Lee 2021). How can cascade learning contend with broader community capacity, especially when it has been actively and intentionally undercut? What pedagogies can illuminate long histories of resistance and organizing against supremacist and extractive logics? At a time when learning is more estranged than ever, what pedagogical tactics can nourish learners and communities in their capacity as people with tools, skills, and resources necessary to make the way forward?
References
Balas, Erin., 2012. “EcoEd Curriculum RPA Watersheds Curriculum.” Personal Communication.
Blum, Susan D. 2017. I Love Learning; I Hate School: An Anthropology of College. Cornell University Press.
Davies, Thom, and Alice Mah, eds. 2020. “Introduction: Tackling Environmental Injustice in a Post-Truth Age.” In Toxic Truths. Manchester University Press.
Fortun, Kim. 2012. “Ethnography in Late Industrialism”. Cultural Anthropology 27(3): 446-464
Freire, Paulo. 1968. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Bloomsbury Press.
Grande, Sandy. 2015. Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought. Rowman & Littlefield.
hooks, bell. 1994. Teaching to transgress: education as the practice of freedom. Routledge.
Iyengar, Radhika, and Monisha Bajaj. 2011. “After the Smoke Clears: Toward Education for Sustainable Development in Bhopal, India.” Comparative Education Review 55 (3): 424–56.
Jenks, Angela. 2022. “Reshaping General Education as the Practice of Freedom.” In Applying Anthropology to General Education, edited by Jennifer R. Wies and Hillary J. Haldane, 61-79.
Lave, Jean, and Etienne Wenger. 1991. Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. New York, NY, US: Cambridge University Press.
Lave, Jean and Ray McDermott. 2002. “Estranged Labor Learning.” Outlines 1: 19–48.
Lee, Charles. 2021. “Confronting Disproportionate Burdens and Systemic Racism in Environmental Justice Policy.” Environmental Law Reporter, 19.
Negi, Rohit, and Prerna Srigyan. 2021. Atmosphere of Collaboration: Air Pollution Science, Politics and Ecopreneurship in Delhi. Taylor & Francis.
Shange, Savannah. 2019. Progressive Dystopia: Abolition, Antiblackness, and Schooling in San Francisco. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Prerna Srigyan is a PhD researcher studying education to science and governance pathways, focusing on environmental and social justice education. She is developing a range of collaborative projects on science, STS, and pedagogy using ethnographic and archival research methods. She works at the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine.
On December 30th, 2021, the Marshall Fire broke out in suburban communities south-east of the idyllic city of Boulder, Colorado, located at the foot of the Rocky Mountains in the United States. Within hours, the fire burned roughly 1,000 homes down to their foundations. It was deemed an “urban fire storm” by climate scientist and Boulder local Daniel Swain.
In our everyday lives we encounter and are exposed to a dizzying array of chemicals – through the air we breathe, water we drink, food we eat, products we buy, work we do, and environments we move through. A recent review of the scientific literature estimates that the accelerating mass-production of chemicals has led to the accumulation of 350,000 “novel entities” (human-made chemicals that did not previously exist) in the environment.[1] They suggest this exceeds the “planetary boundary” for chemical pollution, meaning it is and will continue to disrupt the operation of ecological systems and have major impacts on human health.
“My forest is dying,” he said as we drove northwest on highway 180 through the Coconino National Forest. I looked out the truck window at the many brown and gray lifeless trees among the green and I asked if that wasn’t normal for summer. Billy, a seasonal wildland firefighter, said no, there were many more brown trees this year in July than previous years. It was a visual sign of what environmental scientists call forest morality. A warning that the Coconino National Forest could be reaching a tipping point.
Figure 1. A dead tree in the Coconino National Forest. Photo by author.
“Fireways” evokes the complex interactions between fire and humans. Each year the Coconino National Forest burns; each year it grows back. Yet an impact of anthropogenic climate change is drought, drying out the trees and leaving them less likely to return after fires that burn hotter and more frequently. Fire management policies have also affected the life of the forest, with an emphasis on suppression leaving the forest at risk from more intense blazes. This is the “fire paradox” of contemporary fire ecology, in which ever increasingly bigger blazes are caused by a combination of suppression policy and climate change, with each problem compounding the other.
Figure 2. A forest fire burns on a mountain near Williams, Arizona. Photo by author.
More intense, frequent, and complex fires burn each year over longer fire seasons, with so-called “megafires” occurring over the past thirty years. The Indigenous people of the area, such as the Apache, practiced controlled burning to manage the forest. This practice has been taken up by the “good fire” movement, which advocates regular lighting of controlled burns to reduce fuel. Less fuel in the form of brush and dead trees means that intense fires and megafires are less likely.
Figure 3. A forest fire on the Colorado Plateau. Photo by author.
In Arizona, fire seasons are a regular part of the climatological cycle in a fire-adapted ecosystem. The Coconino National Forest covers a large part of Northern Arizona. It is the largest contiguous ponderosa pine forest in the world. Each year during the fire season from May-July, large forest fires burn. The predominant cause of forest fires is lightning. Fire season ends when the monsoon rains come, usually in August-September.
Figure 4. Monsoon rain clouds over Flagstaff, Arizona. Photo by author.
Forest fires in Arizona have gotten worse. In recent years, monsoons have been weaker, and the fire season is prolonged by a few days. Some years, the rainfall is so insignificant that local people call it a “nonsoon” year. Other years, intense bursts of sudden rainfall causes flash floods. The fires strip the land of trees and vegetation, which along with soil erosion, leaves the surrounding communities vulnerable to mudslides. In June 2021, monsoon rains caused flooding and mudslides through the site of the burn scar from the Museum Fire of 2019. Video captured flood waters sweeping away a Toyota Prius as mud and brown water coursed through neighborhoods close to downtown.
Figure 5. Flooding in the Rio de Flag wash in Flagstaff, Arizona. Photo by author.
Ponderosa pine trees make up much of the tree growth in the Coconino National Forest. Ponderosas do not grow at higher temperatures. As the average temperature rises due to anthropogenic climate change, the ponderosas recede. Fire is necessary for tree reproduction in the forest, clearing the grasses and scrub so the larger trees can grow in the regenerated soils. Ponderosas have a thick, fire-resistant bark. The low-intensity fires of 100-years ago burned the grasses but did not reach the lower branches of the tall ponderosas.
Figure 6. A ponderosa pine tree. Photo by author.
Now more intense fires are burning entire tree stands. Ponderosas only reproduce via seeds, which only scatter a certain distance from a parent tree. If a whole stand burns, it is much harder for the seeds to regrow. Literature from tree surveys show that the forest is close to its tipping point, after which the annual fires will destroy so many trees they will be unable to grow back.
The US Forest Service is responsible for fire management in the Coconino National Forest. In recent years, they have begun to light more controlled burns to reduce the fuel in the forest and decrease the intensity of forest fires. The aim is to reinstate a fire regime that encourages the dispersal of seeds and renewal of soils that promote forest health. However, local people complain about controlled burns, perceiving them as dangerous, reducing air quality due to smoke, and increasing closures of the forest for recreational use.
Local people and visitors use the forest extensively for hiking, camping, and outdoor sports. Recently, the Forest Service has tried to limit use of the forest around the Verde Valley area by restricting camping to approved campsites only. There are perennial problems with trash left in the forest by campers and stray sparks from campfires and cigarettes igniting forest fires. However, the Forest Service also encourages recreational use of the forest, such as by leasing land to a ski resort on the San Francisco Peaks. This is one of the sacred mountains to the Diné people (Navajo), many of whom object to the presence of a ski resort. Historically, the Forest Service has also been responsible for opening large tracts of the forest to logging.
Figure 7. Remains of a campsite in the Coconino National Forest near Flagstaff. Photo by author.
As fires burn tree stands that are unable to regrow, the forest is turned to grassland. In the process, what was a carbon sink becomes a carbon source. The fire paradox of anthropogenic climate change and management policies of suppression are creating wildfires of such magnitude that will ultimately bring abrupt ecological change to the forest.
Figure 8. Dead and living trees surround Red Mountain in the Coconino National Forest, Arizona. Photo by author.
Susannah Crockford is a lecturer in anthropology at the University of Exeter, UK. Her research interests cover the ethnographic study of ecology, religion, and medicine, with field sites in the southern and midwestern US and northern Europe. She has been visiting Northern Arizona for fieldwork since 2012. Her first monograph was published in May 2021 by the Class 200 list of the University of Chicago Press, titled Ripples of the Universe: Spirituality in Sedona, Arizona. Her next book will be an ethnography of climate change. Follow on Twitter: @suscrockford.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[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.
[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
All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.
Marx and Engel, the Communist Manifesto
When my world evaporated into exhaustion with Long Covid, I found myself pondering Marshall Berman’s (1988) insight from his eponymous book, “To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world—and at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are” (15). While modernity brought exhilarating emancipation of education, movement, and identity, it also eroded collective safety nets. Albeit “freed” from the constraints of custom, individuals became vulnerable in new ways to accidents, crashes, hazards, or disasters—be they natural, technological, economic. . . or viral. As public health authorities unfurled confusing, if not erratic, directives about mask mandates and vaccination priorities over the last two years, we learned once again how utterly dependent our lives are to opaque bureaucratic institutions and a standardized “utopia of rules” (Graeber 2015). In these contexts, things tend to fall apart (Achebe 1959).
A disaster is said to be a social construct because its sudden occurrence disrupts the functioning of a society, causing human, material, economic, cultural and environmental losses that exceed the community’s ability to cope using its own resources. Thus, any natural hazard that leads to loss of human lives and property and damages the surrounding resources and non-human entities can be called a disaster (Wisner et al, 2014; Nadiruzzamam, 2016).
Historical evidence has shown that the region of Sundarbans has faced cyclones and their never-ending fury through time. The oldest recorded evidence is from 1582 AD, when a cyclone swept over Bakergunje, in Bangladesh’s Barishal district (part of Bangladesh Sundarbans), causing a loss of 200,000 lives, hectares of farmland, and many cattle. O’ Malley, in his Gazetteer of 24 Parganas (1914), asserts that there is “no safeguarding against the sudden fury of a cyclone, and its record shows that, though they occur at irregular intervals, these violent storms are far more destructive of life and property than either droughts or floods” (Biswas, 2020).
The Indonesian president made this promise amid the fire and smoke haze disaster in September 2015. He was troubled by the fact that the 2015 fires severely impacted the nation’s environment, economy, and politics. Soon after, he established the Badan Restorasi Gambut (BRG, or Peatland Restoration Agency),[2] a new institution with the main purpose of restoring the degraded environment. After enforcing coercive approaches for decades, this moment was the very first time the Indonesian government took a formal, coherent, and scientific-driven approach to tackle fire-related problems. One striking maneuver of the BRG was the way it created thousands of infrastructures as part of its fire governance. These were the facilities BRG expects Indigenous communities like Ngaju people in Central Kalimantan to operate and maintain to achieve an ideal environmental future—to fulfill the promise of the government.
Seawater desalination, the industrial production of drinking water from the ocean, is a practice of increasingly intense interest to thirsty cities across the globe. And why not? It promises the ability to provide a reliable water source that is (seemingly) invulnerable to climate change. What is more, the market is responding, with a global estimated value of roughly $18 billion[1] (c.f., Swyngedouw and Williams 2016). And there is significant expected growth, up to $32 billion (that’s about half the estimated size of the wind industry),[2] in the next four years.
