Tag: environmental justice

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Cascade Learning for Environmental Justice

Environmental Justice as a Pedagogical Problem

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. 

Figure 2. The EcoEd Research Group website.  Source: The Asthma Files. 

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.

Reddy, Beth and Kim Fortun. 2014. “Doing Critique in K-12: Kim Fortun on Ethnography, Environment, and the EcoEd Research Group”. Platypus: The CASTAC Blog. 

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.

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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.

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Desalination and the Political (Blue) Economy of Climate Adaptation

Figure 1. Inside the largest seawater desalination plant in United States that produces 50 million gallon per day, located in Carlsbad, CA. Image © Brian F. O’Neill (2019).

A Blue Revolution?

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.

Read More “Desalination and the Political (Blue) Economy of Climate Adaptation”

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Where the Grass Is Greener: The Case for Anthropology in an Age of Populist Sentiment

In a presidential election year such as this, I as an American citizen am constantly inundated by the displays of political theater that have come to mark the quadrennial spectacle of our democracy: the conventions, photo ops, caricatures, impassioned speeches, and more. 2016 has been unique in that the specter of populism—which, to paraphrase Marx, has long haunted the United States of America—has come to overshadow “politics as usual.” Americans have watched in wonder on television and social media as populists Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders took the nation by storm (albeit with a few major ideological and strategic differences between them). However, with all of the showmanship and wonder surrounding the election of our country’s most powerful individual, it cannot be forgotten that the currents that drive national waves are playing out in unique ways across our country, in communities large and small alike.

Read More “Where the Grass Is Greener: The Case for Anthropology in an Age of Populist Sentiment”

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Antonin Scalia and the Environmental Politics of Human Health

Picture an environmentalist. What comes to mind for you? For some, the word evokes an image of radicals marching through city streets to protest public policies. For others, they think of “tree huggers” who chain themselves to trunks and branches in an effort to prevent deforestation.

Next, think of how the word environmentalism makes you feel. What is your reaction? While some might praise such endeavors, others view the word through a darker lens. They see thoughtless radicals who care more about nature than they do about people, willing to sacrifice the livelihoods of many humans for the preservation of a few trees or birds.

Kay Milton defines an environmentalist as a form of identity performance in which an individual not only holds a particular belief about nature but also is active in promoting their ideology to others (Milton 1996). However, this neutral academic definition takes on a very different meaning in public consciousness. Over the past forty years, the very word “environmentalism” has evolved into a polarizing discursive tool used by establishment powers to decry what they perceive as a fringe group that wishes to preserve nature at the expense of economic well-being. In painting environmentalists as individuals who value the intangible beauty of nature over the extrinsic value it provides, they disenfranchise environmentalism as dangerous to a fundamental social institution that distributes resources for our survival. Environmentalism, they argue, often comes at the expense of human prosperity.

This argument is successful because it strikes directly at the hearts of the average American. For instance, on the imposition of stricter logging regulations in the Pacific Northwest, many workers feared losing their jobs and livelihoods and protested on the grounds of “people before planet” (Layzer 2012). However, the most common anti-environmentalist rhetoric is misleading because it focuses narrowly on only one part of the environmental movement. While early environmentalism focused mostly on conservation of resources and preservation of natural beauty, the modern environmental movement has been characterized by a shift toward the relationship between human action and environmental consequence. These consequences frequently consider the impacts of pollution and other environmental harms on humans in the form of environmental injuries and health concerns. Such a transition began with the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which drew national attention to the dangers posed by DDT and other chemicals to not only other organisms but also people (Carson 1962).

The shift has manifested in what sociologist Robert Brulle calls the environmental justice and environmental health factions of the environmental movement (Brulle 2000). Each is differentiated from other kinds of environmentalism for their focus on the harms that pollutants and other activities have on human bodies. Although small, these factions promote a holistic perspective other kinds of environmentalism lack by emphasizing the ecology of human action. In short, their purpose is to remind us that we, too, are organisms and that our behaviors can have disastrous consequences for our own survival.

Curiously, however, I find in my own research with rural environmental justice advocates that they disagree with Brulle’s categorization. Among my informants, there is a consensus that environmentalism is a naughty word laced with too much political baggage to be viable in their endeavors. The group with whom I currently conduct my fieldwork, called the Northern Ohio ALS Project, seeks an Ohio EPA investigation into an alleged prevalence of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease) in Ashtabula County (Northern Ohio ALS Project 2014). However, recognizing that their own culture of farmers and factory workers are likely adherent to dominant environmental discourse, they emphasize the embodied consequences of pollution in order to humanize their cause. By attaching faces and bodies to environmental problems, they hope to appeal to their society’s emotions and sense of justice.

Humanizing environmentalism is no easy task. Current environmental science and law alike make it difficult to identify the silver bullets that cause illnesses like ALS—if such bullets even exist, that is. Environmental science is complex, with many variables at play; isolating and testing those variables to determine a vera causa (“true cause”) is thus nearly impossible. Such institutions reinforce the social inequalities that make poor people and minorities more than four times as likely to experience environmental injustice and provide them with few, if any, pathways for retribution (Checker 2005). While appealing to the humanism of others may work emotionally, it remains a weak trajectory for working within the system.

This was plainly seen on June 29, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5–4 that the EPA had not properly considered cost-benefit analysis in its regulation of coal plant emissions (U.S. Supreme Court 2015). The majority opinion, written by Antonin Scalia, rejects the EPA’s argument that the benefits ascribed to human life by the regulations outweigh the economic costs imposed on the fossil fuel industry. The court’s narrow rejection of the regulations affirms that environmentalist justice advocates still have a long way to go in establishing a new discourse that considers human well-being from a more holistic and ecological perspective.

Environmental justice advocates are becoming increasingly prevalent voices in environmental discourse. However, the struggle to establish a cultural consciousness that the environment can be a source of harm to humans is limited by modern science and politics. These institutions thus maintain a social order in which bodies are governed in a way that devalues individual human lives. Justice Scalia’s ruling is an unfortunate continuance of our dominant discourse, asserting that economic value takes precedence over the value instilled in human life merely because the latter cannot be readily quantified. The consequence is that those experiencing environmental injustice are robbed of the very institutional mechanisms that would allow them to seek retribution for their injuries. The social order is thus maintained until and unless environmental science can advance to such a point at which human life can be measured in the same way as other forms of human prosperity (e.g., job growth and income). Until such a time, we are resigned to live in a world where bodies mean precious little unless they can be quantified, unitized, and measured as part of a cost-benefit analysis.

Richard Bargielski is a graduate fellow in the Anthropology Department at Ohio State University. His primary research interest is the role of grassroots environmental justice and health organizations play in shaping United States environmental discourse.


References

Brulle, Robert J. 2000. Agency, Democracy, and Nature: The U.S. Environmental Movement from a Critical Theory Perspective. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Checker, Melissa. 2005. Polluted Promises: Environmental Racism and the Search for Justice in a Southern Town. New York: New York University Press.

Layzer, Judith A. 2012. “Jobs Versus the Environment: Saving the Northern Spotted Owl.” Pp. 174–208 in The Environmental Case: Translating Values into Policy, 3rd ed. Washington, D.C.: CQ Press.

Milton, Kay. 1996. Environmentalism and Cultural Theory: Exploring the Role of Anthropology in Environmental Discourse. New York: Routledge.

Northern Ohio ALS Project. 2014. “The Vincina Protocol: Developing a Universal Medical Protocol for the Diagnosis, Treatment and Prevention of ALS/Lou Gehrig’s Disease.” https://vincinaprotocol.wordpress.com.

U.S. Supreme Court. 2015. Michigan v. EPA.


Cite as: Bargielski, Richard. 2015. “Antonin Scalia and the Environmental Politics of Human Health.” EnviroSociety. 8 July. www.envirosociety.org/2015/07/antonin-scalia-and-the-environmental-politics-of-human-health.