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- Convenors:
-
Janine Hauer
(Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg)
Asta Vonderau (Martin-Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Germany)
Ruzana Liburkina (Goethe University Frankfurt)
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- Format:
- Workshop
- Regional groups:
- Europe
- Transfers:
- Closed for transfers
Short Abstract:
This panel addresses and questions idealist assumptions about practices of commoning in the current moment that has been characterised as the 'Chemical Anthropocene'.
Long Abstract:
The notion of commoning is associated with a ‘social good’ "to make resources administered by the state, or marketed by the private sector, the basis for new communities of solidarity of varying scales and scopes.” Commoning, therefore, comes close to ideas of equal access to resources and gains connected to them. However, recent debates on late industrialism and the Anthropocene have drawn attention to the flip side of resource extraction and use. Invoking the notion of “toxic commons” global environmental historian Simone Müller refers to the contemporary moment “when our common-pool resources have become increasingly toxic and the experience of toxic exposure has become—while unequal—increasingly common” (Müller 2021, 444). While commoning goods is widely accepted, commoning toxicity appears less straight forward. On the one hand, citizens and activists affected by or fighting against slow violence exercised by toxic leaks and spills but also everyday exposure to chemicalized environments struggle to make often invisible chemical worlds and worldings visible and known in order to raise attentions to their effects. On the other hand there are multiple attempts to increase not only responsibility but also long-term liability for those who benefit from more short term profit from and with toxic substances and their residues.
In this panel we seek empirically grounded contributions addressing the tension outlined above by thinking with and through practices of un/comming toxicity. We are aiming at a joint discussion to explore the usefulness of toxic commons for ethnographic inquiries and to discuss especially its political and ethical implications.
Accepted contributions:
Session 1Contribution short abstract:
Port dredging, a necessary form of harbour maintenance, stirs up contaminated sediments. This paper examines the ethical, epistemological, and infrastructural tools mobilized to reduce toxic exposure to "legacy sediments" in the Bay of Marseille.
Contribution long abstract:
Port dredging, a necessary form of harbor maintenance, stirs up contaminated sediments. The city of Marseille and the Aix-Marseille-Provence metropolitan government regularly carry out dredging operations in the Mediterranean to keep ports functional. As early as 2001, environmental NGOs reported that dangerous contaminants scattered in the wake of dredging. Along with silt, sand, and marine biota, dredgers unearthed toxic matter or “legacy sediments.” In the port of Marseille, concentrations of contaminants were 37 times higher than official threshold values. “Toxic elements” in the nearshore waters of Marseille are not inert: once suspended and taken up by littoral drift, they can get deposited in the city’s shallow lagoons and on beaches. Here, hobby boaters anchoring in the bay or recreational swimmers further stir up contaminated sediments. Together, these more or less innocuous acts have turned the Bay of Marseille into a “toxic site” or “negative commons” (Müller and Balayannis 2024), with devastating consequences for marine species and various health risks for humans. In some ports, sediment layers have become so laced with heavy metals that dredging is deemed impractical. How do residents, planners, and experts deal with this “toxic common” beyond repair (Müller 2021)? What are the ethical, epistemological, and infrastructural tools mobilized to intervene at these sites? And what does dredging, as a form of purging, have to do with the legacy of industrial urbanization and long-term liability for oceanic pollution? What other ways to coexist with sediments “in the fraught muddiness of the ongoing present” (Anand 2023:701)?
Contribution short abstract:
This paper explores the uneven ways in which chemical harm unfolds on 21st-century monoculture plantations, illustrating the disproportionate toxic burdens and uncommon futures shaped by the Chemical Anthropocene.
Contribution long abstract:
Monocultures play a pivotal role in accelerating the planetary unmaking through deforestation, habitat fragmentation, and chemical harm. The chemical entanglements of monoculture plantations are complex, ambivalent, and disquietingly insidious, posing significant threats to multispecies futures and the habitability of the planet. Rooted in colonial legacies and the extractive logics of agrocapitalism, their impacts are unevenly distributed across spatial, temporal, and social scales. This paper ethnographically examines the chemical-intensive monoculture of Indian small cardamom in the Cardamom Hills, a biodiversity hotspot in India, to illustrate how chemical harm unfolds in a plantation landscape marred by pesticide toxicity and ecological ruin. By foregrounding the uneven distribution of toxic burdens, the paper highlights how the intersections of colonialism, caste-gender inequalities, and monoculture render specific places and people disproportionately vulnerable to chemical injuries. The paper engages with the Chemical Anthropocene by emphasizing its inherently patchy production of toxic burdens and the disparate ways in which they are experienced. It argues for an understanding of the chemical harm’s uncommon burdens and futures.
Contribution short abstract:
Using immersion into the lives of waste pickers who collect scrap copper at Czech landfills, this paper analyses their perception of toxicity vis-à-vis other kinds of hazards. I demonstrate that their indifference to toxicity is shaped by learning and perception of old age.
Contribution long abstract:
Why would anybody disregard exposure to toxicity? A straightforward explanation may be that toxicity is simply hard to grasp. A source of potential harm is invisible, requires time to develop, and its effects can be difficult to prove. Drawing on my fieldwork among the informal waste pickers at Czech landfills, I shed light on other reasons, which are contingent upon specific conditions structuring the lives of these people. I pay special attention to the practice of burning electric cords and cables to extract copper. The practice generates suffocating fumes and requires the handling of toxic ashes left behind as toxic commons of the future. It goes without saying that face masks and gloves are rarely used. Along with exposure to landfill leachate, burning e-waste is arguably one of the most toxic encounters waste pickers experience. Yet, the potential toxicity of the fumes and ashes raises little concern in comparison to other kinds of hazards: being run over by trucks, cut by sharp objects, buried under falling garbage, or breaking one’s leg in irregular terrain. These hazards, however, can be minimized by building experience and skill via everyday work at the landfill. Toxicity is different. It requires knowledge of the microworld and a certain perception of aging. Neither of which waste pickers were afforded. They come from the social milieu where formal education is not valued and concerns about health problems in old age make little sense; everybody knows that “one does not make it to retirement anyway".
Contribution short abstract:
Is the toxic ubiquity of PFAS a chemical commons or a poisonous enclosure? Does exposure to “forever chemicals” draw communities together or sever nourishing relations to place? This paper ventures an ethnographic answer from former plastics manufacturing towns in the United States.
Contribution long abstract:
PFAS is coming into view as an unprecedented crisis of toxicity. After the briefest moment of industrial utility, PFAS comes to haunt life with diabolic immortality. These “forever chemicals” do not breakdown. Their indestructibility is joined with the ability to sail through planetary and cellular systems. Although PFAS were primarily used in American plastics manufacturing, they are now routinely detected in the deepest ocean trenches, on the highest mountaintops, and even in passing rain showers. PFAS are also found in every form of life on earth, where they trip up biological systems at a new microscopic scale of toxicology: parts per trillion. Trace exposure to PFAS is now strongly linked to developmental disorders, immune dysfunction, reproductive harm, and a growing array of cancers. PFAS are everywhere and causing harm.
Is the toxic ubiquity of PFAS best grasp as a chemical commons or a poisonous enclosure? Does exposure to these “forever chemicals” draw communities together in new ways or does it sever any nourishing relationship to place? And where exactly is the “anthropological” in a newfound toxicity that is pervasive, permanent, and without obvious remedy?
This paper draws on a decade of personal and professional involvement in the struggle for justice after the discovery of PFAS in my hometown (Bond 2021). Centering this struggle, this paper crafts a wider argument about the place of toxicity in theory and protest, the question of the commons in environmental justice today, and the radical lucidity of ethnography amidst economic desperation and ecological disarray.