Pollution is Colonialism

"The connection between Schalk and Liboiron’s work is this insistence that you can’t fix things by just moving them away. The desire we often have to fix pollution is, ‘Okay, here’s the recycling bin, and that will take our plastic away.’ Plastic never leaves. It never degrades. Every time we make plastic, we are committing to that plastic existing on our planet for the rest of time, effectively. Max’s work really shows the naivete of how we think about pollution and how the first solutions that we so often come up with, especially in Western science narratives, are always, ‘Let’s get it out of our context and put it somewhere else.’ We don’t think about the fact that we moved the factory, so now it pollutes somebody else’s community, or that when we put the landfill over here, the waste leaks into the groundwater and affects this other community. We don’t pay factory workers enough, some of them commit suicide or die, or don’t have enough wages to feed their families. There is a real need for us to imagine greater interconnection, and to stop creating solutions that are all about assuming access to land that isn’t ours and extracting resources without a mind to the consequences of it. Despite these very heavy messages, Max also manages to be very light. The footnotes are amazing in this book. They are a whole book unto themselves, sometimes, longer than the text itself on a given page. They are righteous and friendly and offer a different approach or are talking a little bit to a different audience. She knows most of her readers will be white, but she sometimes has footnotes that say, ‘This is for my fellow Indigenous peeps.’ The art of what she does with this, not to mention the thinking behind it, is why I try to put this book into the hands of pretty much everyone I know. Except that in some ways there is. A chapter that we ended up pulling from the book, but I wrote as a feature for American Scientist last year, was about pollution and disposable products for menstruation. The way we tend to think is, ‘How can we manage periods to make them invisible so we can go exist in the world?’ We tend to prioritize, ‘What are the most effective products that sop up my period blood and keep it from being visible to other people?’ In doing so, we are producing more and more disposable products that are harmful to the planet. Also, the people who are making these products are not thinking about our health and safety. These products contain VOCs, they contain phthalates: there was just that settled lawsuit showing that PFAS are present in Thinx underwear. We are exposing ourselves, on our thin genital skin, to plastics that then get absorbed into our bodies and live in us forever and have profound health consequences—all in the name of using the most absorbent thing that will keep periods from being seen. So, in a lot of ways, pollution is connected to menstrual justice, because the decisions we make about the products that we use do have those consequences. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . At the same time, her systemic approach—and what I offer, I hope, in my book—is around not telling people this is what you personally should or shouldn’t do. As much as it’s important for all of us to try to make good choices, we need to turn our eyes upward and say, ‘What are the systems in play? What can we do to effect change in a capitalist system that is trying to extract money from us, and give us these products that may be super absorbent, but are not super safe, and have profound negative consequences for the environment as well as our health? And how can we be putting more thought into that and pressuring these companies to make different decisions?’ We have a history of that. With Toxic shock syndrome (TSS), it was feminist activists who were the ones who first noticed what was going on. That was a book I almost put on this list: Toxic Shock: A Social History by Sharra Vostral . It’s the whole history of the feminist activism that got us to recognize the problems with superabsorbent tampons and how that was leading to TSS. Well, those warnings were because of Esther Rome and other feminist activists at the time, who made sure that we all knew there was a problem and changed how we categorize and standardize the absorbency of tampons. So Sharra Vostral has another book, Under Wraps . It’s another book I almost put on this list. It looks at menstrual technologies. Blood Magic and Chris Bobel’s work also cover the reusable rags and absorbent fabrics that people used to use. They’re not as absorbent as a disposable pad, but if you swap them out often enough, you can make do. One of the things that’s amazing about menstrual technologies—but again, has gotten us into the pickle we’re in—is that because they weren’t that good people really did remove themselves from modern life when they were menstruating. You would wear an absorbent fabric between your legs, then you’d wear rubber underwear over it, or a rubber apron that was supposed to protect your skirt from getting blood on it. That’s how you protected yourself and tried to keep from showing that you had menstrual blood. If you were a heavy bleeder, that was pretty much always insufficient. That’s why I think we have to have a nuanced approach to thinking about menstrual technologies and why I would never tell somebody, ‘Listen, you just can’t use disposable pads anymore because they’re bad.’ Without them, many people couldn’t exist in public while menstruating. I couldn’t: I bleed way too much. So sure, I could sit in bed for the first three days, and just bleed on myself and use inferior products in terms of their absorbency. Or I could use ones that are worse for the environment and worse for me but allow me to be out in public. There isn’t really an in between right now. There are some reusable things like cups, but not everyone tolerates them very well."

"Selecting five books on a topic is pure folly. I knew that from the get-go. But I was accurately aware that my list felt incomplete because the book I most wanted to read (let alone recommend) on pollution was, at the time, still being drafted by Max Liboiron , a plastic pollution researcher with a background in both art and science and technology studies. Liboiron’s much-anticipated Pollution is Colonialism was published in 2021 by Duke University Press, and I welcome the chance from the Five Books editors to update this entry to include it. Liboiron is Métis/Michif and their lab, Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research , is based in the Department of Geography at Memorial University on the island of Newfoundland. Pollution is Colonialism explains how the pollution and plastics that Liboiron and colleagues study doesn’t begin in a factory or even within industrial systems. Rather, as Liboiron lays out, the ultimate source of pollution is the violent and ongoing colonial systems of land relations on which Indigenous land was presumed available for the extraction of so-called resources and industrial feedstocks; for the construction of factories; and for the presumed assimilation and storage of wastes. But, for Liboiron, science, including the environmental sciences, a field in which Liboiron has also made notable scientific, theoretical and methodological contributions —they were recently nominated by their peers to the Royal Society of Canada— can also enact, enable and reproduce these same relations, however well-intentioned or passionate its practitioners may be. Pollution science, as the book makes clear, can both harbor and channel colonial norms and practices, too, which in turn shapes how science and regulators see pollution, or don’t, and how they permit or otherwise bureaucratically sanction the use of the environment as a receptacle for pollution, in the process advancing the ongoing colonial project and metering out further harm. Pollution is Colonialism is an engaging, generative read, compact in length, but expansive in insight. Written with wit, intellectual generosity and in a wholly exciting format despite its academic credentials–one in which the footnotes are as readable and thought-provoking and essential as the body of the book itself. [end of addendum] ___________________________ The Oxford English Dictionary contains some surprisingly archaic definitions. One now obsolete use is ejaculation without intercourse, as can sometimes embarrass sleeping, pubescent boys. Another is ‘the desecration of that which is sacred.’ Milton’s Paradise Lost (published in 1667), for example, contains one such reference to the defilement, or pollution, of a temple. The idea of pollution being a material or molecular impurity emerged later, and as industrialisation proceeded. Slag piles and emissions and effluent were visible in new ways, produced in novel qualities, and contained —especially after the invention of coal-tar chemicals in the mid 19th century— new molecules and mixtures. The anthropologist Mary Douglas argued in her 1966 book Purity and Danger that the meaning of pollution varies by context, which is a way of saying social processes assign pollution its meaning. To say something is a pollutant, for Douglas, is to determine that some object or bit of matter is ‘out of place.’ But how those boundaries are drawn, and who determines what should be where, is wrapped up in notions of order, purity, and what constitutes a good society. This sets us up to look for the social story carried by concepts like ‘pollution.’ Today, technical definitions hold sway. They vary by policy and are determined by rational/scientific processes, and in relation to another concept: contamination. There’s a lot of muddled confusion around this term, too, as casual use often treats them as interchangeable. Technically speaking, contamination is matter out of place, but at levels not considered harmful to health or biological systems. Pollution is contamination that has crossed some pre-determined threshold: it is matter out of place and in harmful quantities. That sounds straightforward. But look under the hood and one sees several assumptions driving this definition. First is that only science and scientists can define harm, and thereby pollution. Everything outside that lens or beyond what that lens can ‘see,’ often gets dismissed. This issue plays out in several of the books I recommend here. “What constitutes ‘harm’? Is it social or is it purely biological? And, even within the biological realm, is harm death? Or more subtle than that: effects that show up in fertility and neurodevelopment or metabolism? ” Second, what constitutes ‘harm’ in the first place? Is it social or is it purely biological? And, even within the biological realm, is harm death? Or more subtle than that: effects that show up in fertility and neurodevelopment or metabolism? Who makes this determination? And what happens when scientific research advances new understandings of harm, as has been the case with toxicology? Over recent decades, the once unquestioned pillar of toxicological reasoning —‘the dose makes the poison’— has been complicated by a new body of research on low-dose exposures. And further, ‘the timing makes the poison’ too, meaning there are certain periods during human development in which even trace level exposures can be consequential. Both upend how to set a threshold, how to define ‘harm,’ and by extension, how to define ‘pollution,’ and thereby what to do about it. My favourite scholar to read on this is Max Liboiron , who writes about these categories and how plastics, as one type of pollutant, further muddies the definitional waters over what is a pollutant and what counts as harm. That nature even has a ‘critical threshold’ or ‘carrying capacity,’ is itself— as Liboiron has written — another assumption. Fascinatingly, ‘carrying capacity’ is a concept, like the notion of ‘ risk ,’ that comes to environmental health science and policy from the shipping industry of centuries past, which calculated how much cargo a ship could transport for the purpose of levying trade duties. ‘Nature as cargo hold’ is a powerful metaphor for how governance structures approached the regulation of industry and its waste stream. It makes one think about other metaphors that might have enabled different definitions of pollution and different regulatory approaches. As for alternative metaphors, that’s a fascinating question, and one I haven’t considered before. Were we to stick with economic metaphors lending or borrowing comes to mind. I can see pros and cons to thinking this way. Borrowing has a built-in ethic, one that is popularly understood: What is borrowed must be returned, preferably in the same or better condition. But nature-as-on-loan, as borrowed from the future, upholds similar assumptions that (a) nature is for human use, and (b) that it is owned, though not by us, by some yet-born generation. I’m inclined to keep searching, to seek metaphors beyond economics, however much a sharing and lending economy sounds lovely on its face. I’m reminded that the biologist and activist Sandra Steingraber has pointed out that modern industry exists within two ‘eco’ systems: the economy and also ecology. Both, she points out, derive from the same Greek root, oikos , meaning house. So, economy is the management of the home, and ecology, its study. Yet, as concepts, they exist far from each other, and even made to seem at odds. It is instructive to think about why, given how much a healthy economy depends on a well-functioning ecosystem, and how much profit has depended on waste being relatively cheap, if not free, to offload. For example, factories were built alongside rivers for power, yes, but also as conduits to flush effluent ‘away.’ And this thing that emits waste—the factory, also called a ‘plant’—sits at the interface of these systems, taking in natural resources, metabolising them, and then putting out wonderfully useful, even lifesaving, goods and also wastes of consequence to biology, ecology and possibly evolution. But let’s pause on this for a second: could there be an ecological metaphor —plant! — right in the centre of our economies? I’ve been working on this question for a couple years now — how we came to call factories plants. And I don’t yet have an answer, or at least one that sufficiently satisfies my curiosity. ‘Plant’ might be a remnant of a now dated use of the word, which is the layout or plans for a structure or building. But it is hard to resist the possibility that these houses of production bear some deeper connection to ecology — if only in metaphor. Returning to your question, can this metaphor be productively mined for how to design industry so that we may dwell and thrive and produce useful things, all within an ecological system? This means that emissions/effluent from one system would feed into the next, and the next, and the next, at some point traveling in a circle. The chemical and plastics industries feeds on the waste products of fossil fuel refinement, first coal tar, then oil, and increasingly the byproducts of gas extraction. I suppose that’s a start. But this system isn’t closed, as the scientist Barry Commoner pointed out in the 1970s. It’s still linear. There’s an end, an endpoint. And that end remains: waste, by-products, contaminants, pollutants. All of this makes me think of story that the writer and chemist Primo Levi tells about trees. During World War Two, Levi was imprisoned at Auschwitz, and because of his training in chemistry, forced to work in the laboratories at the nearby BunaWorks, a massive industrial complex run by IG Farben that made synthetic rubber from coal-tar for the German Army. There, Levi dreamt of trees. To him, trees were the original chemical factory. They inhaled carbon dioxide and exhaled oxygen, all the while absorbing light and reshuffling atoms of carbon. But trees worked carbon with a quiet, elegant chemistry that is “refined, minute, and quick-witted.” Nothing like the ‘plant’—concrete and metal, roar and soot, belch and foul — where Levi laboured. Levi’s tree is an object lesson, or perhaps an ideal for how to make energy and useful materials while allowing carbon to cycle without too much interference. And really human handling of carbon accounts for a good portion of pollution and environmental problems today. Climate change, plastics and persistent organic (or carbon-based) pollutants all share a common origin in the human relationship to carbon. This, too, is another point that Steingraber makes, in this case in her book Living Downstream, and it brings the conversation back around to trees. Think, she says, of climate change and poisoning of the biosphere by things like persistent organic pollutants , or POPs, and plastics as trunks of the same tree, a tree with roots in the fossil fuels underfoot."