A Trainload of Neoliberal ShitPresenter: Graham Mooney, Associate Professor, Department of the History of Medicine, Johns Hopkins University This paper is about the political, environmental, and material aspects of human waste disposal in modern America. It reconstructs the ill-fated, two-month, 3,000-mile return journey in 1989 of a 63-car freight train containing more than 4,000 tons of sludge, which traveled from a waste-water treatment plant in Baltimore, Maryland to Louisiana’s “Chemical Corridor” and back again. The train — which a gleeful media dubbed the “Baltimore Poo-Poo Choo-Choo” — became something of a human interest news story as it sought to dump its smelly, drippy load in Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana. This case study illustrates many issues that are relevant to the themes of this conference: the scalar political geographies of environmental regulation as human waste was (and still is) transported across state lines; the racial injustices and social inequalities of “toxic imperialism” (Walker, 2012); the kinds of social and cultural conceptualizations of human waste that need to be present to allow these excremental injustices to become commonplace; and the formations of resistance to corporate and governmental power that can arise in the face of such injustices. Echoing Julie Sze’s approach in Noxious New York (2007), the focus of this contribution will be on how treated human waste became neoliberalized; that is, how Baltimoreans’ shit became a marketable commodity in the late 20th century and how that value was exploited through the intensified marketization of local government service contracts. The Baltimore Poo-Poo Choo-Choo was not simply the result of benign infrastructural neglect. Rather, the train’s travails revealed the precariousness of the neoliberal model whereby the export and disposal of the city’s human waste had been handed to the lowest bidder and direct responsibility for that waste was divested from the city government. The incident exposed the city to national ridicule, a risk that city government sought to mitigate by reframing the episode as a “Biosolids Crisis” and realigning its approach to the political economy of shit.
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Global Waste (Displacement) LawPresenter: Olivier Barsalou, Professor, Law Department; Director, Centre d’études sur le droit international et la mondialisation (CEDIM), Université du Québec à Montréal(Université du Québec à Montréal) Waste (and all the concepts that are part of this semantic field such as pollution, trash, etc.) is ubiquitous. Yet, waste remains invisible in international legal scholarship. The latter conceives of waste as a problem in need of juridical and technical solutions. To that end, waste is generally divided into neat technical and juridical categories (such as nuclear waste, toxic waste, CO2 etc.) each implying a specific set of practices and techniques related to the manipulation, transportation, treatment, and elimination of the said waste. However, this vocabulary inhibits any politicization of waste and only contributes to thickening the mystery of global waste governance. Moreover, international legal scholarship avoids questioning the global political economy of waste which rests largely dependent on a legal architecture (think of the private contracts, trade agreements, and inter-modal transportation systems) that organizes and secures the circulation of waste around the globe. Finally, this same literature remains silent about the relations of production and consumption at the root of the global waste crisis. In other words, waste is a non-object of international law. Yet, this proposal seeks to suggest otherwise. This proposal argues that international law must be understood both as a strategy and a technique of waste displacement thereby facilitating the globalization of waste. Displacement is the key concept here because waste, notwithstanding its nature, cannot be totally eliminated: it can be recycled, buried, charred, moved, or dispersed. However, it never disappears. It can only be displaced or transformed. This displacement operates on three distinct levels: legal, geographical, and economical. International law is a technique of waste displacement to the extent that it provides a repertoire, a vocabulary, and resources to displace waste legally (through legal (re-)qualification), geographically (from the site of production to the site of treatment), and economically (the devalorised waste becomes a revalorised resource). International law is also a strategy of waste displacement to the extent that it can be mobilized by various public and private actors engaged in global waste management but pursuing divergent objectives (criminal, environmental, economical, etc.). This proposal pursues three objectives. First, it seeks to analyze the role that international law plays in the global waste management dispositif and how it contributes to global environmental unequal exchanges. Secondly, from the perspective of international legal theory, this proposal aims to go beyond debates on the institutional and normative fragmentation of international law: that public international law is subdivided into a multitude of self-referential normative regimes (international environmental law, international economic law, law of the sea, etc.) acting independently and often contradicting each other. Preliminary inquiries carried out for this research tends to suggest otherwise. Waste plays a unifying role: by circulating from one international legal regime that does not valorize waste (let’s say international environmental law) to another that valorizes it (let’s say international economic law), waste reconnects these different legal regimes into a relatively coherent legal architecture destined to displace and, ultimately, globalize waste. Finally, this research understands international law as a set of norms, institutions, practices, and discourses whose primary mandate is to manage and, ideally, to externalize waste. However, on a finite earth, externalization can only be displacement. |
Underwater Munitions: Military Pollution and the Legacies of DisposalPresenter: Alex Souchen, AMS Postdoctoral Fellow, Frost Centre for Canadian Studies and Indigenous Studies, Trent University During World War II, Allied war factories produced more than 60 billion rounds of ammunition, bombs, and shells. However, when the war ended in 1945, not all of this ordnance was expended or needed for postwar operations, while the bulk of captured enemy weapons added to the surpluses accumulating around the world. Victory triggered a global “disposal problem” that the Allies addressed by dumping hundreds of millions of tons of ordnance into the oceans. Drawing from my on-going research into the history of munitions disposal, my paper explores the environmental impact and human health risks associated with underwater munitions. It will focus on three related topics. First, it profiles the environmental ethics of Allied leaders to explain why they created policies that intentionally polluted the oceans for disposal purposes. This will also demonstrate the global scale of dumping operations. Second, the paper discusses the evolving ecological challenges and health risks. Corroded bombs can spontaneously detonate or leach toxic chemicals and carcinogens into the food chain. Furthermore, underwater munitions threaten the offshore economy and energy industries, while fishermen and tourists are frequently injured by encounters with mustard gas and incendiaries. Discarding munitions in the oceans never eliminated their deadly nature; instead it delayed and dispersed the violence across time and space. Finally, my paper connects the military’s disposal policies and the hazardous nature of underwater munitions to wider themes in the field of Discard Studies. It offers historical perspectives on the evolution of remediation efforts, management strategies, environmental activism, and the socio- economic costs of military pollution. Keywords: munitions disposal; war junk; underwater munitions; waste regimes; World War II |
Speculative Ecologies and Politics: Microplastics, TNT and Other Pollutants in the SeaPresenters: Sven Bergmann, Cultural Anthropology, Science and Technology Studies (STS), German Maritime Museum and Philipp Grassel ,German Maritime Museum The use of the seas as dumping grounds for the disposal of various types of waste from the 20th century to the present is a serious environmental problem. The ocean contains, for example, munitions from the world wars, radioactive waste or persistent organic pollutants (POPs). In recent years, plastic in the ocean has also received a great deal of media attention, partly because of fears that it might appear in human food webs. Anthropogenic influences on the sea have thus become part of marine naturalcultural environments and challenge modern concepts of cleaning and separation. Based on my own ethnographic research on (micro)plastics in the environment and the transdisciplinary EU Interreg project “North Sea Wrecks” on (corroding) ammunition waste in the North Sea, I will discuss the similarities and contrasts of these emerging scientific objects, which are characterized by a specific persistence, temporality and relation with the marine environment. Although these research objects seem to be quite different, both can be discussed as a form of “slow violence” (Nixon). Slow violence is often difficult to detect because, as Heather Davis (2015, 234) writes, “the relationship between cause and effect often appears much later, or (…) in completely different organisms”. Therefore, studies on the contamination and long-term effects of environmental pollution need to address more indeterminable and speculative effects. It is precisely for this reason that it is complicated – but not impossible – to address these phenomena from the perspective of cultural anthropology and STS regarding questions of environmental justice, (post-)colonial responsibility and a critique of prevailing modes of production and governmentality. Keywords: marine pollution, (micro)plastics, ammunition (war waste), uncertainty, naturecultures |
Deconstructing Garbage in the Weak Recycling Waste Regime: Resistance through Radical Reframing in SeattlePresenter: Lily Baum Pollans, Assistant Professor of Urban Policy and Planning, Hunter College In the mid-twentieth century, packaging and manufacturing industries reshaped the public’s understanding of trash. Carefully crafted corporate messaging stifled attempts to regulate disposables and convinced people and policy-makers that litter could only be prevented by responsible consumer behavior. In the 1980s the same corporations encouraged municipalities to develop recycling programs to ease consumers’ environmental anxieties. These campaigns, still active today, successfully pushed the fiscal costs of disposability onto individuals and municipalities and the environmental costs onto everyone. Cooperation between corporate interests and municipal programming is integral to the production of what I call, following Zsuzsa Gille, a “weak recycling waste regime.” The regime, enacted through efficient disposal and limited municipal recycling, ensures that the public remains responsible for the consequences of disposability, and prevents upstream regulation. As the climate emergency drives municipalities to reconsider service provision, cities are resisting the regime through zero waste and other initiatives. But some cities have actually been doing this for a generation. In this paper, a piece of a larger project called Resisting Garbage: A Theory of Urban Progress, I examine the recent history of waste management in Seattle. Seattle has actively resisted the weak recycling waste regime through a series of institutional transformations that began in the 1980s. The paper traces key changes—a redefinition of garbage, new roles for citizens and state vis-à-vis discards, and a new set of waste governing institutions—and theorizes what transformative approaches to waste management look like. Keywords: municipal waste management, waste regimes, waste governance, Zero Waste, Seattle |