Article

Environmental History Issue 13 No 4 (October 2008)

Jody A. Roberts and Nancy Langston

Toxic bodies/toxic environments: an interdisciplinary FORUM

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NEW TECHNOLOGIES AND METHODS for the detection of toxins, particularly endocrine disruptors, have drawn increasing attention to the pervasive and persistent presence of synthetic chemicals in our lives. Some of these tests, such as biomonitoring and body-burden analyses, highlight that we not only experience our environment in obvious ways, but that we also are united with it at the molecular level. Trace chemicals found in the air, water, and soil are now being detected within us. The very chemical composition of our bodies is being altered in ways that reflect the transformations of our everyday environments.

       Chemicals occupy a position along the border between the "natural" and "cultural" worlds. Industrial chemicals, in particular, prove difficult to categorize. They are artifacts of an industrial society brought into being within a highly specific cultural infrastructure. And yet they increasingly occupy a part of the natural world—and as persistent chemicals, many of them will continue to be a part of the world far into the future, beyond the point of remembering their origins as artificial or synthetic.

       These landscapes, which now contain the various molecular traces of the industrialized world, are not simply environments that can be avoided—as we might once have tried with "contaminated" spaces like those around Chernobyl. These spaces are occupied by people, among others. They are landscapes of life, and therefore "landscapes of exposure." 1 Gregg Mitman, Michelle Murphy, and Christopher Sellers's collection, Landscapes of Exposure: Knowledge and Illness in Modern Environment, brought together the disparate threads of knowledge-making practices; knowledge in and of environments; and perceptions of health, illness, and disease. The collection emphasized the need to grapple with scale, materiality, and uncertainty—concepts that provide the bedrock for much of what follows in this forum.

       In March 2007, the American Society for Environmental History (with funding from the National Science Foundation) brought together environmental scientists, historians of science, science studies scholars, and environmental historians to discuss the new chemical bodies of the twenty-first century. The workshop participants, many of whom contributed to Landscapes of Exposure, addressed the uncertainty that surrounds the fact that organisms of all types, kinds, and geographies—including but certainly not limited to humans—find themselves composed of a cadre of chemicals heretofore unknown to the planet. The problems of toxins in the environment are now inseparable from the issue of toxins in us.

       This special forum in Environmental History continues that lively discussion. In these brief reflection essays, sciences studies scholars, historians of science, and environmental historians provide perspective on the failures of existing toxicological frameworks. While disciplines, topics, and actors differ, there is a surprising amount of cohesion among these works. Four main themes emerge: the uncertainty of knowledge, the place of knowledge production, the politics of dealing with environments and bodies, and the historical roots of current toxicological frameworks. For at least the last three decades, historians and social scientists have worked to uncover the ways in which scientific knowledge is constructed. But in dealing with the crisscrossing issues of environmental pollution, human and nonhuman exposure, and toxicity, the problem is not necessarily with what we know, but with all that remains unknown. We don't often think about this shadow space to our collected knowledge—at least not in those terms. We speak, instead, of uncertainty. Uncertainty implies an aspect of failure: we tried to understand, but certainty unfortunately eludes us. The concept of uncertainty, then, raises questions about the politics of neutrality.

       Sometimes the difference between what we know and don't know is simply a matter of asking the right questions. As Michael Egan recounts in his stories on the presence of mercury in the environment and in bodies, mercury and its more potent organic version, methylmercury, were already widespread in much of the industrial world long before anyone ever bothered to look. While countries such as the United States claimed that they did not have a mercury pollution problem, authorities found themselves making an abrupt about-face after actually looking for it in the nation's waterways. What had seemed like an isolated incident in Minamata, Japan, suddenly became one case in a larger, more widespread public health dilemma.

       When a regulatory agency identifies scientific uncertainty about the effects of a particular chemical, the typical response is to call for "more research." Yet as Scott Frickel argues in his essay, that strategy has clear political outcomes. What if we spoke not of uncertainty, but instead of "knowledge gaps" or "lost knowledge," as Scott Frickel does in his essay "On Missing New Orleans"—how would this change our perspective on what it is we know and don't know about our environments, our bodies, and the transformations each are undergoing?

       Frickel's essay explores the ways in which ignorance and nonknowledge are actively produced in post-Katrina New Orleans. Frickel highlights the ways in which the tools used to examine the construction of knowledge also can be used to probe the knowledge gaps that coexist alongside the vast expanses of what we claim to know. By transitioning from uncertainty to the "institutionalization of ignorance," Frickel reinserts politics back into the picture, and the collective "we" can no longer hide behind the veil of uncertainty. Making the nonproduction of knowledge visible and hence political allows us to explore the ways in which information is kept out of reach by the efforts made not to produce it in the first place. 2

       Another important theme that highlights the ways in which land and bodies are united echoes the work that historians of environments and sciences have pursued for years: the transitions between labs and fields as sites for investigation. 3 Labs are neat, they are clean, and they are orderly. The field, the lab's antithesis, is messy, complicated, and chaotic. Understanding how the cultivated practical knowledge of the laboratory interacts with the dynamic space of the outside world requires an appreciation for the ways in which the artifacts and knowledges that link these places circulate. 4

       In Linda Nash's essay, the circulating artifacts are the bodies of the farm workers. Moving across fields and spaces, their bodies resist the reduction that lab-based science requires for understanding toxicity. Precisely because their bodies circulate, they also accumulate—traces of the specific chemicals applied in each field find their way into the farm workers' bodies. As Fritz Davis points out in his essay, modern toxicology has struggled with calculating effects of multiple chemical exposures. Experimental researchers find it far simpler to focus on the dose-response mechanism for one chemical at a time. But bodies in the field don't have just one chemical in them at a time; they are multiply exposed. Accounting for the synergistic effects of these chemicals presents a challenge to the lab, but mirrors reality in nature.

       The Union Carbide methylisocyanate release in Bhopal, India, in 1984 that killed thousands in the first few hours and potentially scores of thousands more since then highlighted the ways in which bodies, environments, and the politics of the local and global can merge at a single point in time and space. The event is widely acknowledged as the worst industrial disaster in history. And yet, as the residents of Institute, West Virginia—where Bhopal's sister plant was located—as well as those of fence line communities throughout the United States quickly realized, releases don't have to emerge out of a single moment to be catastrophic. A slow constant poisoning of the air, water, and soil can lead to the same outcome, but without the dramatic effect. These realizations led to the creation of so-called "right to know" legislation—the right to know what's being produced next door, what's being released, and what to do when the alarm at the plant sounds.

       Right-to-know legislation is premised on the idea that indeed someone does know, and ought to be required to share that knowledge. But as Barbara Allen points out in her essay, it's easy to subvert right to know by simply preventing anyone from knowing at all. That is, the nonproduction of knowledge works to disrupt the fundamental flows of information that provide the basis for regulatory oversight (at least in the United States). She notes two ways in particular that this occurs: through the active nonproduction of knowledge related to exposure and health, and through the removal of archival sources, particularly the recent attempt by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to close libraries containing several decades worth of environmental health information. 5

       The attempted closing of the EPA libraries presents a more obvious example of the destruction of knowledge—one that should alarm historians and activists alike. The libraries are an essential tool for understanding what we know as well as what we don't know and for motivating action on the part of communities and governments alike (as Allen, Egan, Frickel, and Nash all highlight). Advocacy efforts by the American Society for Environmental History, the Society for Environmental Journalists, and the American Library Association helped persuade Congress to order a halt to the library closures in December 2007. The protection not only of right to know but the ability to know is what links environmental history with ecology, public health workers, citizen groups, and regulators alike. Increased public awareness of exposures has always been a driving impetus in changing and modifying regulatory policies.

       Perhaps the most important contribution, and one most intimately tied to the readers of this journal, involves our efforts to tease out the origins of the problems now emerging that have once again highlighted the intimate links between bodies and their environments. Understanding the historical contingencies that have made the present moment what it is allows us to think creatively about how things could have been, and can be different. While all of the contributors to this forum have historical roots, three in particular present very different perspectives on the construction of the modern landscape of exposure.

       The chemical plasticizer bisphenol-A (or BPA) has begun to enter the common vernacular. But as Sarah Vogel demonstrates in her essay, our knowledge of the toxicity of the chemical has a long, if underappreciated history. Chemists working furiously in the wake of World War II sought to capitalize and profit from the widespread acceptance of synthetics into our lives. Plastics would be the modern marvel of the twentieth century. At the same time, the chemistry behind plastics progressed with little understanding of the consequences. Drawing on the reflections of the sixteenth century proto-toxicologist Paracelsus, plastics chemists believed that the "dose makes the poison." But the story of BPA is a challenge to that notion, and to that history. Vogel notes that even in its early years, BPA already exhibited the properties that have now made it the center of scientific and regulatory controversy. Teasing apart these intertwined histories is creating a space for moving from the "dose makes the poison" to the "timing makes the poison," which in turn is opening up possibilities for new mergers of toxicology and regulation.

       While Vogel's essay traces the development of a specific compound through the changing terrain of toxicology, Nash and Frederick Davis look back even further, casting their gaze onto fields of study that have come to dominate the toxicological terrain that unites bodies and environments. Nash argues that modern concepts about health and environment emerged from the germ-theory of health and bacteriology, while in his essay, Davis sees the history running through pharmacology (which in any case would help us link back to Paracelsus). Davis argues that toxicology developed from pharmacology and chemistry, newly empowered in the wake of the world wars and armed with new understandings about chemicals and their designed and accidental effects on organisms of all types. Nash's history offers us a narrative that helps to explain why causal mechanisms have remained so important in current toxicology, despite the fact that they are almost always elusive. Both Nash and Davis contribute to a genealogy of contemporary toxicological sciences, whether the focus is on cancer in mice or cancer in humans; pesticides in plants or in the bodies of farm laborers.

       While the essays in this forum cover much new territory, the overlap is not always neat. Tensions exist, for instance, in the ways in which the authors view the historical roots of our current situation. Where Davis sees a linear progression from wartime chemistry to toxicology, Nash sees a convergence of theories and practices giving rise to a situation where only certain types of knowledge are possible. The differences may seem trivial at first, but they have serious implications if we view untangling the past as an important precursor for creating the future.

       Indeed, understanding how these current problems will unfold into the future leads to further friction. Take, for instance, the essays by Frickel, Michelle Murphy, and Arthur Daemmrich. All three discuss the possible implications of more widespread use and adoption of biomonitoring data, but they see the possible outcomes of the creation of this information in quite different ways. For Frickel, concerned about nonknowledge production as much as knowledge production, biomonitoring might potentially be used to further highlight environmental injustices and the links among landscapes, exposures, and health. But this will only happen if the tool is used properly: that is, if users ask the right questions and ensure the flow of information to those who can use it.

       Murphy explores the possible "molecularization of life" involved in biomonitoring, questioning the individualization of risks that follow efforts to detail synthetic chemicals inside individual bodies. With the emergence of what she calls a chemical regime of living, what new molecular relations might be formed? Biomonitoring has the potential to lead to social change, but it also has the potential to further privatize risk and lead to "boutique" medicine for the privileged.

       Daemmrich has a radically different view of the future of biomonitoring. For Daemmrich, as biomonitoring studies highlight the extent of chemical contamination in the public writ large, risk will become a concept increasingly associated with the masses, generally, and with affluence, more particularly. That is, if exposure increases with consumption of everyday products, then does it follow that those who consume more are at greater risk? Daemmrich refers to this as a democratization of risk since the chemical traces can now be found in nearly everyone. If true, what will this situation mean for environmental justice advocates whose primary argument has always been one of unevenly distributed risk? Or, as Frickel responds, is this a red herring, distracting us from the lived experience of those still positioned along the fence lines of the industrial refineries? The outcome is unclear, but it is safe to say that the relationships between environment, health, justice, and power are being redefined as we come to a different understanding of our chemical selves in this chemical world.

THE ESSAYS IN THIS FORUM speak many languages, but with common voice they call upon historians to provide their skills in uncovering a history of the present. While the history itself needs to be told, there is a much larger, more important need to bring these stories to light. Nash sums it up best in the conclusion of her essay: "Rather than hoping that increased scientific knowledge will—like some deus ex machina—reveal the solutions to contemporary problems, we might instead insist upon the need to consider more critically the cultural models and historical assumptions that guide contemporary regulatory policy." Our hope is that this forum will help catalyze such an effort by enrolling historians in a project that at once elucidates the past while working to reconfigure the future.

 

Jody A. Roberts is Environmental History and Policy program manager at the Chemical Heritage Foundation's Center for Contemporary History and Policy in Philadelphia. Nancy Langston is professor in the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies and the Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has recently completed an environmental history of endocrine disruptors, titled Toxic Bodies: Endocrine Disruptors and the Lessons of History, which is forthcoming from Yale.

 

NOTES

The authors thank the National Science Foundation for its generous support of both the workshop and this forum, the workshop participants and forum authors for their hard work, ASEH Executive Director Lisa Mighetto, for her logistical support, the editor of Environmental History, Mark Cioc, and the external reviewers for their thoughtful comments.

1  See Gregg Mitman, Michelle Murphy, and Christopher Sellers, eds., Landscapes of Exposure: Knowledge and Illness in Modern Environments, Osiris, vol. 19 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

2  A similar call was made by Peter Rogers, a Harvard University professor of environmental engineering, when a series of articles by the Associated Press drew attention to the presence of pharmaceutical agents in the nation's tap water. "I think the government and utilities are quite right to be very skittish about telling people their results. People will claim it's causing all sorts of problems. If I were a water utility, I would stop those measurements right away because if you measure something, it will get out, and people will overreact. I can just imagine a whole slew of law suits." See, for instance, "Water providers, researchers rarely release full test results," USA Today, March 10, 2008.

3  See, for example, Robert Kohler, Landscapes and Labscapes: Exploring the Lab-field Border in Biology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).

4  Bruno Latour, Pandora's Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), ch. 2.

5  For background on the EPA library closures and the ASEH resolution opposing these closures, see http://www.aseh.net/resources/advocacy/epa_resolution . For updates on Congressional action, see http://www.aseh.net/resources/advocacy/congress-epa .