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This book examines the relationship between environmental justice and citizen science, focusing on enduring issues and new challenges in a post-truth age. Debates over science, facts, and values have always been pivotal within environmental justice struggles. For decades, environmental justice activists have campaigned against the misuses of science, while at the same time engaging in community-led citizen science. However, post-truth politics has threatened science itself. This book makes the case for the importance of science, knowledge, and data that are produced by and for ordinary people living with environmental risks and hazards. The international, interdisciplinary contributions range from grassroots environmental justice struggles in American hog country and contaminated indigenous communities, to local environmental controversies in Spain and China, to questions about “knowledge justice,” citizenship, participation, and data in citizen science surrounding toxicity. The book features inspiring studies of community-based participatory environmental health and justice research; different ways of sensing, witnessing, and interpreting environmental injustice; political strategies for seeking environmental justice; and ways of expanding the concepts and forms of engagement of citizen science around the world. While the book will be of critical interest to specialists in social and environmental sciences, it will also be accessible to graduate and postgraduate audiences. More broadly, the book will appeal to members of the public interested in social justice issues, as well as community members who are thinking about participating in citizen science and activism. Toxic Truths includes distinguished contributing authors in the field of environmental justice, alongside cutting-edge research from emerging scholars and community activists.
1 Toxic trespass: Science, activism, and policy concerning chemicals in our bodies Phil Brown, Vanessa De La Rosa, and Alissa Cordner Exposure to chemical trespassers is ubiquitous for all people, with a daily onslaught of air particulates from factories and power plants, parabens in personal care products, phthalates and bisphenol (BPA) in consumer products, flame retardants in furniture, radiation from uranium mine tailings, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) in fish and marine mammals, and trichloroethylene (TCE) from common industrial usage. The US Centers for
In this mixture of memoir, reflection, and scholarship, the author details how, during a time of suffering, James Baldwin and singer Celia Cruz helped him understand his tense relationship with his toxic paternal grandparents and celebrate the reclamation of his stifled Mexican heritage.
Studies of early modern dress frequently focus on its connection with status and identity, overlooking clothing’s primary function, namely to protect the body and promote good health. The daily processes of dressing and undressing carried numerous considerations: for example, were vital areas of the body sufficiently covered, in the correct fabrics and colours, in order to maintain an ideal body temperature? The health benefits of clothing were countered by the many dangers it carried, such as toxic dyes, garments that were either too tight or voluminous, or harboured dirt and diseases that could infect the body. This article draws on medical treatises and health manuals printed and read in Italy and England, as well as personal correspondence and diaries, contextualised with visual evidence of the styles described. It builds on the current, wider interest in preventative medicine, humoral theory, health and the body in the early modern period by focusing in depth on the role of clothing within these debates.
mostly on the authors themselves. I tried to avoid that as much as I could, despite a first-person narrative format. I was very wary of the risk of nostalgia and purged my book of that as best I could. At the same time, I wanted to place in the foreground the respect I had for the Somali people, as well as exposing readers to the pervasive, toxic hypermasculinity that so defined the situation and my own interactions. It was a fine line to tread. I also did not want the extraordinary level of positive human endeavour to be lost from the story. I would hope the book does
disability-adjusted life years caused by air pollution in 2010 was 7.6 per cent of all DALYs lost, higher than all twelve other risk factors, including malnutrition, smoking and high blood pressure. The damage to the planet’s physical environment is worsening, and the causes responsible, including urban growth, energy production, primary and secondary industrialised processes and the global spread of toxic chemicals, are increasing, not abating ( Landrigan et al
5 The auger: A tool of environmental justice in Ecuadorian toxic tours Amelia Fiske The well platform is quiet in the afternoon heat of the Amazon. Two school- aged children in matching uniforms wander across the empty dirt rectangle carved out of the forest on their way home. I am with a group of photographers, on a “Toxic Tour” to document the pollution left in the soil after two decades of extraction by the Texaco Company1 in Ecuador. Although Texaco left the country in the 1990s, oil extraction has since continued with the state and other foreign companies
Dregs Arsenic – Becky Alexis-Martin Victorian Manchester was blighted by a spectrum of industrial contaminants, and arsenic was one of the more insidious and abundant. Copper arsenite was used to create a verdant pigment known as Scheele’s Green, first made in 1775. This vivid shade epitomised Victorian stylistic sensibilities, colouring everything from wallpaper to clothing and blancmange. However, these cheerful emerald walls concealed a major public health threat. Over time, vapours and inhalable fragments of this toxic tincture found their way inside the
year, defining it as: “denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” Two years later, the OED’s word of the year was toxic, chosen because of the “the sheer scope of its a pplication … in an array of contexts, both in its literal and more metaphorical senses.” For all of these worrying trends, it is tempting to make proclamations about imminent global catastrophe and the novelty of our toxic, post-truth times. However, the Brave New World has been heralded for decades
.g. focusing on individual sugar consumption). This chapter interrogates the solidified wrongness of sugar, arguing that the treatment of the problem of sugar as self-evident gives misplaced singularity to entangled multiple realities, commitments and agendas. I begin by setting out two key discourses of sugar’s wrongness that, superficially at least, are irreconcilable: (1) sugar as empty; and (2) sugar as toxic. The chapter argues that while the discourse of sugar as empty rests on received wisdoms that require little