Synthetic Planet: Chemicals, Politics, and the Hazards of Modern Life (review)

Synthetic Planet is an excellent contribution to environmental studies and also to science and technology studies. Monica Casper's volume focuses on the politics of industrial chemicals, taking seriously the contexts and materialities that allow these to be so productive of both positive and negative effects. Dioxin, for example, is described (1) in the context of Japan's waste-management crisis; (2) in a case of environmental injustice in the United States; and (3) as an unintended and unwanted component of Agent Orange. The attention to industrial chemicals as very specific technoscientific artifacts is one reason this book will be of interest to readers of Technology and Culture. Its "follow the molecule" approach—which Casper casts as a critical extension of actor-network theory—integrates cultural, sociological, political-economic, and technical analyses. In the process, it draws out interesting and important contradictions in the way industrial chemicals, and the systems they are part of, work.

The introduction provides a useful overview of what "better living through chemistry" has looked like in practice, and in various literatures. Here, Casper also describes the questions that brought the book's several authors together and provided a framework. That framework works extremely well; the essays are empirically dense and analytically interesting, and they deepen political perspective. Diana Mincyte, for example, describes how a chemical plant in Lithuania was a means and symbol of post-Stalinist Sovietization. The Kedainiai plant was established in the late 1950s with the promise of industrializing and thus socializing Lithuania through a new mode of production—industrial chemistry—that was supposed to be inherently liberating because it required more mental than manual labor. It provided income for plant workers, farm workers, and a cadre of polytechnic- and university-trained chemical experts, and it was very profitable, generating enormous revenues and contributing to a 70 percent increase in agricultural productivity in the region. Ironically, the plant also became operative in resistance to the Soviet regime, not because citizens protested its toxic effects but because of the way it transformed the lives of people, giving them the money and desire for more industrial products than the Soviets could offer. As Mincyte elegantly writes, the "fertilizers produced at the Kedainiai chemical plant generated a powerful chain reaction in the Soviet economy that eventually eroded the system. . . . The fruits of the fertilized fields did not nourish the contentment of workers in the Soviet socialist economy as much as it infected them with the germ of consumerist desires."

Contradictions are also at the core of many other accounts in this book. Peter Wynn Kirby describes how concern about inadequate landfill capacity in Japan drives people to want "burnables" instead of plastics, with the potential to exacerbate both dioxin hazards from incinerations and widespread crises in Southeast Asian rainforests. Kirby also writes of the way environmental threats operate in a context still shaped by the ideal of Japan as an agrarian society—an ideal that he attributes more to the creativity of an early Japanese ethnologist than to real circumstance. What Kirby suggests is the challenge of recognizing (in a psychoanalytic sense, I would say, though Kirby does not) an environmental threat in a context in which nihonjinron—a "pseudo-scholarly genre of conservative, essentialist Japanese writing" (literally "discourses on the Japanese")—still casts Japanese people as uniquely in harmony with nature, and Japanese nature as uniquely benevolent and beautiful.

The contradiction dealt with by Edward Woodhouse is perhaps most challenging, because it calls upon readers to rethink habits of directing analytic and political attention at the "end of the pipe," where industrial chemicals have their insidious effect. This assumes that industrial chemistry is as it must be, and that our job is to mop up its effects and excesses. Woodhouse turns this assumption on its head with a quick review of how industrial chemistry came to be as it is, and with a wonderfully encouraging case study of work done...