Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self

3 Invisible Matters: The Sciences of Environmental Justice

Invisible Matters: The Sciences of Environmental Justice Three The waters of justice have been polluted. —Percival Everett, Watershed The Hawk’s Nest tunnel incident discussed in the previous chapter illustrates how racism can materialize across bodies and places. Most scholarly contestations of race since the 1980s have employed social constructionist arguments to demonstrate that race is a social, not biological category, forged within a history of economic and political oppression, not simply found “in nature.” Interrogating racism has, for the most part, meant shifting attention away from ostensible racial differences toward the social and political forces that have constructed these differences. It is useful to notice, for our purposes here, that these arguments divert attention from material bodies per se, toward the ideologies and discourses that constitute them.1 Environmental justice science, literature, and activism, however, must to some degree focus on actual bodies, especially as they are transformed by their encounters with places, substances, and forces. Departing from the incisive philosophical analyses of the vast superstructures that support racial oppression, environmental justice activism needs to be rather literal, demonstrating material connections between specific bodies in specific places. 62 | Bodily Natures Whereas the predominant academic theories of race have worked to undermine its ontological status via theories of social construction, environmental justice movements must produce or employ scientific data that track environmental hazards , placing a new sort of materiality at the forefront of many of these struggles. The emerging sciences of biomonitoring and the particular forms of environmental activism that they enable capture the biochemical interchanges between body and place, but they also recast the categories of race and class, which have been at the heart of environmental justice movements. This chapter explores the intersection of racially marked bodies, toxic environments , and the scientific mediation of knowledge within contemporary U.S. environmental justice activism and literature. Civil rights, affirmative action, and identity politics models of social justice—all of which assume that individuals are bounded, coherent entities—become profoundly altered by the recognition that human bodies, human health, and human rights are interconnected with the material, often toxic flows of particular places. Although Nikolas Rose, in The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity, does not discuss environmental justice movements, EJ movements do create, in his terms, “biological citizens” “from below”: Strategies for making up biological citizens “from above” tend to represent the science itself as unproblematic: they problematize the ways in which citizens misunderstand it. But these vectors “from below” pluralize biological and biomedical truth, introduce doubt and controversy, and relocate science in the fields of experience, politics, and capitalism. (142) Activists, as well as ordinary citizens, struggle for access to “biological and biomedical truth” that captures the material interrelations between people and places in forms of knowledge that will be accepted as persuasive evidence of systemic harm. As Ulrich Beck asserts, however, the risks of modernization are difficult—if not impossible—for individuals to apprehend without access to scientific technology or institutions.2 They require “the ‘sensory organs’ of science —theories, experiments, measuring instruments—in order to become visible or interpretable as hazards at all” (27; emphasis in original). Laypeople have contended with these difficulties by pirating scientific knowledges and developing their own scientific practices. Phil Brown, Giovanna Di Chiro, and Jason Coburn study the scientific practices of laypeople, terming the practitioners “popular epidemiologists” (Brown), “ordinary experts” (Di Chiro, “Local Actions, Global Visions”), and “street scientists” (Coburn). This “new species of ‘expert’” results, Di Chiro argues, from “the everyday struggles of people striving to understand and negotiate their needs and desires in efforts to lead a decent life” (“Local Actions , Global Visions” 210). Stephen R. Couch and Steve Kroll-Smith contend that environmental “groups and organizations are unhinging the languages of expertise from expert systems, invisible Mat ters | 63 . . . taking these attributes of expertise into their communal worlds” (385). They mark a significant shift that has occurred in which environmental movements no longer rely upon “a rhetoric of civil rights or environmental justice”: “they are also arming themselves with the lingual resources of toxicology, risk assessment , biomedicine, environmental impact inventories, nuclear engineering, and other instruments of reason” (384). As powerful as this sort of discursive contestation may be, however, many ordinary experts must first contend with the onto-epistemological shift effected by risk society, in which ordinary knowledges are rendered, to some extent, inadequate as the surrounding reality with which those knowledges have contended itself...