The Future of Ethics: Sustainability, Social Justice, and Religious Creativity

Chapter Five: Toxic Wombs and the Ecology of Justice

◆ 190 ◆ CHAPTER FIVE Toxic Wombs and the Ecology of Justice ✦ The whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now, and not only the creation but we ourselves . . . who wait for the redemption of our bodies. (Rom 8:22–3) New Haven, the city that my child breathes and drinks, is an “environmental justice community.” That state designation means that its high levels of poverty and its history of racial discrimination require any action that would lead to further toxic exposures to meet extra legal review. Already this small city hosts two interstates, two rail lines, an oil port, a sewage incinerator , two power generators, and many relics of heavy industry. It is not coincidental that a poorer and browner city bears disproportionate hazards of the energy, transportation, and waste disposal of the wealthiest state in the country. Living in New Haven means living in an environmental sacrifice zone, which means letting others use our bodies to run an industrial experiment. The last chapter showed how to integrate science and ethics in the management of wicked problems while criticizing adaptive management frameworks for their inattention to social power.This chapter focuses on a problem that is wicked in several senses. Environmental toxins prove difficult for science-based management because they involve complex uncertainties and because they involve unprecedented injustices. The complex uncertainty: every human body carries novel compounds that a few generations ago did not exist and whose risks remain unclear.We are all enfleshed in an unplanned biological experiment.The unprecedented injustices: that experiment runs more intensely in poorer and browner bodies.While exposure is pervasive because toxins disperse through ecological flows, it is also uneven, because ecological flows are shaped by social power. Toxic Wombs and the Ecology of Justice 191 The chemical experiment with the human body is a microcosm of the broader human experiment with earth. As tides of novel compounds circulate through ecological systems, they begin to remake the womb of life on earth, with uncertain influences on human health, evolutionary processes , and ecological systems.The United States alone produces trillions of pounds of some 80,000 chemicals, including 5,400 compounds that are each produced in quantities over 10,000 pounds per year.1 The US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) currently tracks only about 150 chemicals. Within theAmerican regulatory regime, chemicals are considered safe until proven otherwise—and proof is an arduous and expensive undertaking, as political as it is scientific. Of the 150 it does track, the CDC finds that every human body inhabiting the United States bears most of them,including persistent organic pollutants such as dioxins and pesticides.2 What that means for our health or earth’s future we do not know. From our ignorance about cumulative and combinatorial exposures and the long-term impact on ecological systems, writes risk expert John Wargo, we must “create an environmentally intelligent society that is self-conscious of the subtle ways that humanity is transforming the chemistry of the planet and our bodies.”3 How to turn an accidental experiment into social learning about sustainability? The chemical experiment runs more acutely in certain kinds of bodies . Race remains the most statistically significant indicator of toxic waste sitings in the United States. Poverty increases likelihood of everyday exposures around the world. Children are disproportionately sensitive to chemical exposures. The womb is uniquely vulnerable and, as this chapter will show, a synecdoche of anthropocene human power interacting with lifesustaining systems. Using vulnerable bodies to run chemical experiments recalls infamous bioethics cases such as the Tuskegee syphilis experiment. The racism and misuse of science in the Tuskegee case illuminate dimensions of environmental injustice, even though the “experiment” of toxins is less intentionally designed. However, the problem of toxic exposures runs deeper because it challenges how ethics conceptualizes injustice. Confronting the problem of toxins requires following social power through ecological relations, interpreting ecosystems as political systems, and rethinking the subject of human rights.This chapter explains how environmental justice projects follow power through all its ecological relations, adapting the meaning of justice and expanding moral anthropology as they do. Religious ethics has not always appreciated environmental justice projects as sites of moral adaptation, even though they represent some of the most creative and successful responses to sustainability problems. This chapter explores some explanations for the lack, which include obtuseness CHAPTER FIVE 192 to white racism and social power within the field of religion...