{"id":391,"date":"2017-03-29T17:24:36","date_gmt":"2017-03-29T17:24:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maq.dreamhosters.com\/second-spear\/?p=391"},"modified":"2020-11-04T00:29:47","modified_gmt":"2020-11-04T00:29:47","slug":"the-incinerator-does-not-exist-sensory-engagement-with-toxic-potentials","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/modil.io\/second-spear\/2017\/03\/the-incinerator-does-not-exist-sensory-engagement-with-toxic-potentials\/","title":{"rendered":"The Incinerator Does Not Exist: Sensory Engagement with Toxic Potentials"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

On the streets of Curtis Bay, a community in south Baltimore, talk of the local trash incinerator is pervasive.<\/strong> People complain about its pungent odor, lament its effects on air quality, and worry about its ties to respiratory ailments. Amidst an already congested industrial landscape, where the cumulative effects of toxic exposure have long impacted land and local health, the plant is a major object of anxiety and sensory engagement. But the incinerator does not exist. Instead, residents are engaged in a precautionary project to prevent it<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Image 1. The still-empty incinerator site. Photo by United Workers.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

During fieldwork, this seemed to me to be a phenomenological enigma: residents in Curtis Bay were sensing the materially non-existent. Here, I briefly consider how and why locals seemed to experience<\/em> the incinerator and ask what we might learn from their anticipatory sensing about the politics and poesis of risk.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Risk Experience<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anthropologists have long understood \u201crisk\u201d to be an orientation toward the future rendered knowable through data from the past. Actuarial charts, climate models, and even personalized categories like \u201ccancer risk\u201d all forecast uncertain futures through recourse to accumulated knowledge. But the literature on risk experience\u2014on the concept\u2019s affective and sensorial dimensions\u2014rarely depicts those exposed to risk doing similar work. Instead, risk seems to be reserved for expert sensing with even citizen science tending to depend on expert tools<\/a>  (see Polleri, this series).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My time in Curtis Bay suggests, on the contrary, that locals invoked the lived experience of exposure to help predict the incinerator\u2019s toxic potential. Though few used the language of risk (with the important exception of local activists, who readily invoked the term in their conversations with government and industry), their orientation toward the plant often seemed to incorporate its logic. In their conversations about the proposed facility and in the meetings where they strategized to fight it, residents talked about the ways in which they already felt toxicity in Curtis Bay, alongside the effects that the incinerator might, could, or would have on their daily life experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In other words, they frequently engaged with the possibility <\/em>of the incinerator by invoking accumulated sensory data.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This in and of itself was not surprising. There are plenty of accumulated \u201cdata\u201d available in Curtis Bay to suggest what the incinerator might look, smell, or feel like. Indeed, residents have five generations of exposure to environmental degradation. Curtis Bay is a hub of the petrochemical industry. It already hosts the nation\u2019s largest medical waste incinerator. It\u2019s home to the city\u2019s landfill, to coal piers, to oil tanks, to military facilities, and to millions of pounds of hazardous waste. Residents are used to watching smoke billow from stacks. They\u2019re accustomed to unpleasant smells and stilted breathing. Most have corporeally attuned to living in a heavy industrial space (compare Kenner, this series). As I show below, their accumulated knowledge differs significantly from that brought to bear on the incinerator by Maryland\u2019s regulatory agency. And what captivated me most about this contrast was that their anticipatory sensing seemed to embody a critique of the state.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Though locals frequently exclaimed that the incinerator had exacerbated their asthma and though they often denounced its odor in the present tense (saying things like, \u201cthe incinerator smells awful,\u201d drawing the future-possible into the sense-able present), here I limit my analysis to contrary ways of seeing. Regulators and residents visualized pollution quite differently, and this difference shaped their evaluations of the plant\u2019s acceptability.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ways of Seeing<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Besides oddly colored chemical clouds that occasionally make their way across the city skyline, toxicants are essentially invisible in the air. But there are<\/em> several ways to \u201csee\u201d toxicity (see Fukuda, this series). As Maryland\u2019s director of air quality explained to me last spring, \u201cWhat scientists see with technology is truly unbelievable. We fly airplanes, we float balloons, we check monitors and run models, all to help fill in the state\u2019s pollution picture. And then we figure out what part of the picture needs to change,\u201d he said, \u201cin order to reduce pollution risk.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Expert ways of filling in the state\u2019s \u201cpollution picture\u201d chiefly see from above\u2014literally, with the help of aerial maps and smart balloons<\/a>, and schematically through graphs, spreadsheets, and emissions models that translate past and present levels of toxicity into highly specialized, prohibitively expensive, predictive forms of data. But seeing from above has certain limitations. For one, the eye attuned to ambient conditions misses fine-grained variance\u2014a condition exacerbated by the removal, in 2008, of the only state air monitor ever sited in Curtis Bay (it was sent to a more statistically \u201crepresentative\u201d neighborhood). Standardized modes of sight also slight the effects of accumulation: computer programs designed to predict the effects of a \u201csingle pollutant\u201d from a \u201csingle plant\u201d within a discrete span of time can in no way capture the felt reality of living for years<\/em> among several dozen chemical-emitting industries. State-sanctioned ways of seeing help explain why Maryland officials aren\u2019t too worried about the air in Curtis Bay. And they clarify how a new source\u2014the incinerator\u2014was permitted for construction in the region.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Curtis Bay, in contrast, residents see from amidst, and toxicants have long made themselves known to the eye through processes of settling, drifting, and aggregation. They\u2019ve appeared in the way blonde hair used to turn chartreuse when children swam in the cove (they don\u2019t swim there anymore), as soot staining window sills and white sheets, and in the color snow sometimes turns when it hits ground (\u201crainbow,\u201d one of my informants explained, like asphalt tinged with gasoline). Pollution here is not limited to individual plants or isolated in time. It flows. It sticks to things. It piles up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Time is central to its accretion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So while measuring exposure to pollutants by epidemiological standards is notoriously difficult and while there are certain details expert vision misses, those who have long called the region home invoke visual evidence to assert Curtis Bay\u2019s toxicity. And that evidence comprises a very different set of accumulated knowledge then used to generate predictions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n