Pollution Is Colonialism

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With the understanding that plastics are everywhere, Liboiron continues with the idea of the “alterlife,” meaning that there is no separation between human bodies and pollutants, but instead a mutual and ongoing co-becoming (p. 89). Accepting the idea of the alterlife provides the opportunity to look at what relations matter, or in other words, focus on systematic violence rather than specific Harm. This book begins with two engineers in the 1950s, Earl Phelps and H. W. Streeter's threshold model of prediction on how much toxicity a river could take before it could no longer purify itself, drawing a clear line between contamination and pollution through a too-neat sigmoid curve. Liboiron asks: what does it mean for one to assume entitlement to Land as a sink, to Land as an assimilative space for pollution (p. 5)? MM: And there’s a question of who has jurisdiction. Like, I live on the Great Lakes. This is Anishinaabe Haudenosaunee territory. What are the laws? Who has jurisdiction? Laws aren’t just rules. They’re ethical systems, they’re systems of responsibility. So the way the science is in the settler-state gets us to think about pollution is their physical objects. We kind of regulate them with law. But thinking in our territories and out of our own traditions of thinking, any relation, any physical relations, is also an ethical relation. It’s a responsibility. It’s not just an attachment, it’s not just an ecological connection. It is responsibilities between fish and water, between people and fish, between air and people, between peoples and peoples are both human and non-human. And so that comes out of a whole different jurisdiction, a whole different epistemology. It’s a whole different way of being. And so if we’re not affirming that, then I think we’re not doing anti-colonial work. If you don't do what you call systematic thinking, you only ever play in the sandbox the dominant system as already laid out. You can tweak the system, but you can't change it. The example in the book is regulated pollution levels. It would seem like a good thing to regulate industry so it doesn't pollute more that is allowed, more than causes irreparable harm to the environment. This is based on the idea that land and bodies can absorb, metabolize, dilute, or purify some amount of pollution. But this needs land. It assumes settler entitlement to Indigenous land (and often people's bodies in the case of body burdens) for industry production. Even the environmental science that so much of our activism and certainly our state laws are premised on also assume access to land for settler and colonial (and industry) goals, needs, and desires. That is, it's based on colonial land relations. I'm saying that something good in one way can still also be colonial

At the same time, the World Economic Forum named Germany the world’s top recycler even though the country is infamous for being the biggest exporter of plastic waste. Every year, Germany exports an average of over one million tons of plastic waste, surpassing every other country in the EU.

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Anyway, I’ve written way too much and should begin concluding. One of the primary things Liboiron takes up in this book that I think is worth emphasizing and this is something Michelle Murphy has discussed extensively elsewhere (and is therefore cited extensively in here), is regarding scientific rationalizations used for producing pollution thresholds (read environmental violence thresholds), which Liboiron describes as: “bad relations of a scientific theory that allows some amount of pollution to occur and its accompanying entitlement to Land to assimilate that pollution. I mean colonialism.”

VS: So talking about your work a little bit, I think everyone listening has an idea what pollution is, but both of you see it slightly differently than most. And so I’m wondering, Murphy, can you tell us what pollution is? Oil and gas are extracted to create plastic and other disposable products consumed by the U.S., UK, and European Union. Meanwhile, the burden of recycling and incinerating plastic pollution falls on a few developing Asian countries. Former colonial empires set up this inequitable international trade that exploits developing countries by forcing them to get rid of their hazardous waste for cheap. This unjust practice is called waste colonialism. Nunatsiavut Government. (2016). #MakeMuskratRight & “ Lake Melville: Avativut, Kanuittailinnivut (Our Environment, Our Health) ” By the end of the 19th century, French colonizers in North and West Africa banned rural communities from practicing their centuries-old subsistence farming methods. That soon led to extensive environmental degradation. The locals were forced to chop down forests to make way for cotton plantations and other cash crops throughout French Equatorial Africa — which extended from the Congo River into the Sahel.

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To date, history is repeating itself. In the southern region of Palestine, the Palestinian population that once lived and farmed the area was expelled — largely to the Gaza Strip — and the region is now facing widespread desertification after the Israeli government diverted the Jordan River and uprooted innumerable native olive trees. During the early stages of the founding of the state of Israel and the displacement of Indigenous Palestinian communities, a joint Israeli-Australian project planted thousands of eucalyptus trees instead of native trees and vegetation as an effort to “dry the swamps” of southern Palestine. As an Associate Professor in Geography at Memorial University of Newfoundland, they are a leading force in the development and implementation of anticolonial research in a wide array of spaces. They are also the founder of Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR), an interdisciplinary plastic pollution laboratory whose methods emphasise on humility and good land relations. Liboiron developed the interdisciplinary field of discard studies and runs a blog that serves as a platform for the understanding and implementing the same. A staunch advocate for justice-oriented scientific methods, they are an expert in the fields of feminist science studies, discard studies and Indigenous science and technology studies. Their latest book Pollution Is Colonialism will be released by Duke University Press in May 2021. Max: But that disruption can also be helping. Like beach cleanups and carbon credits. Those are still disruptive interventions on the part of the state that reaffirms the settler state and what counts as good and right and true. Pollution Is Colonialism is an essential read for those interested in Science, Environmental Activism, STS, Pollution, Colonialism (including decolonialism/anticolonialism), Indigenous Studies, and Discard Studies, to mention a few. I especially recommend it for graduate students to assist with thinking about relationships within their field of research. One key takeaway from the book is how Liboiron writes about compromise, not as a failure, but as a matter of fact reality, one has to begin somewhere – this book is a somewhere.