Analyze

Sylvia Wynter (2003) suggests that our current struggles in Western colonized society regarding racism, classism, sexism, homophobia, ethnicism, climate change, environmental destruction, and the unequal distribution of resources are rooted in what she argues is the overrepresentation of the descriptive statement of Man as human, which only recognizes white, wealthy, able-bodied, heterosexual men as "human." As such, just as I argue Black feminist writers and scholars have drawn on speculative methods and Afrofuturism, the use of twentieth-century technology and speculative imagination to address issues within Black and African diasporic communities (see Dery & Dery, 1994), to insist on and explore the full humanity of Black girls, women, and femmes, so too have Black and African diasporic scholars called on Afrofuturism to imagine new ways technology and traditional knowledge practices can address environmental injustice. Suékama (2018) argues that as a form of resistant knowledge building and theorizing, an Afrofuturist approach to environmentalism “integrates speculation with the ecological and scientific, and the spiritual or metaphysical'' to make our environmental justice less European, male, human, (and I would add capitalist) centered. Thus, an Afrofuturist approach to environmental injustice asks us to think about our collective struggle for environmental justice as a part of and connected to other forms of systemic oppression rooted in the rejection of African diasporic and Indigenous people and their knowledge practices through the overrepresentation of Man as human in Western society. In this way, a speculative and Afrofuturist approach to environmental injustice draws on African diasporic knowledge practices in conjunction with modern and traditional technologies to imagine new solutions to environmental injustice that center the needs, values, and traditional practices of African diasporic people. 

Image source: Still from "Pumzi" Directed by Wanuri Kahiu

Peterson-Salahuddin, Chelsea. 2023. "An Afrofuturist Approach to Unsettling Environmental injustice." In 4S Paraconference X EiJ: Building a Global Record, curated by Misria Shaik Ali, Kim Fortun, Phillip Baum and Prerna Srigyan. Annual Meeting of the Society of Social Studies of Science. Honolulu, Hawai'i, Nov 8-11.

Industrial meatpacking plants in countries all over the world (USA, Germany, Australia) have all become hotspots of COVID-19 (Link). 

The close proximity in which workers working in such plants, the gruelling hours, the lack of access to healthcare among workers (many of whom are immigrants, refugees and POCs), are all reasons why such plants have emerged as hotspots. This Propublica article talks about the amont of preparation that such an industry has for pandemic flu outbreaks that could wipe out animals, but failed to do the same for their workers (Link). Moreover, our desire of meat (bad for the environment and unsustainable), has resulted in these companies having a tremendous amount of clout which allowed some to go over the heads of local officials as the ProPublica article reports. 

A well publicised Harvard study reported an association between long-term exposure to fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and COVID-19 deaths (Link). Another recent study that consider multiple pollutants found a signficiant association between nitrogen dioxide (NO2), a traffic-related pollutant and COVID-19 deaths, and not PM2.5 (Link).

Air pollution and COVID-19 have intersected in other ways. The decreases in air pollution due to the lockdown were seen as one of the few silver linings of the crisis (Link). Although early optimism has been dashed as air pollution levels have jumped right back up in China (Link) and other places when the lockdown was lifted. Some may say that under the cover of COVID-19, the Trump administration also rolled back several environmental regulations (Link), and it is unclear yet what the long-term effects of such rollbacks will be.

Air pollution is also a carrier of COVID-19 (Link), and researchers have been investigating the transmission of the virus by simulating mundane activities such as speaking in the elevator and even flushing a toilet.

Some of the other ways however, in which air pollution and COVID-19 will intersect are at infrastructure such as warehouses, which we will see increase as more and more people move to shopping online. Already in the recent pasts of the building of massive warehouses have been challenged for environmental justice reasons, as they tend to be built in poor, minority communities and result in heavy freight traffic, which in turn burdens such communities with increased pollution (Link1, Link2). Amazon employees themselves have documented the nature of siting of warehouses (Link), and it is likely to become an even more fraught site of contention as we move forward.