Analyze

“The large question this study addresses is the following: How do people make sense of (and cope with) toxic danger? The Martinezes’ story anticipates the complexity of the answer(s): physical and psychological suffering is compounded by doubts, disagreements, suspicions, fears, and endless waiting.” (4)

‘Flammable is a story of people’s confusion, mistakes and/or blindness regarding the toxicity that surrounds them. Flammable is also a story of silent habituation to contamination and of almost complete absence of mass protest against toxic onslaught’ (4)

“Schoolteachers, journalists, and lawyers are also part and parcel of daily life in Flammable. Together, all these actors contribute to what Flammable residents know about their place. They also influence what they ignore, what they want to know, and what they misrecognize. Government officials, company personnel, physicians, teachers, journalists, and lawyers jointly (but hardly cooperatively, given that their opinions don’t count equally) shape locals’ experiences of contamination and risk. This book examines how and why this production of shared knowledge (or lack thereof ) occurs.” (5)

“All in all, confusions, bewilderments, divisions, rumors, frustrations, and hopes are making Flammable residents wait—they wait for more testing, for further and better knowledge, for relocation, and for the “huge” settlement with one of the “powerful companies” that will, in the words of a neighbor, “allow us to move out.” This waiting is, as we will show, one of the ways in which Flammable residents experience submission.” (6) 

“We did our best to learn how to listen, look, and touch with respect and care, knowing with Nancy Scheper-Hughes (1992:28) that “seeing, listening, touching, recording, can be, if done with care and sensitivity, acts of fraternity and sisterhood, acts of solidarity. Above all, they are the work of recognition. Not to look, not to touch, not to record, can be the hostile act, the act of indifference and of turning away.” (14)

‘… the culture of toxic uncertainty is a complex web of meanings and shared understandings’ (108)

Labor of confusion: “During the long period of slowly germinating contamination, the actions of government authorities toward pollution in the neighborhood were less consistent and more contradictory than either the denial or underestimation that has been documented in the existing literature. Those multiple incongruous actions gave shape to what we term, extending the insights of students of ideology and symbolic power (Thompson 1984; Eagleton 1991; Bourdieu 1991), a labor of confusion that has a decisive effect on shared (mis)understandings.” (10)

 Ulrich Beck, social invisibility, lack of “social thinking” about environmental issues (Beck 1992)

Bourdieu, symbolic violence - misrecognition of power structures on part of the oppressed enables domination

Toxic uncertainty: “a way of experiencing toxic suffering that is shaped by what we call, borrowing from Charles Tilly (1996), the interacting “invisible elbows” of external power forces and of everyday routine survival struggles” (6)

Flammable is an account of how people in a particular place make sense of slow, invisible environmental pollution. The people of Flammable live in an Argentinean shantytown located next to petrochemical companies and storage facilities. They have been deeply affected by the rise in unemployment in the 1990s, with most residents subsisting on part-time manual jobs at one of the companies, retirement pensions, state welfare programmes and what else they can find. The area in which these residents live is known and recognized by government experts to be contaminated and unsafe for human habitation–and yet widespread confusion and uncertainty amongst residents and a lack of government actions means that the shantytown continues to exist. Auyero and Swistun explore the multitude of influences that ‘‘shape what people see, what they don’t see, what they know, what they don’t know, and what they would like to know, what they do and what they don’t do’’ (145). They show how residents gradually naturalize their situations, which, combined with the mystification of dominant discourses, contributes to their quiescence in the face of contamination. 

• Flame retardant chemicals
• Migrate off of products and into air/dust
• Many are endocrine disruptors, interfere with the reproductive system and thyroid
• Stain repellent chemicals
• Polyfluorinated alkyl substances (PFASs) or polyfluorinated chemicals (PFCs)
• Enter air, dust, and drinking water
• 6 million US residents have blood PFAS concentrations over EPA limit
• Associated with cancer, thyroid disease, immunotoxicity, reduced immune response to childhood immunizations
• Phthalates
• Enter air and dust
• Associated with asthma and allergies
• Polychlorinated Biphenyls (PCBs)
• Environmentally persistent pollutant, endocrine disruptor, and probable carcinogen
• No longer used, but remain in estimated 25,000 US schools
• Prenatal exposure may affect height, weight, head circumference, and body size at puberty

The authors structure their argument around three metrics: student health, student thinking, and student performance. They define these as follows:

• Student health: the overall physical and biological health of a school building occupant.
• Student thinking: short-term impacts on cognitive function and mental well-being.
• Student performance: the successful long-term academic performance of students.

Through their review of more than 200 studies, they conclude that there is unambiguous evidence for negative effects of low environmental quality on all three of these metrics. Although it is discussed in less detail, they also reference studies that provide evidence for the improvement of these three metrics when issues with school infrastructure are addressed.

"Millions of K–12 students in America spend several hours a day learning in schools that are more than 50 years old and in need of extensive repair and where children may be exposed to mold, poor ventilation, uncomfortable temperatures, inadequate lighting, and overcrowded, excessively noisy conditions."

Emphasizes the scale of the issue--this is not a Philadelphia or Santa Ana or Azusa problem, it is a national issue for all public schools. Also emphasizes the breadth of the issues--there are so many different forms of environmental hazards in schools.

• Ventilation & air quality:
• Children breathe more air than adults relative to their body size
• Water quality:
• Contaminants like lead have greater effects on cognitive development and behavior of children than adults
• Thermal comfort
• Current models for thermal comfort are based on adults and do not predict children's comfort levels
• Children are more susceptible to the effects of heat stress
• Children's clothing and activity levels (major determinants of thermal comfort) are distinct from adults
• Lighting and views
• Children have larger pupils than adults
• Children have greater light-induced melatonin suppression--their Circadian rhythms are more susceptible to manipulation
• Noise
• Children under 15 are more sensitive to difficult listening conditions because they are still developing mature language skills
• Children need a greater signal-to-noise ratio in order to understand language
• Memory and attention development are sensitive to chronic noise exposure

"We recognize that beyond the four walls of the school building there are many environmental and social contexts that can adversely affect students’ well-being and undermine their academic potential. Inequities persist in the distribution of the social determinants of health, and students bring these influence with them every day when they walk through the doors of their school building."

Environmental injustice can't be an either/or issue of hazards inside or outside schools, it needs to be a both/and issue where hazards in schools are being addressed in conjunction with hazards outside of schools.

"The chronic impacts of a poor school environment often do not get the same type of attention as cases like these, because the links between building quality and health are subtler and less overt."

"These" is referring to a list of dramatic incidents where students were suddenly exposed to some kind of environmental hazard. This quote captures one of the biggest challenges of environmental justice work--in the many, many cases where it is not visible, it is hard to mobilize support, attention, and emotion because the links aren't flashy. This connects to ideas about slow disasters in Anthro 25A.

• Ventilation:
• 15 cubic feet of outside air per person or 5 liters per person per second
• Carbon dioxide concentrations below 1000 ppm
• Water quality:
• No amount of lead is safe
• National Primary Drinking Water Regulations (NPDWR)
• Thermal health
• Indoor temperatures between 68 and 77 degrees Fahrenheit
• Lighting
• Minimum 350 lux, up to 1000 lux
• LED instead of fluorescent lighting
• Noise
• Maximum background noise: 35 dB
• Maximum reverbration time: 0.6-0.7 seconds