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Anonymous (not verified)
Lee argues that EJ practice has long stagnated over an inability to properly define the concept of disproportionate (environmental and public health) impacts, but that national conversations on system racism and the development of EJ mapping tools have improved his outlook on the potential for better application of the concept of disproportionate impact. Lee identifies mapping tools (e.g. CalEnviroScreen) as a pathway for empirically based and analytically rigorous articulation and analysis of disproportionate impacts that are linked to systemic racism. In describing the scope and nature of application of mapping tools, Baker highlights the concept of cumulative impacts (the concentration of multiple environmental, public health, and social stressors), the importance of public participation (e.g. Hoffman’s community science model), the role of redlining in creating disproportionate vulnerabilities, and the importance of integrating research into decision making processes. Baker ultimately argues that mapping tools offer a promising opportunity for integrating research into policy decision making as part of a second generation of EJ practice. Key areas that Lee identifies as important to the continued development of more effective EJ practice include: identifying good models for quantitative studies and analysis, assembling a spectrum of different integrative approaches (to fit different contexts), connecting EJ research to policy implications, and being attentive to historical contexts and processes that produce/reproduce structural inequities.

Citizen science as a contested culturally specific term

lclplanche

This text argues that the umbrella term citizen science has come to describe a variety of organizations and structures that function in a very different way. Not only does the notion of citizen science cover a wide variety of situations, but the term itself makes references to different types of organizations and is not neutral. Japan had forms of "citizen science" which pre-existed the introduction of the English term, as heirs to the development of more engaged scientific practices by politically inclined scientists in the 1970s.

The tensions within the use of the term citizen science and its diverse embodiments take the form of the following: basically, the concept of citizen science in Japan is mostly used in the context of top-down participatory approaches. The organizations that emerged after the Fukushima disaster are much more varied than this and exist within a framework that had been previously developed in Japan. This framework included visions of participatory and democratic science making by citizens, for citizens, and of citizens. They are mostly local organizations that are sometimes but not always affiliated to a network. Some of them cooperate with more formal institutions, while others steer clear of any collaboration with formal science or governments, partly because there is a lot of distrust towards these institutions in Japan, especially since the Fukushima accident.

One of the pitfalls of the reputation that citizen science projects have in Japan is that they are associated with the anti-nuclear movement and are therefore associated with the far left. This causes a need for distantiation from any political association, which some of the organizations studied use.

A complex set of data to understand and use.

lclplanche

One of the reasons for the specific nature of data and knowledge management in this context is the economic necessity and attractiveness of stable, high paying employment. In terms of the beginning of the accumulation of local knowledge regarding the risks to which the workers and the neighbors were being exposed to, this clearly played a role. For fear of losing their good paying jobs, and due to the military nature of their occupation, workers never told anything about their jobs to their families, or didn't ask questions that could have led to uncomfortable answers. This dynamic continued later, as we can see by the testimony of the worker who worked on the clean-up of the Weldon Springs site. The Priest also notes that in the neighborhood, people were wary of information leaking, as it might depreciate their property values.

Something else which we can observe is that, on top of the economic necessity for preserving one's job, there is also a sentiment of pride in doing one's work properly. A worker recalls that the relationship that the workers had to having to wear blue (and reduce your actions because you were contaminated) was that it was just part the job, and that they had a job to do. After the Weldon springs plant closed, there was a liberation of voices, and it was easier to report health concerns. The sentiment of pride in doing ones work properly is completed by a sentiment of patriotism. The same worker, Mr Schneider, said: "We have to believe what our government tells us, what the heck, uh. Best country in the world, I still think it is." Another example of the relationship between the job and the risk is the testimony of the clean-up worker who said that they shut of their Geiger counters, because they were "just going nuts". Here we can see that when the risk is too high, it becomes less visible, less understandable, because it is inescapable. Another reason for the difficulty of accumulating and sharing information, at least until the 1990s, is the priority of beating the communists. The discourse of emergency and national priority is not conducive to asking questions (as we can observe today in different ways).

The closing of the Weldon Springs plant coincided with the rise of environmental concerns in the USA and the change in environmental perspective had an impact on the categorization of places such as the Weldon Springs one, which became a Superfund site. This required a change in management at the department of energy because they started needing to have conversations and interactions with the public. This did not solve all the knowledge management problems however, because the measures put in place to deal with the injustices were insufficient compared to the nature of the events that had unfolded.

This is for multiple reasons. The first the nature of the risk means that the production of knowledge and regulations was complicated by a lack of understanding of the different medical pathways, conditions, and interactions which lead to the development of health problems. The number of people affected is also quite small, so the statistics may not appear to be significant. The second is the complexity of the accumulation of data in order to gain reparation and recognition, something which led to a movement to make the process more collective, in order to support the data finding and management process and make the knowledge of the administrative procedures consolidated. Finally, there were instances where the records of employee exposure were falsified, which meant that the access to this information was impossible.

Acceptable losses

lclplanche

One question that is brought up in the documentary which compelled me is the quesiton of knowing how to mark the borders of acceptable risk. While at the beginning of the nuclear production operations, the question is not raised so much, it comes into play later, when the environmental movements have influenced the governance of the USA enough that the clean-up becomes a question answerable through policy. It is at that point that multiple tensions arise. First, there is the tension between the perception of risk that the workers who worked in the factories had and the outwards sign of protection that the workers doing the clean up wear. And second, once risk is acknowledged, a tension arises related to the extent of risk, and the areas which need to be protected.  As the priest recalls,  people visiting the clean-up site, were in laymen's clothing on one side of the fence, and on the other side of the fence, people were in moon suits. Similarly, a clean-up worker recalls that the houses where they stayed during their time at work were just on the other side of the fence from the clean up site where they had to wear protective gear.

Another tension which intrigued me in this documentary is between the representation of exposed workers as heroes and as victims. This is something which arises of another context which is mentioned in this documentary which is the military, and some of the exposed workers are veterans. Faced with life altering situations, it is without a doubt useful to have a construction which permits the making of meaning and the perception of oneself as honorable, but it should be investigated what the impact of patriotism and loyalty to country is on perception of risk and injustice. 

The last question which intrigued me in this documentary is that of the construction of the deterrent/protective structure on the nuclear waste site. The priest raises an interesting point when he asks whether the best use of the money spent was in constructing this structure that would, according to him, be attractive to children, instead of providing financial support and health care to the people affected by the radiation. It really made me question the value of creating an attractive memorial like structure, and the discourse it conveys on the nature of the events which unfolded there. And of course, the classic question of the management of essential message bearing structures that wil long outlive us.

The all encompassing labor of nuclear weapons production

lclplanche

The original labor of this quotidian Anthropocene is the labor of weapon production. The economy of war produced a situation where workers' security or the environment was absolutely not the main priority. As someone said in the documentary, there was no reason for workers not to be protected as early as 1942. After the war, work had to be put in to construct more permanent buildings which would improve worker safety and allow better control of the uranium purification process. Another form of labor was put in to structure the practices of control of worker's contamination.

Another labor, which was provoked by the anthropocenics in this situation is that of the medical professionals who surrounded and treated the workers. For example, Mr Schneider's first cancer was discovered by his chiropractor.

Another provoked labor is the activist labor of the workers, children and activist who are impacted by the health risks of working in those factories. The paperwork and administrative labor required to obtain compensation for health impacts is very high, and requires expert help, organizing in a collective was another labor which permitted the previous ones, and allowed for the pooling of ressources and knowledge to properly defend the rights of workers. A labor which is related to this one is the labor of workers' unions to fight for accurate representation of the risks entailed by the employment of their members and to support the protection of workers.

Related to the labor within the factories themselves is the labor of clean-ups, which contained some of the same risks, with more protection and less exposure time than the original problem producing labor. There is also the labor of knowledge production and risk assessment by individual workers who were coerced in putting their livelihoods above their health. One worker says he had severe nosebleeds on the job and was warned/threatened by his supervisor that he would be fired if he told someone about it.

The final labor that I noticed being covered in this documentary is the labor of everyday clean up. Some people recall cleaning radioactive dust off of their laundry that they set to dry outside, and someone else recalls her brother cleaning the dust off his car in the morning.

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Anonymous (not verified)
" Then, after the scale of the disaster had sunk in and victims began to realize they were barred by the local and federal authorities from returning home, another kind of trauma set in. Families had to find a place to live, a way to replace lost income, a place for their children to go to school, a way to obtain their prescription medications and telephones, a way to pay mounting unpaid bills for homes they no longer inhabited. Without their personal documents, they had to try to track insurance policies, if they had them, bank accounts, and health records, to begin the slow process of accessing government or insurance funds to help pay for their displacement and their hoped-for recovery. The reality of how much had been destroyed, not just in personal physical property but in whole communities, whole ways of life, had just begun to be felt" "The ongoing conditions of displacement have prompted some to report that, despite the length of time since the actual disaster, New Orleans is still in a state of “responding” rather than “recovery.”4 This ongoing predicament is key to understanding that what we are calling “chronic disaster syndrome” is different from posttraumatic stress disorder, in which traumatic events are isolated in time and symptoms are related to events in the past. In the case of Katrina displacement, conditions that are traumatic continue; they are ongoing. " " “Cleaning up the mess” in this case included a deliberate effort to get rid of the poorest sectors of the population, who were seen as a drain on public resources— those who lived in public housing. The notion that subverting support for public-sector recovery and using disaster to enrich private contractors by evicting and “erasing” the poor were part of a deliberate plan was affirmed for residents when they heard one of their state lawmakers say, in regard to the loss of public housing from the storms and flooding, that “God did what we could not do.""