Dirty hands: The toxic politics of denunciation

Abstract

In September 2013, President Correa balanced himself on a felled log over an oil waste pit in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Extending a bare hand dripping with crude, he launched La Mano Sucia de Chevron campaign, demanding accountability for decades of contamination. This article explores the role of bodily knowledge in witnessing industrial contamination and struggles for environmental justice. Situating the mano sucia in the history of activism in the region, I show how the juxtaposition of different hands within the same motif reveals profoundly asymmetric relationships to the toxic entanglements that oil produces. Dirtied hands reveal the co-production of toxicity and power in extractive landscapes: At times throughout this article, the gesture calls for corporate accountability and distributive environmental justice, at other times, it reveals the systemic production of material, social and political distance between the accrual of benefit and the production of harm in an industrial-capitalist order. While drawing on the central role of bodily knowledges in apprehending environmental harm, I argue that bodily knowledges must also be examined for their specific relationships to forms of power and exploitation, and for their potential for appropriation by other parties - even when dedicated to condemning environmental injustice.

Toxic politics: Acting in a permanently polluted world

“…The case studies in the articles that make up this special issue both challenge modes of politics that rest on dominant evidentiary representations of harm, and explore less celebrated modes of activism to collectively argue for multiple concepts of toxic politics and reproductive justice in a permanently polluted world. These cases show the deep ambivalences of denunciation of toxicity through charismatic, image-driven or data-driven activism that simultaneously supports the wider structures it denounces (Fiske, 2018). They investigate how the drive to create representations of invisible, toxic, slow disasters by making better, clearer, standardized scientific representations of toxic sensorium never overcomes unevenness and representational resolution (Spackman and Burlingame, 2018).…”

“…This is in part because, in Tironi’s and Lyons’s cases, ‘politics is not about debates and argumentation but about the white noise of chronicity, while the composition of a common world often means surviving, coping and resisting’ (Tironi, 2018: 26; also Tironi and Rodríguez-Giralt, 2017). In Fiske’s (2018) work, these ‘narratives of action, mobilization and publicness’ (p. 1) are appropriated, and in part strengthen rather than subvert systems of power that allow oil extraction and its effluents (and affluence) to continue. This move away from democratic and liberal modes of action and their ‘future-oriented obsessions with capturing social power’ (Lyons, 2018: 13) makes room for other types of action and what counts as politics, so that they no longer privilege the modern humanist political subject and epistemologies based in claims and counter claims.…”

“…Greenpeace drops banners from bridges, photographers take pictures of starving polar bears on shrinking ice floes, and in Fiske’s case study in this issue, a bare hand is held up, dripping with Chevron’s oily waste left behind in the Amazon. The dripping hand is the icon of the La Mano Sucia de Chevron (The Dirty Hand of Chevron) campaign, which seeks ‘to enroll supporters in efforts to hold Chevron accountable for decades of environmental damage’ in Ecuador (Fiske, 2018). Though local activists and residents repeatedly dip their hand into Chevron’s waste pits for media and toxic tours, and though their bodies bear the marks of contamination-related diseases that they narrate for cameras over the course of years, it is the aloft dirty hand of President Correa and other celebrities who come to visit the waste pits and lend their support to the environmental campaign that come to define Chevron’s toxic trespass.…”

Civilian science: the potential of participatory environmental monitoring in areas affected by armed conflicts

“…Although the security conditions of many conflict and post-conflict settings present considerable challenges, the increasing use of citizen science or community-led approaches for monitoring environmental hazards in insecure or politically contested contexts (Phys.org 2018), or simply to bear witness to harm (Fiske 2018), suggests that these challenges may not be insurmountable.…”

In smell’s shadow: Materials and politics at the edge of perception

“…Here, attunement indexes transition from states of normal to abnormal. Scholars of environmental justice who study risk and harm in late industrialism – a period characterized by accumulating levels of infrastructural, regulatory and ecological collapse (Fortun, 2012) – note what Fiske (2018) refers to as the ‘central role of bodily knowledge in apprehending harm’. Unserved by regulatory systems, unprotected by political will, the body becomes that which both bears witness to harm and is called on to evidence harm.…”