|
|
|
MICHAEL EGAN
FORUM
toxic knowledge: a mercurial fugue in three parts
| IN A PROVOCATIVE DISCUSSION on the nature and historicity of scientific knowledge, Bruno Latour asks: "Where were microbes before Pasteur?" He concludes: "after 1864 airborne germs were there all along," which presents the historian with an interesting portal into the history of scientific knowledge and its relationship with environmental politics. The history of toxic environments is largely reactionary in nature: the framing of new environmental standards comes in response to the discovery of hazards and those standards are frequently revised as new information becomes available. Reactionary history and the changing contexts of awareness of toxic hazards are suggestive of what Latour called the "historicity" of scientific knowledge: "History not only passes but transforms."1 Scientific discoveries alter our reading of the past. Drawing on a similar epistemological trope, this essay surveys the histories of knowing and unknowing surrounding a series of confusions related to the discovery of mercury contamination in rivers and lakes in the northern hemisphere between the 1960s and 1980s. In so doing, it offers an index toward thinking historically about toxic bodies and toxic environments. |
1
|
|
Chemistry is the science of material change and the scientific knowledge developed to understand these changes offers an opportunity for environmental historians to tell stories about stories about nature. Chemical knowledge has been pivotal in human interactions with nature, and the accounts that follow rely heavily on the polity of a constructed scientific knowledge. In addition to the prospect of chemistry offering insight into constructions of science as they relate to environmental history, however, one might also recognize the material significance of chemicals to environmental narratives. Studying landscapes in which various natural and synthetic chemicals come together to form insalubrious settings for organic beings also presents new opportunities for considering nonhuman agency in our environmental histories. In all three snapshots of toxic environments that I present in discussing mercury pollution, mercury's chemical make-up undergoes changes that are only partly influenced by human activities. Weaving together narratives of chemical knowledge and toxic environments, then, offers ways of complicating our environmental histories. |
2
|
|
The most common form of mercury poisoning involves methylmercury, an organic mercury compound that accumulates in humans and animals and acts as a highly dangerous neurotoxin. The issue that plagued the scientists from Sweden, Canada, and the United States, whose research comprises the main thrust of this work, was that methylmercury was appearing in freshwater systems where it did not belong. The absence of a scientific rationale for methylmercury's presence in the places it was being discovered mystified researchers until a number of breakthroughs in understanding resolved their confusion and painted a troubling canvas of the complexity and severity of the global mercury pollution problem. |
3
|
|
In the early 1950s, Swedish conservationists observed a marked reduction in the populations of seed-eating birds while also encountering more bird carcasses around the countryside, which were found to contain staggering amounts of mercury. By 1960, predatory birds also were found to have elevated levels of mercury in their systems. The high mercury content ultimately was traced to the use of mercury in agricultural fungicides and the treatment of seedgrain.2 During the investigations into the source of mercury in birds, scientists began considering the repercussions if mercury used in agriculture should find its way into freshwater systems. According to one account on the Swedish response to mercury pollution, "not much imagination was needed to realize the potential hazard to human health of the mercury in fish."3 In 1964, teams of scientists began taking samples of fish from several bodies of freshwater in Sweden.4 In short order, they found alarmingly high levels of methylmercury, the quantities of which indicated that they could not be attributed solely to the mercury treatment of seedgrain.5 |
. . . |
There are about 2551 more words in this article.
Please log in (or, if you are not yet an
authorized user, please go to the
User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
|
