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MICHELLE MURPHY
FORUM
chemical regimes of living
| IN CANADA, THE COUNTRY in which I work and live, the increased price of oil, itself linked to the war in Iraq, has recently made the extraction of oil from the "Tar Sands" of Alberta economically profitable. At this same historical conjuncture, Canada has elected its first prime minister from Alberta, a province characterized by an almost Texan neoliberalism and minimal environmental regulation. The extraction of oil from the Tar Sands is not only an energy and water intensive process, it is also profoundly polluting. |
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Meanwhile, the residents of the small town of Fort Chipewyan, many of whom are members of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, recently have been disturbed by the rise of rare cancers in their community. Their local doctor responded with alarm and sent a report to Health Canada, a federal department, requesting an investigation. After some media attention, Health Canada's Alberta arm complied, concluding there was no unusual incidence of cancer, and then proceeded to file a formal complaint against the troublemaking doctor with the Alberta College of Physicians and Surgeons. The charge was met with political outrage and eventually dismissed. In the last few years, one can witness a proliferation of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) now investigating the Tar Sands and rallying behind Fort Chipewyan.1 |
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While Americans often have made a stereotype of their neighbor to the north as a land of socialist compassion, Canada is also the United States's largest supplier of oil and a participant in a larger transnational political economy of accumulation and dispossession. And not only the Canadian state, but the people of Fort Chipewyan, who live downstream from the Tar Sands—whose chemical byproducts most likely caused cancer in their community, as well as all the molecular relations externalized and imperceptible that we do not yet know about, are caught in this larger political economy. Cars, militarization, water, laws, the direction of a river, the price of oil, the properties of sand, the rise of neoliberalism, histories of colonial dispossession—are all part of a complex of molecular relations that extend outward in place, and into the past, as well as forward to uncertain futures. |
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It has become a truism that synthetic chemicals have traveled to distant crevices and niches of the globe. Largely produced by over a century of petroleum-dependent industrialized capitalism, these varied molecular modifications range in duration, mobility, and effect, offering us a world changed in ways both subtle and overwhelming. The intensification of production and consumption in recent decades has yielded a chemically recomposed planetary atmosphere to alarming future effect, while it has penetrated the air, waters, and soils to accumulate into the very flesh of organisms, from plankton to humans. Not only are we experiencing new forms of chemical embodiment that molecularly tie us to local and transnational economies, but so too processed food, hormonally altered meat, and pesticide-dependent crops become the material sustenance of humanity's molecular recomposition. We are further altered by the pharmaceuticals imbibed at record-profit rates, which are then excreted half metabolized back into the sewer to flow back to local bodies of water, and then again redispersed to the populace en masse through the tap. In the twenty-first century, humans are chemically transformed beings. |
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