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JODY A. ROBERTS AND NANCY LANGSTON
toxic bodies/toxic environments: an interdisciplinary
FORUM
| NEW TECHNOLOGIES AND METHODS for the detection of toxins, particularly endocrine disruptors, have drawn increasing attention to the pervasive and persistent presence of synthetic chemicals in our lives. Some of these tests, such as biomonitoring and body-burden analyses, highlight that we not only experience our environment in obvious ways, but that we also are united with it at the molecular level. Trace chemicals found in the air, water, and soil are now being detected within us. The very chemical composition of our bodies is being altered in ways that reflect the transformations of our everyday environments. |
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Chemicals occupy a position along the border between the "natural" and "cultural" worlds. Industrial chemicals, in particular, prove difficult to categorize. They are artifacts of an industrial society brought into being within a highly specific cultural infrastructure. And yet they increasingly occupy a part of the natural world—and as persistent chemicals, many of them will continue to be a part of the world far into the future, beyond the point of remembering their origins as artificial or synthetic. |
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These landscapes, which now contain the various molecular traces of the industrialized world, are not simply environments that can be avoided—as we might once have tried with "contaminated" spaces like those around Chernobyl. These spaces are occupied by people, among others. They are landscapes of life, and therefore "landscapes of exposure."1 Gregg Mitman, Michelle Murphy, and Christopher Sellers's collection, Landscapes of Exposure: Knowledge and Illness in Modern Environment, brought together the disparate threads of knowledge-making practices; knowledge in and of environments; and perceptions of health, illness, and disease. The collection emphasized the need to grapple with scale, materiality, and uncertainty—concepts that provide the bedrock for much of what follows in this forum. |
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In March 2007, the American Society for Environmental History (with funding from the National Science Foundation) brought together environmental scientists, historians of science, science studies scholars, and environmental historians to discuss the new chemical bodies of the twenty-first century. The workshop participants, many of whom contributed to Landscapes of Exposure, addressed the uncertainty that surrounds the fact that organisms of all types, kinds, and geographies—including but certainly not limited to humans—find themselves composed of a cadre of chemicals heretofore unknown to the planet. The problems of toxins in the environment are now inseparable from the issue of toxins in us. |
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This special forum in Environmental History continues that lively discussion. In these brief reflection essays, sciences studies scholars, historians of science, and environmental historians provide perspective on the failures of existing toxicological frameworks. While disciplines, topics, and actors differ, there is a surprising amount of cohesion among these works. Four main themes emerge: the uncertainty of knowledge, the place of knowledge production, the politics of dealing with environments and bodies, and the historical roots of current toxicological frameworks. For at least the last three decades, historians and social scientists have worked to uncover the ways in which scientific knowledge is constructed. But in dealing with the crisscrossing issues of environmental pollution, human and nonhuman exposure, and toxicity, the problem is not necessarily with what we know, but with all that remains unknown. We don't often think about this shadow space to our collected knowledge—at least not in those terms. We speak, instead, of uncertainty. Uncertainty implies an aspect of failure: we tried to understand, but certainty unfortunately eludes us. The concept of uncertainty, then, raises questions about the politics of neutrality. |
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