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How does planetary toxicity influence technological innovation?
Source: Mike Prince
When we think of our bodies in this permanently polluted world, modern narratives have promoted a fortress model, with a prevailing attitude that if we eat enough organic food, take enough supplements, do enough exercise, live far enough away from a polluted metropolis, we can guarantee that our bodies will remain healthy and well. Wellness thus becomes an individual responsibility, accessible to those who can buy distance from the harmful chemicals that a polluted earth is full of.
While it is true that safety from dangerous toxicants is unevenly distributed across financial means, geographical regions, and geopolitical histories, the fortress model of wellness falls short on numerous principles.
This article explores manifestations and methods that are used to address planetary toxicity and pollution.
When did this all begin?
Scientists working on the Anthropocene proposition - the Anthropocene is a contested name for an emergent geological epoch defined by human activity on the earth, as departed from the Holocene, its name is a combination of the Greek ‘anthropos’, meaning human, and ‘cene’, meaning ‘new’ - have been searching for a specific geological marker of humanity’s impact on the geological record on earth for over 20 years.
Phase One of this geological change is ascribed to the invention of the steam engine in 1784. The Industrial Revolution is said to have kick-started a transformation across England, Europe and the Atlantic to North America that set the conditions for increased use of natural resources and emissions.
Phase Two begins on Monday, 16 of July 1945, with the first atomic detonation. The radioactive isotopes from this experiment are thought to have entered the atmosphere and ecosystems with such force that these particles entered the sedimentary record and cemented human-made matter into the deepest corners of the earth.
Coinciding with this date is The Great Acceleration, the period defined by globalisation, technological advancement, and resource extraction. Here, the wide dispersal of ‘technofossils’ such as discarded plastic and aluminium, ubiquitous dispersal of industrial pollutants, and oil spills are said to act as paleontological markers of the Anthropocene.
Whether the Anthropocene becomes accepted as an official geological era or not, it is clear that firstly, for Anthropocenologists this epoch has its roots in toxicity, and secondly, that pollution has planetary and deep time consequences.
A Permanently Polluted World
Although toxic pollution is widely accepted as one of the key negative consequences of the climate crisis, it doesn’t always act in shocking and violent ways. While oil spills and polluted rivers do muster urgent responses, these events are only the tip of the iceberg. Toxic pollution is less tangible and often builds in slow and unseen ways, thus making specific attribution and accountability difficult.
Indeed, although WHO estimates that 7 million people die every year from air pollution - 4.2 million from outdoor and 3.8 million from indoor air pollution, - it remains a slow and chronic aggressor because effects culminate in the bodies of humans and non-humans over long periods which creates distance between the causes and consequences.
Even sites of concentrated pollution, which we may imagine to be zones of industry and extraction with depleted waters or toxic smog, are not so easily contained. The recent outrage around sewer discharges in Britain which has left just 14% of rivers with a ‘good ecological status’ shows that even areas that seem well preserved can be contaminated.
Although pollutants can be found all over the earth, concentration and dispersal are not evenly distributed. Wealthy nations have made a habit of deferring waste to developing nations with devastating consequences on ecosystems, people, and non-humans, thus transferring concentrated harm on to others.
The Top 10 exporters of plastic waste – including the UK, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the US - defer around five million tonnes of plastic per year to countries such as Turkey, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Indonesia. A Bloomberg experiment that tracked the journey of three items of plastic from the UK revealed that not only can plastic waste often end up in mismanaged dumps, it also travels through numerous countries along the way, further adding to the energy required to dispose of it.
The need to transcend our needy bodies is coupled with the need to transcend our needy planet.
The Return
Exporting waste and polluting industries overseas or in hinterlands might give the sense of preservation and safety, but the world rarely conforms to the human-made containers of national borders. Due to the complexity of our commodity systems, natural systems find it increasingly difficult to consume and process the waste.
While we have been conditioned to believe that there is a separation between our bodies and the external world, our bodies are increasingly layered with the complexity and waste we have created. The lack of effective and hyper-local end-of-life solutions and proactive industrial processes has seeped into our bodies, in the form of microplastics, pesticides, radiation, and more.
The word Cyborg might call to mind ornate science fiction characters, part human and part machine, endowed with robotic arms or biochemical regulating devices, however, it has also become a term to describe our current relationship with technology. Anthropologists such as Donna Haraway propose that humans are already enmeshed with technology, whether it be pacemakers, insulin pumps, or the effects of digital technologies on our brains, which signals a departure from what we understand to be human. Likewise, the ubiquitous presence of waste in our environments and bodies has raised questions about what enmeshing our bodies with this complexity may mean for humanity given that waste is both physically and temporally enduring.
Through the longevity of waste human beings have been pushed into a conversation with deep time. The idea of waste not being able to break down for hundreds of thousands of years invites a follow up question: what might become of humanity then?
Although such questions were broadly situated within religious or philosophical thought, technological advancements, the existential threat posed by climate change, the risk of a planet that is no longer habitable for humans, and the prospect of heat death – the entropic exhaustion of the universe – have turned speculative thought experiments about deep time into genuine concerns.
Such concerns result in the creation of exit strategies which would free humans from pesky bodily demands like nourishing food, clean air to breathe, organs and flesh to keep safe, clean water to drink, a planet on which to do all of those things, and so on. These strategies, which are broadly rooted in post-humanist thought, would include things such as genetic modification or the use of cryonic methods to preserve bodies until technology advances to levels capable reviving bodies and elongating life spans, in theory. A US based start-up is using computational logics to pitch for the preservation of consciousness through a process that would eventually enable them to upload the brain to a computer, leading to digital immortality.
The need to transcend our needy bodies is coupled with the need to transcend our needy planet. With significant investment being rallied for space exploration, a planetary exodus is also on the cards, thus turning the cosmos into a feasible geographical territory.
While these technologies are nascent and speculative, they are gaining traction and funding in an age that is defined by existential risk. They rally around an optimism that our present crisis may fuel the next stage of our evolutionary destiny, thus cementing our position as transcendent beings with limitless cosmic abilities.
Source: Eric Dale
Exodus for Whom?
Though these practices are in part concerned with the avoidance of death, whether at personal, species, planetary, or indeed cosmic scales, they can be rather forgiving of it when it happens to inconsequential beings. Long-termism is an emergent model for enacting these post-humanist technologies. The subsequent description of this movement is informed by Émile Torres’ extensive exploration of its consequences.
Long-termism takes a utilitarian model when it comes to the advancement of the human species by orienting ethical and technological advancements in the present towards the radical potential and number of humans in the deep future, trillions of years into the future, that is. For some proponents of this approach, the best use of our time on earth would be to contribute to this prophecy of making humans the most vast and glorious presence in the cosmos. If humans were to be wiped out before technology could mature to enable our cosmic takeover, this would be a total catastrophe on account of the potential trillions of lives that the wipe out of humanity would cause.
The individual ingestion of non-polluted foods or individual wellness doesn’t change the reality that the air that we breathe, like the world we inhabit, is collective.
This position has numerous consequences but two will be explored for our purpose. Firstly, time spent on things such as alleviating poverty or improving global health outcomes become a distraction, a frivolous occupation that takes away from time and resources that could be spent on the important work of advancing humanity into cosmic habitation.
The second implication is that the planet doesn’t need to remain habitable to everyone for this mission to be fulfilled. As long as some humans remain to keep working on technologies that could enable humans to fulfil their deep future potential, this would amount to a crisis averted.
If the implications of this are elusive, Torres notes that Nick Beckstead, a key figure in the movement for long-termism, argued in his PhD dissertation that ‘saving lives in poor countries may have significantly smaller ripple effects than saving and improving lives in rich countries.’ Though Beckstead framed this stance on a seemingly neutral logic of there being more innovation and economic productivity in richer countries, it seems that the sight of the deep future caused him to forget the histories of inequality that facilitate those material conditions in the first place.
If we follow the proposition to its logical conclusion, the humans who are sacrificed to fulfil this destiny are precisely those humans who have been subject to histories of inequality and injustice.
What long-termism engenders therefore is the sacrifice of millions of humans in the name of utilitarianism. It is this logic that enables planetary experiments such as solar geoengineering which would render a significant part of the Global South uninhabitable to become ‘a respectable idea’ and facilitates a planetary exodus for those who can afford it. The uptake of long-termism may appear farfetched or implausible, yet its methods of displacing harm on to those who have historically been subject to it are echoed in the networks that transfer waste from wealthy nations to developing ones and in the willingness to lose island states to the seas while the Global North delays transitions to a green and circular economy.
Although nations may enact a fortress model when it comes to environmental protection, the vast world system we are part of doesn’t adhere to the near bordering of nations or bodies. The individual ingestion of non-polluted foods or individual wellness doesn’t change the reality that the air that we breathe, like the world we inhabit, is collective.
As the waste we dispose of breaks down, it enters the natural cycles we rely on to produce the food we eat and the water we drink. As man-made objects make their way into our flesh, the distinction between organic and inorganic is troubled. Embracing technology can enable us to reach our potential, but not when technology remains rooted in the thought patterns that have created the problem in the first place.
Whilst this may present a bleak prognosis, acknowledging the histories of waste, pollution, and disposability can make us attuned to the manifestations in our bodies and at the same time call on us to address the inequitable distribution of harm across our world.
Author: Marina Ionita | Editor: Dr Ehab Sayed
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