Abstract
Faced with the non-optional acceptance of toxic chemical artifacts, the ubiquitous interweaving of chemicals in our social fabric often exists out of sight and out of mind. Yet, for many, toxic exposures signal life-changing or life-ending events, phantom threats that fail to appear as such until they become too late to mitigate. Assessments of toxicological risk consist of what Sheila Jasanoff calls “sociotechnical imaginaries,” arbitrations between calculated costs and benefits, known risks and scientifically wrought justifications of safety. Prevalent financial conflicts of interest and the socially determined hazards posed by chemical exposure suggest that chemical safety assessments and regulations are a form of postnormal science. Focusing on the histories of risk assessments of pesticides such as DDT, atrazine, PFAS, and glyphosate, this article critically reviews Michel Serres's notion of “appropriation by contamination.”
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 181-202 |
| Number of pages | 22 |
| Journal | Environment and Society: Advances in Research |
| Volume | 12 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 1 Sept 2021 |
Bibliographical note
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:I thank my colleagues at the University of California, San Francisco at the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education (CTCRE) and Environmental Health Initiative (EHI) for their encouragement to look cross-sectionally at industrial epidemics, as well as the librarians of the UCSF Industry Documents Library, Kate Tasker and Rachel Taketa, for their help identifying various source documents and continuing to expand this invaluable online public collection of previously secret industry documents. The Dynamics of Inclusive Prosperity Initiative at Erasmus University Rotterdam has provided key staff assistance and funding to my co-directed projects Agribusiness and its Alternatives as well as PFAS Exposures as Environmental Crime, which have greatly facilitated the writing of this article.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021. The Author(s). All Rights Reserved.
