How do we know what we know and with what consequences?
“Both in the nineteenth century and today, consequences experienced by the bulk of humanity as devastating are connected with the social processes of industrialization and modernization. With both epochs we are concerned with drastic and threatening interventions in human living conditions” 51
An Illustration of a typical 19th-century factory using coal as its fuel.
“There may be different material consequences each time – back then, material immiseration, poverty, hunger, crowding; today, the threatening and destruction of the natural foundations of life” 51
Child Labourer of the 19th Century --- Burned landscape from "Slash and Burn" deforestation
“The immediacy of personally and socially experienced misery contrasts today with the intangibility of threats to civilization, which only come to consciousness in scientized thought, and cannot be directly related to primary experience.” 52
The accident at the Three Mile Island Unit 2 (TMI-2) nuclear power plant near Middletown, Pennsylvania, on March 28, 1979, was the most serious in U.S. commercial nuclear power plant operating history,(1) even though it led to no deaths or injuries to plant workers or members of the nearby community. The sequence of certain events -- equipment malfunctions, design related problems and worker errors -- led to a partial meltdown of the TMI-2 reactor core but only very small off-site releases of radioactivity.
“In the past, the affliction was dictated along with one’s class fate. One was born into it. It stuck to one. It lasted from youth to old age. It was contained in everything, what one ate, how and with whom one lived, what kind of coworkers and friends one had, and whom one cursed and, if necessary, went into the streets to protest against.
Risk positions, on the contrary, contain a quite different type of victimization. There is nothing taken for granted about them. They are somehow universal and unspecific. On hears of them or reads of them. The transmission through knowledge means that those groups that tend to be afflicted are better educated and actively inform themselves...” 53
On April 25th -26th, 1986 the World's worst nuclear power accident occurred at Chernobyl in the former USSR (now Ukraine). The Chernobyl nuclear power plant located 80 miles north of Kiev had 4 reactors and whilst testing reactor number 4 numerous safety procedures were disregarded. At 1:23am the chain reaction in the reactor became out of control creating explosions and a fireball which blew off the reactor's heavy steel and concrete lid.
The Chernobyl accident killed more than 30 people immediately, and as a result of the high radiation levels in the surrounding 20-mile radius, 135,00 people had to be evacuated.
“[R]isk consciousness and activism are more likely to occur where the direct pressure to make a living has been relaxed and broken, that is among the wealthier and more protected groups (and countries)” 53
"The difference in how people are affected by class and risk positions is essential. To put it bluntly, in class positions being determines consciousness, while in risk positions, conversely, consciousness (knowledge) determines being.” 53
“People who find out that their daily tea contains DDT and their newly bought cake formaldehyde, are in a quite different situation. Their victimization is not determinable by their own cognitive means and potential experiences.” 53
"The National Justice League has filed a series of lawsuits against food companies, accusing them of poisoning the public by using a known neurotoxic chemical -- aspartame -- in their foods and beverages. The lawsuit seeks to bar these companies from producing, using, processing or selling aspartame.
Aspartame is very well documented as an excitotoxin, meaning that it overexcites nerve cells, causing permanent damage. According to research by Dr. Russell Blaylock, aspartame causes brain lesions, migraine headaches, reproductive disorders, Alzheimer's disease, blindness, mental confusion and many other nervous system disorders.
Part of this is probably due to the fact that aspartame, when consumed, breaks down into several chemicals, and one of those chemicals is formaldehyde. Formaldehyde, of course, is a potent nerve toxin and has no place in the human body, yet people are effectively "drinking formaldehyde" every time they pick up a diet soft drink or "diet" food item sweetened with aspartame."
“[A]ll the decisions on the risks and hazards of civilization falling within the compass of knowledge production are never just questions of the substance of knowledge... They are at the same time also decisions on who is afflicted, the extent and type of hazard, the elements of the threat, the population concerned, delayed effects, measures to be taken, those responsible, and claims for compensation.” 54
In the aftermath of the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska, 1989. "A court in Alaska has reduced by $1 billion the punitive damages imposed on the world's biggest oil company for the Exxon Valdez disaster in 1989, but said the firm must still pay $4 billion." click here
“Unlike news of losses in income and the like, news of toxic substances in foods, consumer goods, and so on contain a double shock. The threat itself is joined by the loss of sovereignty over assessing the dangers, to which one is directly subjected.” 54
“[T]he investigations of risk researchers also take place with a parallel displacement in everyone’s kitchen, tea room or wine cellar. Each one of their central cognitive decisions causes the toxin level in the blood of the population to shoot up or plunge, so to speak...” 55
“We are concerned, then, with a permanent large-scale experiment, requiring involuntary human subjects to report of the accumulating symptoms of toxicity among themselves, with a reversed and elevated burden of proof.” 69
“In risk positions... quality of life and the production of knowledge are locked together.” 55
“[T]he current crisis of the future is not visible, it is a possibility on the way to reality” 55
“The latency phase of risk threats is coming to an end. The invisible hazards are becoming visible.” 55
“The barriers provided by ‘acceptable values’ seem better suited to the requirements for Swiss cheese than to the protection of the public” 55
DDT was developed as the first of the modern insecticides early in World War II. It was initially used with great effect to combat malaria, typhus, and the other insect-borne human diseases among both military and civilian populations.
A persistent, broad-spectrum compound often termed the "miracle" pesticide, DDT came into wide agricultural and commercial usage in this country in the late 1940s. During the past 30 years, approximately 675,000 tons have been applied domestically. The peak year for use in the United States was 1959 when nearly 80 million pounds were applied. From that high point, usage declined steadily to about 13 million pounds in 1971, most of it applied to cotton.
The decline was attributed to a number of factors including increased insect resistance, development of more effective alternative pesticides, growing public and user concern over adverse environmental side effects--and governmental restriction on DDT use since 1969.
“[P]erceptions of risks and risks are not different things” 55
“The industrial system profits from the abuses it produces” 56
"Drinking wells and hand pumps in sixteen neighbourhoods near the derelict Union Carbide factory have been systematically poisoned for years by chemicals abandoned at the plant when the US corporation quit Bhopal. Dow Chemical, the 100% owner of Union Carbide, continues to refuse to accept responsibility for the contamination created and left by its subsidiary and for the ill health it has caused. These matters are currently before courts in India and New York." bhopal.net
“Hunger can be assuaged, needs can be satisfied; risks are a ‘bottomless barrel of demands,’ unsatisfiable, infinite.” 56
“Everything must take place in the context of a cosmetics of risk packaging, reducing the symptoms of pollutants, installing filters while retaining the source of filth” 57
“The growing awareness of risks must be reconstructed as a struggle among rationality claims, some competing and some overlapping” 59
Alcohol: Benefits and Risks
“The history of the growing consciousness and social recognition of risks coincides with the history of the demystification of the science.” 59
Thalidomide is a drug that was introduced on to the market on October 1, 1957 in West Germany. Thalidomide soon became a drug prescribed to pregnant women to combat symptoms associated with morning sickness. When taken during the first trimester of pregnancy, Thalidomide prevented the proper growth of the foetus resulting in horrific birth defects in thousands of children around the world. These children were born in the late 1950's and early 1960's and became known as "Thalidomide babies".
"Just before Silent Spring was published the America public learned about the terrible medical consequences of the drug thalidomide and the birth defects it caused. In this case again it was a question of science putting a drug on the market before enough testing had been done to establish the dangers to a minority group of users."
“Anyone who insists on strict causality denies the reality of connections that exist nonetheless.” 63
An image deployed in the debate over smoking and cancer causation. For a long time, cigarette manufacturers cited an unclear connection between smoking and various cancers. Since it was not immediately and presently visible -- A causes B, here and now-- cigarette companies for a long time denied any correlation between smoking and cancer. They are known to have funded their own studies designed to disprove the connection.
“Acceptable values may indeed prevent the very worst from happening, but they are at the same time ‘blank checks’ to poison nature and mankind a bit.” 64
|* Arsenic contamination has been found in 19.4% water
samples.
* Arsenic levels well above acceptable range have been found in tube well
water of 155 Thanas (sub-districts) belonging to 44 districts.
* The acceptable level of arsenic in drinking water has been agreed to
be 0.05 mg/L for Bangladesh.
“Acceptable levels certainly fulfill the function of a symbolic detoxification.” 68
For radon gas in the home, Health Canada considers 800 Bq/m3 to be the limit above which remedial action is recommended. In the US, the E.P.A. specifies an upper limit of 150 Bq/m3.
“Risks ... bring the substantively, spatially, and temporally disparate into a direct, threatening connection.” 70
“[W]e are dealing not with ‘second-hand experience,’ in risk consciousness, but with ‘second-hand non-experience’” 72
“Not until the step to cultural risk consciousness is everyday thought and imagination removed from its moorings in the world of the visible.... What becomes the subject of controversy is .. what everyday consciousness does not see, and cannot perceive: radioactivity, pollutants, and threats to the future.” 73
“Affliction by hazards need not result in an awareness of hazard; it can also provoke the opposite, denial from fear” 75
“Troubled times and generations can be succeeded by others for which fear, tamed by interpretations, is a basic element of thought and experience.” 75
“The very intangibility of the threat and people’s helplessness as it grows promote radical and fanatical reactions and political tendencies that make social stereotypes and the groups afflicted by them into ‘lightning rods’ for the invisible threats which are inaccessible to direct action” 75
Typhoid and SARS outbreaks both spawned these sorts of reactions.
“Sooner or later, new demands on social institutions in education, therapy and politics are bound to arise from ... increasing pressures to work out insecurity by oneself.” 76
“In the risk society ... handling fear and insecurity becomes an essential cultural qualification, and the cultivation of the abilities demanded for it become an essential mission of pedagogical institutions” 76
“[T]he state of emergency threatens to become the normal state” 79
“Environmental problems are not problems of our surroundings, but – in their origins and through their consequences – are thoroughly social problems, problems of people, their history, their living conditions, their relation to the world and reality, their social, cultural and political situations.” 81
