This, Too, Will Contaminate

  • Joy Xiang

In the early 2000s, after years of raising concerns, residents and other stakeholders in and surrounding Mississauga’s Clarkson neighbourhood succeeded in drawing provincial attention to the area’s poor air quality. Clarkson’s industrial zone, with several large and looming factories adjacent to residential housing and public parks, remained the most visible polluter in the eyes of locals, despite companies’ attempts to soften and conceal their toxic impressions through tall fences and strategic landscaping. After 22 months of air pollution monitoring, the Clarkson Airshed Study report was published in 2007. While the visibility of heavy industry structured the community’s assumptions about toxicity, the report demonstrated that in fact vehicle emissions from the nearby QEW highway and truck transport accounted for the majority of particulate pollution.1 Industries should certainly be held accountable for their environmental transgressions, but sometimes (as in this case) the most obvious cues of pollution may be faulty if not considered within wider patterns, similar to how the visible and invisible stakes of climate change cannot fully be signified with any single image, like a smokestack, tailings pond, or emaciated polar bear. Industry forms part of a dominant human-made and -enforced system where populations depend on materials like cement and refined oil for the necessities of living and working. If the factory is not here, then where?

Personal and public anxiety about the contamination of the commons (shared natural resources like air, soil, and water) must not be limited to hyper-localized, “not in my backyard” sentiments that reflect a fear of the permeable border of the body and its vulnerability. What would it mean to consider being polluted as a kind of empathy or collusion with others and the environment, necessarily in mutiny against the global forces of capital that instead push us to compete for the prize of being the least toxified?2 What does it look like to actively conspire as the polluted, treating pollution as a commons and not a punishment, against that which solidifies environmental inequalities? The marginalized and under-classed within and between nations disproportionately experience the toxic byproducts of development and resource extraction, beyond lived and witnessed knowledge; as the landmark 2017 Lancet Commission reported, 92 percent of pollution-related deaths occurred in low-income and rapidly industrializing countries.3 The transmutation of nature from raw materials into goods considered useful for humans also produces harmful substances at a rate faster than they can be consumed by existing natural systems—this pollution, a displacement of responsibility, takes without giving back the same potential for life.

There is no “ideal” level of pollution (although economic cost-benefit analyses have been made).4 All pollution is toxic, and the “ideal” amount really means: what can we afford to lose? Who and what will be sacrificed (first) in the name of global development and infinite growth? Who is not worth attending to, and whose bodies are we not considering when we worry about local levels of pollution? The current system indicates that pollution is an acceptable cost for someone (although not necessarily us) to bear. Mass contamination (chemical, synthetic, plastic) cannot be fed back into the cycles of production—waste must be displaced.

The term “metabolic rift” describes the fracture of cyclical ecosystems that “govern the interchange of materials” in living beings and nature as a whole. While metabolism allows for a system’s regeneration and continuance, its rift is characterized by unequal exchanges of pollution and profit brought on by the global economy, and the alienation of human beings from nature.5 Historically, the pollution of a place has rendered possible the economic growth of another. In a particularly blunt example, the large-scale nineteenth-century guano trade saw the British Empire pilfering nutrients and rich soils from Peru and Chile; this created the fertile land and produce on which an empire was quite literally built. This “nutrient flow” was a one-way relationship, leaving the original lands subject to degradation and resource wars.6 Would the Empire have been as powerful if Britain’s soil fertility had remained poor, depleted, and unable to nurture life? While abundance accumulates, contamination is outsourced (see Koko, Nigeria, where Italian companies paid residents $100 a month to unknowingly store 18,000 drums of hazardous waste).7 In Ontario, landowners can be paid to receive and store part of the 25 million cubic metres of possibly polluted “excess soil” produced annually from development projects (a figure that has been on the rise since 2017).8 Meanwhile, three hours away from Mississauga, Sarnia’s Chemical Valley, with over 60 oil refineries and factories, houses 40 percent of Canada’s petrochemical industry and has the most polluted air in the country. It is bordered by Aamjiwnaang First Nation, a community that has been actively documenting and resisting the significant public health impacts of the Chemical Valley.9 Meanwhile, the pushing through of more pipelines is an attack on Indigenous sovereignty and health—all for the sake of meeting consumer and industrial oil demand.

…and a tiny, solid particle of fugitive dust escapes a material pile in Clarkson’s industrial area and sneaks into the luscious ecosystems of bodies at Lakeside Park…

Being and feeling contaminated implicates every body as a porous node in an overall earthly metabolism. Contamination provokes us to situate ourselves in material exchange and relation with the environment, other people’s bodies, and any organism that breathes or absorbs—in the act, expelling what was inner into outer, trading recognition of a mutual influence. We do not bear pollution’s effects equally. The material interconnection that lived (and feared) experiences of toxicity make visible could profoundly shift understandings of risk, responsibility, local environmental ethics and lobbying—as well as the source of climate change, and its potential alleviation of its negative effects. Such allegiances must benefit all forms of life, and conspire against the forces that be and systemic imbalances that consider certain acts of toxic colonialism acceptable because they are profitable.

The body is already, always open. But are you polluted enough?


Part three of a serial column by a member of The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge team on the physical and material traces of climate change and environmental violence in the region.

Joy Xiang is a writer, arts worker, and perpetual late bloomer living in Tkaronto. Her work engages desire, migration, material flows, and media nostalgia and futurity. She prioritizes collective and collaborative processes, and learning ways of being together in complication and intimacy. Her first zine cold blood used cold-blooded creatures as a metaphor for creative and survival-focused adaptation strategies. She has been on the editorial team of Milkweed, re:asian, and Canadian Art; written for Mercer Union, Ada X, and Hamilton Artists Inc.; and held positions at Blackwood Gallery and Vtape. She is a member of the feminist working group EMILIA-AMALIA.

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