While we have thought through form during the semester, maps have emerged as a particularly interesting site to examine how the relationship between toxicity and our ability (or inability) to fully apprehend its scale and effects is deeply intertwined with systems of power.
Maps are claims to space and information through processes of abstraction, and yet their usage is completely naturalized. As any cursory glance will tell you, attempts to map toxicity and communicate its locations are a mainstay of environmental justice activism, visually naming metrics such as industrial transportation routes, distributions of chemical plants, or the smoke plume of accidents such as the ITC Fire in Deer Park. These maps do something, trying (and often failing) to represent movement and complex toxified lifeworlds within two-dimensional space, exclusively relying on birds-eye views to make risk knowable and manageable. Even as they try to let communities aware of pollution that affects them, maps flatten landscapes and remake nature in particular and potentially dangerous ways. As scholars of colonialism such as Stone 1988 and Sampeck 2014 have shown, maps are not neutral or objective, but are contingent on their sponsors and producers’ desires and cultural, social, and political worlds. In relation to toxicity, the issue that has come up time and time again in our research is that they often rely on incomplete information.
A very small collection of maps we have examined in Houston:
In thinking of the ways that hazard and risks are assessed for these kinds of maps, we have been particularly interested in shape and staticity. For example, how do dots and lines differentiate between potential hazards (i.e., flammability, reactivity and toxicity)? Why is it useful to differentiate between hazards or not on these types of maps? What are the processes that go into deciding the risks and hazards posed by certain chemicals? What precautions are taken to mitigate reactions, fires, and seepage into bodies and environments? Perhaps most importantly, what is lost or foreclosed in these processes?
For our implosion, we have begun to explore how we can represent toxicity as not just an object, but a process. However, as we try to create an audio-visual map that conveys movement, scale, and magnitude, we have been confronted by both a staggering amount of historical information and a lack of it. When were maps of chemical industries first created? How did their usage become so widespread? What data is missing?
(Answers forthcoming!)