Simon Turner: Hi, good afternoon, it’s nice to be here again, talking about anthropogenic markers. What we are going to do now is introduce ourselves and our practice, where we’re coming from, and how we work. 

Let me start with my own work. I manage, coordinate, and organize the GSSP project of the Anthropocene Working Group, looking at anthropogenic markers at 12 sites across the globe trying to identify where we would fix stratigraphic evidence for the Anthropocene. In doing so, we use a series of markers, most of which are purely anthropogenic. These markers have been produced by fossil fuel combustion, atomic weapons testing, and pollution, to name a few, but we also address things like CO₂ and sulphate, natural things that have been accelerated by human activity. 

Most of these things existed on this planet before we started to interfere with them. That’s why I made a list there. I remember as an undergraduate that it’s a very difficult game to play. Is it a contaminant, or is it a pollutant? These are quite separate things. It’s a gradation—some things are contaminants so it’s hard to say, “Is this natural? Is it naturally high? Is it naturally low?” Most of the times when we’re at these sites, we recognize these as really obvious anthropogenic markers. But we also ask, “How? How much? Has it changed?” And so I’m just creating a list of only the main contaminants. We are looking at other markers, but these are just the ones I highlight here as contaminants. 

People have probably seen this map before. So, we have these global locations of the sites where we see similar patterns in a lot of these markers, but then, we sometimes see dissimilar patterns because nature has a really good way of homogenizing signals. It accentuates some contaminants in some deposits. They don’t always occur at the same time, and that’s why it’s such an interesting project to be involved with, looking at this idea of contaminants or markers. 

On the far left of this graphic is a curve for Spheroidal Carbonaceous Particles, or SCPs in short. I think it’s from our Polish core. I took most of the information from it because this is how we represent many types of contamination or pollution, and we just wanted a shape to illustrate. We also have a timescale to show how depth also equates with age. 

So, you can detect markers at very low levels between 1930 and 1940, as you see here, and that could give you some background information. Without human activity, you would expect to see these things in the ground at around a certain level. And when you see this build-up and it increases to a peak maximum, it could be having its most damaging effect as a contaminant, and could then move into this phase as a pollutant because it would start to have an ecological effect.

On the right side is a drawing I did in March 2022 when I was trying to figuratively describe how much of an effect you’d see in a core. These things are small; the ice core doesn’t change from blue to red, as in a cartoon, but we do see sometimes visible changes. What we’re quite often looking at are these very small changes in concentrations of parts per million, even per billion. So this is a problem we have and that we may later discuss with issues such as how to describe the scale of these things on a global and on a microscopic scale. It’s really quite a difficult challenge that I continually face when describing scale. I’m not very good at unit conversion, as well, just in case we do that later. I’m terrible at that. So, this is a scale diagram of the actual size of the stratigraphic archives we have. I drew these little lines at the top showing a 45-centimeter core from the Baltic. You know, these changes occur over a few centimeters, sometimes millimeters, and sometimes improve or deteriorate, but the changes you see are sometimes disappointingly small, and very subtle. It’s therefore often challenging to connect such subtle changes in contaminants and define them as pollutants. 

This is another thing about scale. So, I did this to think about the scale of how we get used to looking at contamination. 

This picture shows my boat, which I got from a Chinese supermarket, and this is a photo of the most remote place I could find. This is in the middle of Tibet a few years ago; I had been out collecting my bucket of sediment stories. They’re sediment cores which I collected using a very fragile boat in the middle of nowhere, collected material that we then went on to analyze in order to look at mercury and to build up a picture of global mercury patterns using a series of lakes across Tibet—building up this sort of global signatures of historical anthropogenic change by going somewhere really remote and looking at the difference between global contamination at regional patterns of airflow. It’s also a beautiful place. I mean, you know, we’re having conversations about contamination and pollution, but when I see a picture of Crawford Lake, I immediately want to go swimming. We think about contamination and pollution as something very visible, but this, this lake, is in the middle of absolutely nowhere, and yet you can detect big changes with the technology we have (and the technology we will have in the future). This is more the sort of pollution I work with on a personal level that is now contributing to the Anthropocene Working Group task. 

This is the sort of more dispersed pollution I generally work with—a product of power stations like this one in the UK Midlands. So when you see something like this and think about pollution, most of what you are seeing is just water vapor. It’s the thin chimney, which is often pumping out the toxics. But when you compare that to this great picture of the New Farm Powerhouse in Brisbane, Queensland in 1952 (next to which I coincidentally lived in the 2000s), I go, “Wow, did power stations really look like that?” Of course, when I was a neighbor it had by then been converted into an art center. So, there is this legacy of enormous amounts of pollution. We need to remember that older people used to live in cities where this was a very common practice. We’re often really looking at contamination nowadays, but there’s also this huge amount of carbon and combustion products that in the past were released straight out into the atmosphere, unfiltered.

And so, this brings me on to this idea of where I think pollution is going. I mean, we’ll come to some of your work on these source pollution episodes, which are horrendous and high and the pollution is very obvious. But what I think about sometimes more in the Anthropocene is things like my hometown. 

This is London. Obvious pollution is what we’ve seen in the past. But you know, it’s now the cleaning products, it’s the cars we drive, it’s sulphur emissions—like in the Matrix film with the Agent Smith going, “Urgh! Just the stench of humanity.” That’s what a lot of day-to-day contamination and pollution exposure is now: the indoor pollution, the air pollution sitting in the car, air pollution generally. It’s not as obvious, it’s not as visible, but it’s there.

This was just my last thing because I thought it’d be quite interesting to talk more about scale. I did some math. These are our GSSP sites ranked. I do quite a lot of work on mercury, and I thought, “If I’m going to talk about contaminants, I had better talk about a contaminant I know a little bit about.” On the left-hand side is a block of one million little square blocks where the little red dot represents one part per million (ppm). Other people call it one microgram per gramme, then if that was one gramme of sediment, one ppm of something would be akin to that little dot. Having ranked the mercury concentrations of the sites where we actually were (we did quite comparable measurements), we then have here the ranking by concentration per dry mass, from least to most contaminated. And so, I’ve got the low values here in the middle column, which are sort of like the background concentrations, and then I’ve put the highest concentration on the right hand side, just to show you the levels and the numbers that are in ppm or microgram per gramme. Therefore, when we’re talking about mercury contamination in the Gulf of Mexico coral, we’re looking at 0.0014 micrograms per gramme. That’s really a very low concentration of mercury. It’s higher than the low background, but it’s not massively high if you think about a ppm, so we work our way up the scale. It’s fairly obvious that when we move up and come to the more industrialized affected areas, we end up in sites like Beppu Bay, which has the highest mercury concentration in the sediment, 0.4 ppm, just under a half that little red dot. 

I then thought, “Well, if this were a sediment study, then I could try and give it some sort of assessment of toxicity.” It’s interesting to talk about pollution as a historical concentration in a sediment core, but we also need to assess how bad it is now, how to measure pollution, and how to talk about what risk it has. So, I have put a probable ecological effect value in there. About one ppm mercury in a gram of sediment is usually regarded as high, you need to do something about that in modern sediments. So if you’ve got one ppm of mercury in a gram of sediment, then it’s clearly contaminated, and it’s almost certainly going to have a measurable ecological effect. 

When I thought about you, Murphy, I thought, “Well, how much mercury is in the Great Lakes?” Here is a value from a paper from a couple years ago. So, the most contaminated sediment survey I found in a paper was about two ppm. Two ppm of mercury is a lot, but again, when you compare it to a gramme, it doesn’t seem that much you know, surely we could probably deal with that. The most important or most famous toxic mercury event was probably Minamata Bay. They were pumping mercury-contaminated waste straight out into the bay. It was even greater at its peak. In the sediments—not the water or the fish—it was over 500 micrograms per gramme. I’ve just marked 1000 ppm there in lighter red. Even the best-known, worst ecotoxicological mercury release in history, and certainly the best–studied one, was still only a small fraction of that cube, but big enough due to its toxicity to have significant ecological effect on humans and other organisms. And so, it’s just interesting and useful to compare these sort of anthropogenic markers that we’re very keen on discussing as real evidence of environmental change with their appropriate scale.

Murphy, would you like to follow on from that?

Michelle Murphy: Yes, so I’m Michelle Murphy, and most of the work I’ve been doing since about 2015 is about an area in Ontario, Canada on Anishinaabe land—an area called Chemical Valley. Chemical Valley is the site of the world’s first commercial oil field as well as the most important place for the refining of petrochemicals in Canada. Something like 40% of Canada’s petrochemical refining happens in Chemical Valley. The work that we do is at an Indigenous Environmental Data Justice Lab, and it involves both people at the university and also people from Aamjiwnaang First Nation, who are some of the world’s greatest experts in fossil fuel pollution because they’ve been living with it on their territory since the 1850s. 

I want to start telling you about Chemical Valley by thinking about how it was mapped and surveyed in the nineteenth century. Part of making Chemical Valley possible was the use of surveys to establish property relations and create the reserve system. It was a literal clearing of the land, both in terms of lumber but also in terms of constraining Indigenous people to particularly small parcels where they were not allowed to speak their language, practice ceremony, and where their children were sent to something called residential schools. And so, that process of creating what we might call like an apartheid situation, in this period, was really important for the first establishment of fossil fuel capitalism in this area. Chemical Valley sits on a river that runs from Lake Huron down to Lake Erie. At the bottom of this river is Detroit. So this region—where at the top of the river is where the first commercial oil field was and at the bottom is Detroit—is really important for the establishment of the logics of fossil fuel capitalism and its relationships to colonialism, what we might also call racial capitalism. 

The way that the oil field was found was because of this geological survey done in the 1850s. The geological survey was looking for different minerals and other potential resources for establishing the emerging state of Canada, which wasn’t confederated yet—Canada didn’t yet exist in 1850. Instead, it was mostly colonial companies that were chartered by the British crown and which were the precursor to the establishment of Canada. They found the spots where oil just bubbled to the surface, and they were pretty excited about them. And they published it. That brought a whole set of land prospecting and land speculation to this area, which is Anishnaabek territory.

It’s interesting to think about geology as a field, both really being part of this process of constituting the conditions—whether it be the surveys, whether it be the looking for resources—that helped make massively scaled fossil fuel violence possible, and then as geologists today, wrestling with that history and trying to use their tools to do something different to reckon with it.

Today there are about 57 different facilities that surround Aamjiwnaang First Nation. It’s surrounded on all sides. It’s surrounded below by scores of pipelines. These are pipelines that can be transcontinental pipelines, but they’re also feedstock pipelines that bring fractionated parts of oil to plastics or fertilizer companies. All the many, many things that you do with petroleum, that make the plastics that become the microplastics signals that make technofossils.

The Imperial Oil Refinery is a facility we are obsessed with at our lab. Not only because it’s the biggest emitter regionally, but because we believe it’s the oldest refinery in the world. It began in 1870. There was another refinery that was the same age in Pennsylvania that blew up in 2019. It did shut because it blew up. Now the Imperial Refinery is part of a very large complex that does more, of course, than refining chemicals and oil. 

The other thing I want to say about the history of Chemical Valley is that there was a long period before 1850 when there was no constraint on the process of fossil fuel extraction. Extraction was part of a colonial logic that ascribed itself the right to come and take, and to come and kill. The logic was part of the Christian Doctrine of Discovery. If people weren’t properly Christian, anything could be done to them. If the land wasn’t properly made into property and productive, anything could be taken. That led to the establishment of a kind of entitlement to pollution that is deeply part of this colonial legacy. And so, in Chemical Valley there’s a long history and lots of documentation of the oil flowing into the air, going into the water, going two inches thick down the river. It goes on and on. 

But in the 1970s, when environmental regulation began, an important change happened, and they were forced to stop pushing things into the water and into the air. In pushing things into the air, you had maybe less point-source local intensity of pollution, but you did have a kind of inauguration of new modalities of global atmospheric flow. That happened. So when we think about the question of the small number that a scientist might measure for a pollutant, if you’re standing in a particular local spot that will not capture that, there is nothing small about atmospheric flows of chemical pollution. The problems of pollution measurement are important in Chemical Valley because even if the instrument doesn’t say much, you can feel it, you can see it with your eyes, you can actually hear it with your ears. 

How our lab comes to understand pollution in Chemical Valley is by understanding how pollution is a form of colonialism. We build on the work of Max Liboiron who has written a really wonderful book called Pollution is Colonialism. 

It begins, in part, with an understanding of land and land disruption. When we say land, we don’t mean soil or earth, we really draw—at least in our lab—on a snobby understanding of land with land as all our relations. Land includes waters, it includes air, it includes ancestors. So when we look down at the land, we are asked to think that the land is the first teacher, that law in knowledge doesn’t derive from human activity, it comes from the land, and we are students of that, which is a powerful epistemology that not only our ancestors—both human and non-human kin—are in the land, but that the future generation is in the land as well. And so if we think about reproduction in this way, it doesn’t simply go from body to body, it goes land, body, land, and not just between us as humans, but with nonhumans too. So if you have this way of thinking about land, pollution really becomes a different thing. 

The other thing I wanted to say was that I appreciated how Simon brought up mercury. Canadian refineries can produce about 50 to 60 times the amount of pollutants that a comparable US refinery will produce. It’s very unregulated. In this region—both in Aamjiwnaang First Nations and another community called Grassy Narrows First Nation—in Northwestern Ontario, are places that also had intensive mercury poisoning. Whenever we have a community meeting, people who are my age or older will often be telling us stories about how there was so much mercury pollution that as children they would just be picking up the silver with their hands to play with, and adults would always be trying to get them to stop doing it. The Canadian government was not interested in this problem whatsoever. Scientists from Minamata Bay in Japan came over in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. They showed that both Amjiwnaang and Grassy Narrows were sites of Minamata disease that were comparable to Minamata Bay for mercury poisoning. 

So, to conclude, it’s really interesting to think about the fact that if you do a core or a sample, you are probably going to get a really different signal depending on where you are, up and down the river, or whether in the Great Lakes area or somewhere else, but let me pass this to Lesley now.

Lesley Green: Thank you both very much. One of the issues I have been working on chemical contamination in the city of Cape Town, where I live. One of the immense challenges of signaling the Anthropocene for our research teams is the engagements with the municipality. The City of Cape Town is under a centre-right political party; it has been for about 10 years. They are the official opposition in South Africa. What that means is that you’ve got the context of a city that’s determined to show that it is the best-run city in the country. The argument is, therefore, that they should have political power in other cities and other provinces. For this reason, the markers of pollution are the focus of an intense and ongoing political struggle, which means that there’s kind of a “science war” going on. 

Now, I’m going to show you a couple of pictures of different bays in Cape Town. Just to give you some idea of what kind of thing we’re up against when we’re trying to speak about pollution. The team, I want to acknowledge, consists of Dr. Cecilia Ojemaye (who’s just recently finished her PhD at the University of the Western Cape) along with her project supervisor Professor Leslie Petrik, who’s an environmental chemist. Cecilia did her master’s in pharmacy in Nigeria, and so she’s got a particular interest in pharmaceuticals. 

As an Environmental Humanities team, we’re really curious about what kinds of connections we can make. In large part, our collaboration with environmental chemists began because I was doing a lot of ocean paddling at the time, and a lot of our fellow paddlers were getting ill. So, the question was why. We tried to take samples of water to the city, “Please test this water because it’s making us sick.” And they were met with denials and obfuscations. The samples would be accepted, but then lost, and so on. So I then met Leslie Petrik and suggested we start a small research project around this. 

This is one of the bays. This is at the coast of a place called Milnerton, a middle-class suburb in Table Bay. Bear in mind that Cape Town is a peninsula on the southwestern corner of Africa, which means that, on one side, you’ve got the Atlantic Ocean, and, on the other side, you’ve got the Indian Ocean. This is on the Atlantic side in Table Bay, and what you’re seeing there is the subject of great contestation. 

The image was taken by Jean Tresfon, who is a conservation photographer and a microlight pilot. He took this image which, of course, caused huge consternation because it’s been an ongoing battle between the city and the residents of that area who are saying, “There’s terrible pollution coming down that river. The river is stinking and the fish are dying, birds are dying, birds have disappeared.” When Jean took this photograph and released it, the city’s response was, “No, you’ve got it all wrong. That’s not sewage. It’s an algal bloom.” Which of course, if you’ve got a particular ontology, it is an algal bloom, but the algal bloom wouldn’t be there if the sewage weren’t there. So, this is kind of sleight of hand, you know, what I think Isabelle Stengers would call sorcery, in the use of a scientific claim to make an anti-scientific argument. And so, we had a senior official in City Water and Sanitation making a speech to 40 scientists in a room and saying, “Look, it’s an algal bloom, not sewage.” To my astonishment, there was silence. Nobody challenged him, giving you a sense of the of the politics of compliance. Now, part of what’s going on here is also that upstream there is not only a failing wastewater treatment works, but there’s also a shack settlement, which means that there’s a lack of sanitation services. That means that people are using a bucket system for night soils which often end up in the street. There is a system of chemical toilets, but they’re highly contested and not always collected on time. So there’s huge socio-political issues going into this contamination, and one of the issues about this contamination is that, because it’s got such a high load of sewage, it also contains a huge proportion of pharmaceuticals. 

So, that’s one river downstream of one wastewater treatment works. On the other side of Cape Town—the southern side on the Indian Ocean, is False Bay. “False” Bay because it’s not the Table Bay, not the one that you dock in if you’re sailing. That’s very close to where I live. There was a desalination plant in the area. When Cape Town had its major drought in 2018, it almost ran out of water. The city set up desalination plants on two parts of this bay and another one on Table Bay. All three plants failed, and at least one of those companies involved is in the process of taking the city to court with the court case resting on incorrect ocean contamination figures. The plant was set up at huge cost and then dismantled after a couple of months because, again, the algal blooms—which wouldn’t have been in there in such intensity if there were not contamination—made it impossible for the membranes of the desalination plants to work.

What’s fascinating about this area is the part that ironically looks like a face–I call it the face of anthropos. That’s a seventy-hectare waste dump in the city; it’s one of the city’s two waste dumps, but it’s right on the ocean. Next to it is the wastewater treatment works, again, right on the ocean. And not only on the ocean, but also on the recharge zone of the Cape Flats aquifer, which is our emergency water. Very close by, is a whole lot of farmland, for which the small-scale farmers and land rights claimants took the city to court to stop them building over it. They won their court case because the judge ruled that this was in fact the major recharge zone of the Cape Flats aquifer. You can imagine the level of heavy metal contamination from a seventy-hectare waste dump that does not sort out its electronic waste or the pharmaceutical contamination coming in. So, no surprise that in False Bay there are very, very high levels of contaminants in fish that have been sampled. The gills, flesh, and livers of the fish were sampled, and the team consistently found very high levels of contaminants in them.

Green land around it is actually a nature reserve–presumably because ecosystem services are supposed to clean up the landscape. Then around that is a landscape of dispossession. The apartheid state led forced removals in the ‘60s and ‘70s and dumped people of color in this area. In the summer, when there’s a prevailing wind, you’ve got dust from that waste dump going straight into people’s bodies through breathing. There’s an enormous amount of dust that flies around there. In the winter, the wind blows in the opposite direction, and so you’re getting that straight into the ocean. Again, these are fairly high levels of contaminants.

In the ocean very close to that waste dump, there were very high levels of cadmium found in some mussels. To my astonishment, the scientists that wrote a thirty-year review of the science of False Bay could not offer an explanation for that. A senior official in the City’s oceans and coasts division was one of the authors, and they couldn’t explain this. They declared that the high levels of content of cadmium must be due to, and I quote, ”topographical features.”

This image is on the Atlantic seaboard. What you’re seeing here is in Green Point, it’s at the south of Table Bay, where there’s a marine sewer outfall. Now, the City of Cape Town would not have such a good record of sanitation services if the ocean contamination were measured. The claim that Cape Town is managing its sewage better than any other city is simply because it’s sent out to sea, not to rivers, as in many other poorly-functioning municipalities. This is raw sewage, and the claim is made that the trucks pick up the matter that’s been macerated, the claim is made that it goes to landfill. However, residents who’ve lived there for many years simply have no recollection of seeing trucks. So on the one hand, the city’s claiming that it’s picking up the solid matter, on the other hand, the suggestion from local residents is that the pipes simply get reverse-washed and the sewage goes out, with its microplastics, etc.), and of course, being sewage, it has got very high levels of pharmaceuticals and persistent organic pollutants. 

Very briefly, this is Camps Bay, which is fairly close to Green Point, and there’s another marine outfall here. Now, the city was claiming that the very high E. coli counts in the ocean were from surface runoff, and they were denying that all of those marine outfalls were ever washing back to the coast. We, together with Leslie Petrik, began to do a study that looked at the actual pharmaceuticals because these clearly were going through people’s bodies, and that would show that we were really dealing with sewage, among many other studies that have been very heavily contested by the City. 

In a chapter from Cecilia Ojemaye’s PhD thesis, she looked at the herbicides simazine and atrapine in the water of Camps Bay. Camps Bay is very interesting because there’s is no industry there; it’s simply a residential area. The city responded with a rebuttal that claimed that the herbicides must come from surface runoff. The authors then responded with a supplement to their study, even when under pressure from the journal editor to withdraw their paper. They argued that in 2018—the year the rainfall study had been done—was a drought year, and there simply wasn’t enough rainfall to cause that level of surface runoff. The city then responded by sending the journal their certificate of analysis from Eurofins reference laboratory, which is in the Netherlands. It’s astonishing to discover that the City of Cape Town was sending its contaminant studies samples all the way to Europe when the LCMS equipment was available to do these tests in Cape Town; I’ve remained puzzled by that. Eurofins said that the chemicals were below a limit of detection, so then the question became, “Well, what was your limit of detection?” And Leslie Petrik then wrote to the manager of the Eurofins laboratory—which by the way is one of the highest-performing European stocks, I must add, globally for the past ten years. They also appear in papers loaded by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists linking them to various tax havens. So, there are a lot of questions around the actual governance of the company that have been raised in those papers. Wikipedia will tell you that Eurofins has paid, in the United States alone, $28 million in court-imposed fines for regulation violations, much of which was linked to bribery and corruption according to the NGO Good Jobs First. This raises a lot of questions about their commitment to interest-free science elsewhere, including in Cape Town. Petrik then went back to them said, “Well, what was your limit of detection?” And it turns out that they used an unusually high limit of detection. You know, simply saying that being below limit of detection, therefore, could not imply the absence of these chemicals. So, that was the response of Petrik and Ojemaye to the city and there was no further discussion.

You know, that’s the kind of science around pollution signals which are Anthropocene issues. I think we need to recognize and acknowledge that sewage, particularly with the pharmaceutical load that it carries, is part of our Anthropocene condition as part of the environmental devastation that we are dealing with. In late 2018, we measured 1.2 million Enterococci in a river downstream of a wastewater treatment works, which is operated by one of the big global water utility companies. It was clear that an unbearable load of sewage was going downstream, so we tried to get a meeting with the City to raise this, and a couple of community members arrived at the meeting as well, whom we did not expect. The officals said, “Well, we are not going to meet with you because we don’t do politics, we meet only with scientists, and if we meet with members of the community, that’s politics.” So I said, as the leader of the delegation, I said, “Look, you know, please respect my code of ethics. It’s not ethical for me as a social scientist to speak for communities or for people who can speak for themselves.” The community members offered not to say anything, but that was also not acceptable to the officials. They walked out of the meeting and said we were playing politics and they weren’t prepared to engage. 

They didn’t reply to any emails or phone calls in the space of two weeks. At that point, we felt an ethical obligation to publish, so we put a short article in an online daily and made the case that environmental management figures needed to be available. Their response, “Academics unsubstantiated bombshells trigger panic free of accountability,” was an astonishing attack that, I might add, has caused all of us immense reputational harm in university systems. In some ways, I’ve never quite fully recovered from the reputational harm that was done to us on that score. We chose not to sue for libel, which it was. However, we then responded with a very short article that pointed out a couple of the broad areas of counterfactual argument that had been made and invited the city water officials to commit themselves to ethical and evidence-based governance of environmental contamination. 

I’m very glad to say that, since the most recent round of elections in October last year, we have a new mayor who’s more open. There are also some new officials whom we can work with. I’m hopeful that we can begin to actually acknowledge these kinds of issues and deal with them, but I think the broad question here is that pollution signals are subjected to what I would call a toxic politics of toxicity.

Michelle Murphy: Thank you, Lesley. One kind of question that might be important is, if pollution emissions are one of the most massive disturbers of lands, waters, and airs, how do we deal with them given the ways that they’re so hard to signal? You know, plutonium gives a nice signal, but chemical pollutants have—for all sorts of reasons—are much more difficult to surveil … Some of the reasons are political and social, some materials are hard to turn into a signal. And so, Simon, maybe you could start and tell us a little bit about your work thinking with fly ash and trying to turn it into a signal.

Simon Turner: What really struck me with at the response and sort of pollution incidents that you are reporting, Lesley, was it is really hard to measure pollution, and so those sorts of trickery with discussing things like levels of detection and, you know, which pollution? What is a pollutant? Is it an algal bloom, etc.? You know it’s very easy to create disharmony and confuse. My example is mercury and, like SCPs, some of these single things are relatively easy. You can do experiments, you can say, “Well, we’ll expose some daphnia or some other small organisms to levels of concentrations, and we can get an ecological threshold.” We can say something about an element, a pollutant, and we can do that sort of tests. That Eurofins laboratory, something’s going on there for sure, but it is hard. 

So if someone says there is a pollution incident, I measure this first thing and someone can say, “Oh, did you not measure x or y?” And you go, “Oh, we didn’t because we didn’t have the resources.” Then they can say, “Oh, well, you know, if you had measured both, you could compare and say something more precise.” Sometimes it’s easy to say where it’s coming from. Like that big refinery, pretty obvious where it’s coming from. I’m not sort of defending, you know, how to do this, or sort of defending people who misuse it, but it is genuinely very hard to pinpoint sources. So when you start looking at real pollution, like you’re describing, it’s very often not just a single element or substance. Mercury is a good one to study because it has such amazing characteristics like being bio accumulative. You can have a little bit, but it has enormous toxicological effects, unlike many other elements. But what’s incredibly hard is when you have mixed models, mixtures of pollutants. What’s the one causing the damage? When it’s obvious—like oil flowing down a river—you go, “It’s probably the oil causing that.” But when you start looking at this sort of more dispersed industrial/urban waste such as levels of cadmium, if you start measuring and monitoring this stuff, it’s very hard to sort of work out what is actually causing the damage—and quite often it’s cumulative. 

In sedimentological work you can add them (the contaminant concentrations) all up, and you divide things by factors based on lots of previous ecotoxicological work and end up with calculated or estimated ecological thresholds. If you’re lucky enough, you have more data, you can put in more information, and it will create a more robust expression of how toxic the sample that you’re dealing with is. But that’s only for sediment, it’s very hard then to apply that to water or to the atmosphere than to the soil. All these things are sort of measured and monitored quite differently. 

Just thinking about both your work is such an incredible reminder about what we do. When you see this localized, the intense effects of the Anthropocene. I was just talking about distance, but it’s the same story. We have to look at this very similar sort of materiality in what’s happened in these processes. This is causing changes in Tibet, but it’s causing a far more dramatic effect in the bays in Cape Town, in Lake Erie, and elsewhere. So that’s probably not a great answer. It’s just so interesting to see these contrasting scales.

Lesley Green: What’s interesting is that these persistent organic pollutants, also known as chemicals of emerging concern, do evaporate from the ocean, and then they’re subject to long range planetary transport. So what goes into the ocean at Cape Town gets evaporated, transported around the planet, you know. I mean, how many cities discharge sewage into sea? Municipalities have a global responsibility, and I feel very strongly that the problem with the Stockholm Convention—which governs the release of chemicals of emerging concern—is that it doesn’t pay attention to the fact that it’s an agreement signed at a national level, but it’s very often implemented at a municipal level. It seems they haven’t actually understood that the relationship between municipal and national may be very uneasy.

Simon Turner: Just quickly going back to plutonium, there’s only a few places where it’s really come from. So in terms of saying where’s it from, who did it, and what happened, we have techniques to fingerprint exactly where it’s from. For organic pollutants it’s usually really hard to do the same. You can broadly point to areas and regions and locations, and some things are more obvious than others, but it’s very difficult once things enter the atmosphere/hydrosphere. They then really have a great habit of coming back and accumulating and metabolizing. We did some work in a small pond in Yorkshire, UK many years ago. These fish were metabolizing an organic pollutant and transforming it into something else. We didn’t know they did that. And so then you have a metabolite which is also an organic pollutant. These things are not or rarely monitored. There’s very few places to do this properly and effectively, and where they are able to differentiate where this pollution is coming from and what effect this is having on not just little organisms, so it’s very rarely done.

Michelle Murphy: I’ve got to the point where I was so frustrated with chemical data, or even the informatic form by which we normatively identify and monitor chemical pollutants. If I look at that history of molecular governance  and the investment in understanding particular materials one at a time (particularly for IP purposes), and then when I look at the monitoring data and the regulation process of regulating chemicals one at a time, year by year for example, this way of informating chemicals is to me a theatre. This kind of molecular governance is part of a commitment to give ongoing permission to pollution because the chemical substances that are being manufactured or put out as pollutants are being disentangled from all their social relations. I think it’s an accomplishment of the last 150 years that we’ve created a kind of chemistry that is so invested in the chemical fetish, that disentangles chemicals to such a degree that we actually build our instruments to look at things one molecule at a time. Of course, it is so many kinds of knowledges that we can make out of molecular science. But there is another side to it, which is the constraining of our understanding of chemical pollution or chemical materials that are designed and purposely also put into the world as commodity forms and part of production. It is often on purpose that institutions only study chemicals and regulate them in such a narrowed dimension. And so one of the things that we deal with at Chemical Valley, and this is very common in pollution hotspots, is that the science is not that useful. In fact, and most often, it’s used exactly like Lesley is saying, namely to deny the form of violence.

It’s really hard when we take a measurement in soil, or measurement in someone’s blood, to trace it back to the cause of a harm or to trace it upward to where it came from. That is true. However, it is not hard to understand that fossil fuel production is violent. That doesn’t take these fine-grain measurements. If you’re standing in Aamjiwnaang First Nation, it does not take any instrumentation to understand the force of this modality of production, and people could easily story it to you. 

We also know that Imperial Oil is owned by Exxon; the other companies there are Suncor, Shell, and Nova Chemicals. They’re big, multinational companies. If we look at who owns those companies, it’s a particular list of hedge funds, global investment portfolios, and very large banks. In the end, I feel like, it is vital to remake  the kind of chemical informatics that the findings of your research and the findings of Lesley’s research require of us. An informatics that asks of us to attach the chemical to the source of its harm. And to responsibility. It is crucial  to query  how this chemical fetish is useful, and how it’s also really not useful.

Simon Turner: Yeah, doing another soil survey in a neighborhood called “Cancer Alley” isn’t going to contribute an enormous amount. It would have been done before in, I mean, the distance you have to travel, measurement-wise. It’s really interesting to think about these markers for transition from markers to chemical violence as a huge continuum. You know, rather naively, I think, “Scientists, if I keep measuring, maybe it’ll … it will matter, it will have a purpose!” And someone in policy will go, “Oh, my God! These … these results are amazing. Look at that Excel spreadsheet! We can use this in policy.” But data does need to be there. I also just think about the openness and transparency of environmental data. For so long, it has been hidden. The soil and air results here, these have been hidden in the past; there’s no denying that, you know, big polluters hide data. By law they have to monitor, and so we do it. And through hook by crook, they hide it. Like we said about measuring single things and not thinking about mixed effects, is this going to have a big effect if you start reducing one pollutant but increasing something else? But we don’t know what happens. Really, the lack of knowledge or deliberate obfuscation is astonishing.

Lesley Green: I think it is really interesting to look at where the research questions come from. It might be useful in the next iteration of this kind of work to start with local communities, in bays or in rivers, or wherever. To ask, “What are you experiencing? What has happened in the last twenty, thirty years?” And begin to open up different questions. Our huge project on ocean contamination started with kayakers saying, “We’re getting sick,” and that framed research questions and we’ve been quite dogged about pursuing them. But, you know, most of the city officials would say, “Well, that’s just anecdotal evidence, it doesn’t exist as fact.” Yet from these everyday observations, this whole project unfolded. So this, I think, is one of the crucial things for colleagues in the sciences: To trust questions that come from anecdotal evidence and use those to pose research questions.

Simon Turner: History is littered with anecdotal evidence. It’s often the first time it’s mentioned or noted. With disease and pollution, things like that, you can do the monitoring, but it’s usually an old pattern like pollution in rivers and lakes or people getting ill. It’s worth it not to ignore anecdotal data because it’s a human experience. We as humans are pretty good at picking up when things are wrong.

Michelle Murphy: There are other ways of worlding chemical pollution that’s more than just collecting anecdotal or local evidence. I’m thinking about the conversations that have happened around Francine’s core at Crawford Lake, her bringing forward the understanding that the lake is living. I don’t know anything about Wendat relations with water, but I can say something about Anishinaabe thinking about water. Anishinaabe say water is life; it’s not just that the lake is alive, like an organism. The word for water is Nibi, which I have been taught means “towards me,” and you understand that you are actually a form of water. I have  been to different water ceremonies. I remember one where an  Elder spoke for forty minutes naming the forms of water. It’s not just the forms of fog, or rain or river, it was also naming kinds of soils, kinds of insects, birds, and many other forms of being. All these forms of water in which water is not an object—and all the forms are not objects but actions of being. So it provokes me to think, “Well, if I’m working in Chemical Valley, and this is Anishinaabe territory, what is a chemical pollutant? What are its forms? What are its extensive relations? How is it an action and not just an object? Is it okay to think about it in this molecular object way alone?” And answering these questions is more complicated even than the problem of letting the chemical stay still as a universal object form and then merely collecting local knowledges to give a more complex characterization of that chemical object. Instead, it is to ask, “What is a chemical pollutant? Or what is chemical violence? Or what is substance or what is matter?” It might be really important to unsettle the universal way of doing chemical science because, unfortunately, it is both that which measures its harm and is responsible for harm, or complicit in its production. So how do we not reproduce the epistemologies that in many ways gave birth to the thing one is now wrestling with?

Brian Holmes: Marcel Duchamp said that the beautiful observers make a beautiful painting. In other words, there’s a contribution of the observer to the quality or the lack of quality of the painting; if the observer doesn’t have the gaze, it’s impossible for this painting to be beautiful. In fact, the beauty doesn’t all reside in the painting. It isn’t that a certain observer can see the hidden medium, and it is that beauty is actually produced, and by at least half or in some kind of sliding scale by the observer. In a certain way, I think the toxicity of chemicals is actually produced by the sensitivity that we have, or do not have to, let’s say, to the value of life, and in most cases, this sensitivity is completely absent.

I have organized to have on my phone a large amount of information about the place where I live, and I was looking back to a particular metal factory. In 2019, it released 248 pounds of manganese into the air. Manganese is a neurotoxin. It’s particularly damaging to children. This factory is located between a large Black neighborhood and a large Latino neighborhood in an industrial corridor and employs a lot of people. We have a fair amount of information about it that’s very easily available, and I can actually find it in thirty seconds. It has a risk score assigned by our EPA. A risk score of 10 is large, 20 is starting to be concerning. The risk score of this factory is in the 9,000+. No, sorry, 900,000+. In other words, the risk score of this factory is completely off the charts of anything tolerable. You never hear anything about this in the city of Chicago. I’ve never heard this factory being mentioned by anyone. For about a year since I put together that map, I have been contemplating how I could engage a project to create the sensitivity in the city where I live, because this is just one among many, many, many factories in the greater Chicagoland. 

This work is no longer in the measuring. The toxic release inventory, we have it in the United States since the 1970s. It took a lot of activism to gain that, and having gained it, it is sort of dead on arrival because there are so many other social factors, the main one being employment in this case, I’m sure this is the reason why. So the figures of employment and the political valence that that has in the city completely cancels anything that would augment the sensitivity of people to the value of their own and of other people’s health. 

The too-late aspect of the Anthropocene is that it’s now too late to continue this sort of fetish of data. It’s not that the data is invaluable. It’s that it’s not enough. It’s nowhere near enough. I think everyone who’s involved with chemical violence knows this. That’s been a large part of the conversation here because we’re looking at very obvious things, but things whose obviousness does not register. So there’s an aesthetic, in a way, but I think you would be better to use the spiritual language and the language of value and language of life. How does a perception become a change in orientation? That change in action, I think, is really the question.

Simon Turner: How much more of a measurement do you need? How many more measurements do we need in the Anthropocene to tell you how the world has changed at a local level? I mean, it’s almost like a paralysis. I think the next major challenge of scientists and everyone is figure out what to do with this information. We’re swamped with environmental information, some very dodgy, but mostly pretty good. There is clearly enough to do things about it. The difficult part is how and what actions to take using what we already have.

Lesley Green: I think one of the things that I’ve learned through this project has been how divided and fragmented the sciences are. Many in the scientific community are terrified of backing anybody that’s in trouble with a potential funder or source of data, you know, which in this case is the City. In the end, what you have is the academic community operating as its own powerful censor because that’s how the networks operate in terms of closing and opening doors. So, there’s the networks of power that are linked to the fact that we work in neoliberal universities where research centers compete with one another for funding. You’ve then got that competitive angle to research funding, and there’s a lot of gatekeeping around that. 

You’re also in a situation where organizations that should be protecting the commons because they are government-funded become semi-privatized, and if the scientists are told, “You only have a job to the extent that you can secure contracts that will pay your salary,” that operates then to silence them as well, and you’ve got a series of silencings. 

But the most important for me is the way in which we “do knowledge,” and this comes back to the thing of the molecular. The only thing that laboratory research can do in this situation is the identification of the particular molecule, but it needs field research to put the puzzle together as to where those molecules come from. What’s been so fascinating about listening to these extraordinary projects that your team has done in the last decade is hearing geologists and biogeochemists actually starting to do the tracing of where the signals are coming from. My question to Francine earlier was, what does it mean to inherit this scholarship? What does it mean to be an inheritor of Anthropocene geology in academic institutions? To me, it invites what Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, a Brazilian colleague, called an “anthropocenography.” We’re actually not just measuring individual objects in space and time, you know, putting them in Cartesian space. We are really foregrounding the kinds of relations and building very different kinds of science which track the relations that are world-making. 

We can then escape the problem of a corporate or a municipal official who can say, “That’s an algal bloom.” We can get away from the thing of “what is it?” Which is such a deadening question, and we can begin to attend to the metabolisms, to the sedimentation, to the Earth processes. We can begin to think of these Earth processes that are being described and explore how they can become central to a kind of a social science going forward. I think that the urgent need is for an integrative scholarship to emerge. If there’s one thing that this workshop has given me hope for, is that that kind of process-based research actually might emerge, because it’s such terrific work that has been done on Earth processes. What do those mean for the social sciences? And what did that mean for the natural sciences? You know, why do we continue to inherit this architecture of our universities that comes from the Victorian era? Let’s invent something different!

Simon Turner: Yeah, there was a question earlier this morning about fieldwork, and I’m sure people have tried it before, this sort of sociology-driven geological fieldwork. The objectivity of statistical analysis or sampling would take you to places, and you’d make sure that you have enough samples in one place to represent where you think contamination is, you’d go somewhere else, like Tibet, and you’d get some background data. And so, you’d have these objectified scales of like, where it’s high, where it’s low. But that doesn’t start to answer the questions about where people are actually interacting with, say, soils, or where the children are playing. That’s what’s more important than, you know, than you probably missing that sampling point, if you did it as a quantitative analysis. You need to go and ask questions of where people are interacting, where they’re going to the toilet, where they’re washing their hands. These are very human elements of interaction with the environment which would get missed with a purely quantitative analysis. Moving into the much more physical sciences, molecular measurements … why are we measuring this? Not just because it’s really interesting, but also because people need to know on very different levels and different scales.

Michelle Murphy: Our lab did this little project this summer about what in Canada is called the National Pollution Release Inventory. The Ministry of Environment and Climate Change Canada wanted to hear from Indigenous experts—and particularly from a frontline community—about what’s wrong with their data and how to make it more accessible because their data is just like a list of chemicals on a gigantic spreadsheet. It turns out that most of the data reported is not based on any physical measure whatsoever. It’s more like an  Excel spreadsheet that is based on industry-standard equations, and so the data of the National Pollution Release Inventory is not really accessible or accurate data at all, except that through this data the company does admit to pollution. So our lab did this project, and they wanted us to go through and say, “Well, you need to make this data more accessible, you need to make the fonts bigger, you need to make it more downloadable,” like this kind of thing. But that’s not what the community had to say, instead, community members and our lab asked, “Let’s reimagine environmental data. What would it look like if environmental data were governed by our values and Elders and youth? It would look like the land is in our language, and we’d have to begin to plan it in Anishinaabemowin.” And so then our thinking went on, “What would the practices be for this other way? What would the outcomes be?” So the finding of our report said they actually need their pollution release inventory to be governed by Indigenous people. The government experts we were in conversation with couldn’t understand our report because it was not useful to them, there were no actionable items to their thinking. But there was an actual item in it, which is that there are other governance structures that might be better, or might be different, for addressing environmental justice. And so, it’s not just the local sociological specificity that you add to universal knowledge. No matter where you are, there are actually different horizons of justice and different horizons of governance that are not tethered to the nation-state; I think that these are often better places to start.  

But our lab might hold this belief, and then the government is not picking up on it. It’s kind of a relief that the government can’t understand it. I mean, in some ways, you wouldn’t want to make anything that the colonial government could just take and make useful to itself, so that was an accomplishment in and of itself. But then also, the part of the work about rethinking chemicals that was accomplished was a small group of Amjiwnaang First Nation community members working with other Indigenous people are making their own modality of study, as opposed to being studied by colonial logics. 

Simon Turner: Yeah, that’s a fascinating field to look at, isn’t it? It makes me think of the high Arctic, for example, trying to embrace and combine Inuit inhabitation affected by ways of contamination. So when we think about contamination in remote areas, or the affected Indigenous cultures, there are certainly people studying this, but there are clearly not enough. And when we move away from places where there’s perhaps an obvious culture that has been affected, for instance, Brian’s example in an inner city which is, you know, a big mix of people, there are sometimes race, cultural, and economic divides as well. But having a map that tells you how high the manganese is, without something to say, is not going to help someone move, because he or she can’t.

Brian Holmes: Interestingly, there’s another case—open piles of manganese dust floating in the air—where there’s a constituted social movement, where within six months of the discovery of this, they had those piles out of circulation and covered. Through political action, that community was able to turn the knowledge into action, rapidly, because they have a long experience of it. Other communities don’t have that luck, really, to live in such a way that sediments social relations, that builds up actively. Social relationships give people leverage because the leverage would be there. But it’s not equally distributed because it takes very special conditions for that kind of capacities to form.

Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent: Thank you for this interesting discussion, which raises a lot of epistemological issues. Listening to you, I became convinced that, as you mentioned this morning, we have to objectify the Anthropocene because it has to be understood that we live in a toxic world. But at the same time, I wonder, well, who needs facts? Who needs matters of fact? We have seen that politicians just deny them, they just change the name. It’s not polluting, it’s algae. And we have too many data. We have too many lists of contaminants, but no one cares. And maybe we need more science, but not the kind of science that’s going on. In terms of contamination, and chemicals, we look at them, as you mentioned, as molecules, abstract entities separated from the environment, and this is what chemists say about them. But what we experience is that they circulate, they enter into our body, and they’re active. So it’s more a question of changing our regard on these contaminants, on these molecules. They’re active materials, they’re reactive, and they’re interactive. They’re interacting with us. So what kind of science could be adequate for conveying this more political view of chemicals as political actors? We have to invent that because it’s really important to take a different look at this problem. And pollutants have a life of their own, we have seen that they can they circulate, and that you can find them many, many centuries after. So, how could we turn our attention to their own lifecycle independently from ours?

Simon Turner: Thank you, Bernadette. I think we’ve discussed it before when we were talking about these standards and how we quantify, say, pollution. We were having a discussion about this probable-effect concentration. It’s a well-worked out principle of adding a chemical to an inert sediment. You expose some daphnia or other organisms over a 24-hour period and then say 17% die, and 22% are still swimming around, that gives you a number. These things are very well-thought out and tested and used for regulatory work. But, Bernadette, sadly, it’s only on one chemical, and it’s on an organism which is very sensitive. You don’t usually do the same thing with mixed assemblages of sediment or indeed organisms. It’s really standardized how we measure things to say what is high and what is low. It’s very rare to mix pollutants and see what happens if you add a third more of that one and reduce that other one by half. What’s the interaction? What effect does that have? 

Neil Rose and I once thought we should look at ecotoxicology or paleo ecotoxicology. Whether or not you can look at these multi-mixture contaminants, just using metals for a start, is so hard. You have to conceive how we look back in time how these things have interacted and how some have become legacy pollutants; some have been reworked and arrived in a different organic form. I can see why it’s easier to stick to a method of assessment that perpetuates, and perhaps derived from, measuring much higher concentrations of things in an industrial environment. That’s then applied to the environment, which we all know is far more complicated than we could ever think. How these things disappear, come again, come back in a different form, and interact, it’s easy to go in between the knowledge of scientists and just use that to obfuscate, to deceive, to lie about what the measurement is rather than embracing and saying, “Well, these measurements that we know have limitations were used as fact. And facts are very dangerous sometimes.”

NN: Hi, so, I’m not a scientist. I’m just a student from Hamburg, but I was reading a lot of your work, Michelle Murphy. I was wondering how I could translate the work you do. You already talked about doing methods that the nation-state will not understand, but I was thinking about how these new ontologies like, maybe, local ontologies could actually work? Where could I start? Because I definitely see the problems, for instance, in Hamburg, where a Roma community lives next to a garbage dump—as it is in all Europe—or the migration community keeps living next to the harbor where different refineries are located and so on. So, of course, this is happening locally, but still I’m wondering what’s my place as a white scientist? It’s maybe also question that not only young scientists, but all scientists, should think about. So I was wondering, how could we create ontologies or world-making that somehow empower? So that people have access to knowledge about what is happening, but in their own understanding? I find it difficult to translate because, of course, Germany is not a settler colonial state, although it was a colonial power. I would be grateful for insights.

Michelle Murphy: Well, my first thought is you start where you are. And if you start where you are, the first problem is probably, how does the university function to force you to reproduce kinds of study that you know are complicit in the violence you’re seeking to dismantle? That is a question that involves you having to find some comrades and doing something that is probably not confined to your discipline or your department. It may also involve collaborating with people who then are beyond the university, or outside the university, and that also is the place to start. Then the next question is, how are we going to work together differently? And that takes time.

Lesley Green: I think one of the issues is that the law of evidence disempowers people. The law of evidence requires members of the public to produce evidence of the order that we’ve heard in the last few days, which is hugely expensive and really time-consuming, complicated, and, frankly, out of range for most people. When I was doing research on fracking a couple of years ago, what I found very interesting was looking at the ways in which different legal regimes in the United States, state by state, were operating, and the state of Maryland did something very interesting. They turned the law around. Instead of requiring the public to provide evidence that fracking had harmed their livelihood or their health, they turned it around and said, “We know that fracking uses very harmful chemicals. So that’s our starting assumption. The onus is therefore on the company to prove that they’re not harmful.” And just by turning that culpability, that responsibility for evidence around, Maryland was just not as attractive a destination for fracking companies. Surprise, surprise! I think it’s crucial, as environmental democrats, to push for laws that are empowering, that put the onus on polluters to demonstrate that they are not harming, rather than putting the onus on the public to show that they’ve been harmed.

Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent: This is what the European legislation is doing. It puts the responsibility of proving on the company, but there is a backside to that. The flip side is that it’s only the large companies who can afford to pay the costs of proving that it’s not harmful, so it kills all the little companies in favor of the big multinationals.

Michelle Murphy: I guess I’m a gigantic pessimist. I have no faith in the nation-state or the EU or anything like that to constitute regulations that would break out of this permission to pollute system which we could also call a permission-to-kill tradition. I cannot see it happening. I think it is worth thinking about what is environmental justice without the nation-state as the horizon for addressing where these intractable violences might be dealt with. As a pessimist, I don’t think that any of our work is going to stop Chemical Valley, but I think that the point of the work is to be building intergenerational relations for coping with trying to live in as beautiful and just a way as possible, in a highly violent condition. This is the project of intergenerational survival in hostile worlds, and what does it take to keep that going. That is really what’s underneath the work of our lab.

There’s a really nice edited journal volume of  Ethnic Studies by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang called Toward What Justice? You don’t need to go to an Indigenous community to find another modality of justice. I think there is this implicit idea that law and regulation is the answer to pollution, that it is going to be the answer to the data, and I truly don’t believe that.

Simon Turner: I might have to rethink pessimism because you just gave a great, practical approach to a young researcher here from Hamburg. It was like a manifesto (Murphy: “More like a survival project.”) Okay. But you know, you don’t want to go out looking for problems, there are probably more than enough problems where you are. Your environment, you know, that’s where you need to focus your energy to change, and I thought that was a great optimistic thing.

Michelle Murphy: I get accused of being an optimist all the time.

Lesley Green is professor of anthropology and the director of Environmental Humanities South, a research and graduate teaching initiative at the University of Cape Town. Her current work sets in dialogue post-colonial and decolonial thought with the post-humanities and science studies in Southern Africa, paying particular attention to questions of just environmental governance in a time of climate disorder.

Michelle Murphy is a science and technology studies scholar whose research concerns feminist and decolonial approaches to environmental justice, reproduction, and data studies. Their current research focuses on the relationships between pollution, colonialism, and technoscience on the lower Great Lakes.

Simon Turner is a Senior Research Fellow in Geography at University College London, United Kingdom (UK). He has recently started as Scientific Coordinator for the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) and Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) project to define a global boundary stratotype section and point (GSSP) for the start of the Anthropocene.

Please cite as: Green, L, M Murphy, S Turner (2022) Environmental Markers to Chemical Violence. In: Rosol C and Rispoli G (eds) Anthropogenic Markers: Stratigraphy and Context, Anthropocene Curriculum. Berlin: Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. DOI: 10.58049/gm5e-cr07