Untenable, in fact downright dangerous, homes have become a reality for those living in degraded environments
By Pramod K Nayar
People living, and mostly dying, in the midst of their bombed houses that are no longer homes. The search for shelter and amenities but also safety from falling bombs and sniper fire. This is the topography of the unliveable.
What we see on our screens from the most dangerous place on earth today is the extreme instance of what it means to live in a home that is so very not-home. In the most dangerous place on earth, homes are targets and the residents potential victims. War has amplified what contemporary commentators point to as an increasingly common condition: that more and more humans live in homes that are themselves dangerously polluted, in biomes and ecosystems that are on the verge of collapse.
In the age of distanced warfare — the missiles and drones fired from a thousand kilometres away, reducing your home to rubble — another, less palpable form of distanced violence occurs, daily.
Sickness at Home
Catherine Flowers in her memoir, Waste, notes how in Lowndes County, Alabama, one can see ‘raw sewage in people’s yards’. Sandra Steingraber in her memoir, Living Downstream, points out that ‘for those of us born in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s…we were certainly the first generation to eat synthetic pesticides in our pureed vegetables’. And this ruination and sickness around human habitation is not restricted to humans, notes Steingraber:
In Italy, dogs are more likely to have lymphoma if they live northeast of Naples, where illegal waste disposal is a rampant practice…Military dogs in Vietnam exposed to the herbicide Agent Orange suffered from high rates of testicular cancer. Scottish terriers in Indiana have higher rates of bladder cancer if their owners use lawn chemicals…
Both Flowers and Steingraber in their environmental memoirs are pointing to what Rachel Carson, from whom practically all contemporary environmentalism of the Global North originates, noted: that toxins are all around and inside homes. Toxins are not out there somewhere. But this in itself is not surprising, since living next to industries and nuclear testing sites automatically implies that the homes and resident living bodies are assimilating the by-products and effluence regularly.
For Flowers, places such as Alabama are practically ‘third world’: ‘I began to wonder if third-world conditions might be bringing third-world diseases to our region’. This third-worldisation, so to speak, is racialised, as Flowers emphasises: Lowndes County is predominantly black. The land has a racial history of exploitation and suffering. Today, this same history’s legacy produces, Flowers argues, an environmental injustice because the population in Lowndes still remains disposable, as their slave ancestors used to be.
Distant Toxins
Even in places such as the Arctic circle, Marla Cone notes in Silent Snow, among the Inuits, we can find high quantities of chemical toxins. The Arctic Paradox, as Cone calls it, is that there are no polluting industries in the Inuit homeland: the toxins come from industries in the USA. This means, toxins travel and poison people, homes and bodies in some random part of the world. Hence, Cone’s statement: ‘the outside world is imposing a more subtle, insidious, and intractable scourge on the Arctic’.
For Cone, the problem is not polluting industries in the immediate proximity of lifeforms. The problem, as she notes, is the interconnected nature of toxification. She writes:
the circumpolar north has been transformed into an immense living laboratory where scientists are gradually unravelling the fate of contaminants on earth and their effect on all its inhabitants, from pole to pole…
In another such memoir, Dan Fagin writes how from the 19th century, the dye industries dumped their waste into rivers and seas:
In 1862 the Geigy family built a second factory for aniline production and rented this one to him also. The new factory was larger and required even more arsenic acid… That was too much for a lagoon to handle alone … so this time Müller-Pack adopted an additional disposal method that would become all too familiar a hundred years later in New Jersey: He discharged his arsenic-laced wastewater into the nearest waterway—in this case, a canal beside the plant that led to the Rhine. On the outskirts of London, Perkin was doing the same thing in the canal next to his factory …
In the USA, Fagin writes, ‘manufacturers … paid Toms River Chemical to take their waste and pump it into the Atlantic’.
And that is how river and ocean currents carry toxins to distant places, rendering those people and places toxified. Toxification is also, then, a form of globalisation.
Home-sickness
We have now a new version of homesickness: being sick of and at home due to the toxins we imbibe daily. The psychologist Glenn Albrecht coined a term for this: solastalgia. Albrecht writes of solastalgia as
a lived experience of the loss of value of the present [that leads] to a feeling of being undermined by forces that destroy the potential for solace to be derived from the immediate and given. In brief, solastalgia is a form of homesickness one experiences when one is still at home…
Albrecht’s focus is the environmental damage that induces homesickness, a sense that we can no longer experience solace and comfort at home.
Untenable, in fact downright dangerous, homes have become a reality for those living in degraded environments. Since all homes are now connected by water, wind and chemical particles originating elsewhere, no home is, really, safe from, say the effluence coming from a distant factory. Indeed, human efforts have rendered Planet Earth itself as an unliveable home for humanity but also for other lifeforms.
Today, we see bombed-out homes on our screens, and ask: is the drinking/ground water safe? Have chemical weapons been used? Won’t such toxins enter the blood streams and genetic material of the beleaguered residents as they sleep, at home, damaging their future progeny — although there may be none the way the strip of land is being levelled — for good?
Today, persons crowded into hospitals and refugee centres are sick within their homes precisely because they are at home. Their being at-home has enraged the mightier powers, who refuse the right of some people to feel at-home.
Today, as in Lowndes County in Catherine Coleman’s memoir, homes are destroyed, toxified, as continuation of a historical, racially inflected injustice.
Today, solastalgia in the rubble-home is also the crisis perpetuated by those living comfortably at home, while reducing others’ homes to ruin.