Merrill Singer - Ecosystem Crises Interactions

As this last comment indicates, a central feature in contemporary human societies that shapes the way humans interact with the environment is social inequality. Health anthropologists have developed what they call an ecobiopolitical model for comprehending the complexities of societal–environmental interaction in the production of health and health inequality within society. This approach is informed by a synthetic and holistic exploration of the linkages that connect power and social structures, societal/environmental relations, and health and the environment. The term “ecobiopolitics” draws needed attention to the complex entwinements across conceptual domains that underlie the making of human health and disease.

In the ethnographic book Flammable: Environmental Suffering in an Argentine Shantytown , for example, the authors Javier Auyero and Debora Swistun (2009) describe a highly and multiply polluted slum area in Buenos Aires. Called Villa Inflamable, this shantytown is surrounded by a petrochemical complex, leather tanneries, various other factories, open‐air garbage dumps, and the contaminated waters of the Río de la Plata, a river named for a ship explosion that occurred just offshore. The people of the community also face an indifferent state bureaucracy and duplicitous corporations controlled by elite polluters. The shanty and the surface water around it have high concentrations of arsenic (a potent, potentially lethal poison), cadmium (a carcinogen), chrome (which causes dermatitis, an ulceration of the skin), mercury (a neurotoxin, which damages all body systems), cyanide (which causes weakness, giddiness, headaches, vertigo, confusion, and heart stoppage), and phenol (which is corrosive to the eyes, the skin, and the respiratory tract, and causes burns), and blood samples drawn from some of the local inhabitants show startlingly high levels of lead. Residents suffer from diarrhea, respiratory problems, skin diseases, cancers, allergies, and anemia.

The people who live in the shanty endure what Auyero & Swistun (2009) call “environmental suffering,” a term derived from the health social science concept of social suffering, which refers to experiences of group misery caused by occupying an oppressed or marginalized social ranking in a hierarchical social system. Environmental suffering can be defined as social suffering mediated by the environment, in this case among people living and working in a polluted or toxic environment that is the product of anthropogenic activities by dominant groups in the wider society. Social inequality commonly produces environmental inequality, environmental suffering, and health inequality.

Being in such an environment, people’s lived experience can be highly stressful because of the direct effects of the illnesses of family members, the constant threat of such illnesses to household economic viability, and the persistent uncertainty about what is happening. A heavily polluted environment is a stressful environment, and the burden of living there is twofold: 1) direct health effects of pollutants on the body; and 2) the stress of being in a constant state of threat.

With multiple toxins in the land, air, and water, the people of Villa Inflamable are at constant risk of the perils of ecocrises interaction (e.g., interaction between hydrocarbons in the polluted air and runoff of tannery chemicals in the polluted water). Toxicological interactions among environmental pollutants that increase adverse health effects have been described (Krishnan & Brodeur 1994). Such interactions of two or more chemical contaminants may occur simultaneously or sequentially (involving interaction among toxins stored over time in body tissues). Other adverse ecocrises of diverse kinds also threaten human health and well‐being, as detailed in subsequent chapters.

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