Dr Karen Malone, Professor Environmental Sustainability and Childhood Studies, Swinburne University of Technology
introduction
Children take me walking in their neighbourhood in Semipalatinsk, Kazakhstan. In my diary after the walk I write: The children recognize the fragility and porosity of human and non-human life and its link to the contaminated earth. Children speak often of the dust, dirt, thick uneasy air, toxic radiation – the way it infiltrates everything. To attend to, attune to, and be affected by the uneasy childearth encounters in the streets of Semipalatinsk is to recognise the porosity of matter, past radiation, catastrophic encounters that have been and continue to be the monsters of our contaminated toxic world.
uneasiness
Precarity flourishes as the uncertainty and unpredictability of the current state of the planet continues to be the most pressing issue of this generation. The impact of climate change, habitat destruction, overpopulation, radiation and human consumption means the sixth mass extinction in Earth’s history is under way and it is thought to be more severe than previously feared. Over 50 years ago, Rachel Carson (1962) warned humanity dangerous chemicals and radioactive particles were causing increasing irreversible harm to all living beings.
“Only within the moment of time represented by the present century has one species— man— acquired significant power to alter the nature of his world. During the past quarter century this power has not only increased to one of disturbing magnitude but it has changed in character. The most alarming of all man’s assaults upon the environment is the contamination of air, earth, rivers, and sea with dangerous and even lethal materials” (Carson 1962, p. 3)
The impact of environmental pollutants on children’s bodies especially in large major cities, causes young children, nonhuman animals and plants to die in increasing numbers. Due to their immature cells, closeness to the source (the earth) the build-up of toxins in their bodies is exponentially ingested at rates higher than adult humans.
The Anthropocene was a term coined first by Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen and biologist Eugene F. Stoermer to describe the significant and irreversible impacts of human activities on earth and the atmosphere described by Carson and others many decades before (Crutzen and Steffen, 2003). The Anthropocene as a rupturing force brings our attention to humans who are neither exempt from the ecological world nor exceptional to those we are acting/being/dying in relation with. Exploring the Anthropocene story is to speak of how humans became such a potent environmental force that a signature of all our doings, for good or ill, are measurable in the layered rock for millions of years to come. By altering climate, landscapes, and seascapes, as well as flows of species, genes, energy, and materials, we have damaged our planet, many say beyond redemption.
Many scientists proposed dates for when this new epoch would begin, one accepted start being in the 1950s, when human activity, namely rapid industrialization and nuclear activity, set global systems on a different trajectory. Scientists say nuclear bomb testing; industrial agriculture (particularly cacogenic chemicals) human-caused global warming and the proliferation of plastic waste across the globe have so profoundly and deliberately altered the planet from its natural state it should be marked by the renaming of this epoch. As Carson wrote in 1962, the changing planet was up until the past two centuries of human intervention, a series of natural events. Life including the earth’s animals and plants were until this time moulded by the earth, an interactive dance of survival and adaption lead by planetary evolution. Chemicals and other lethal materials produced by modern society, including radiation, have set off a chain of evils where life now affects the planet, irreversible and universal contamination seeping into all aspects of living tissues. Radiation being one of these central lively actants.
Radiation is no longer merely the background radiation of rocks, the bombardment of cosmic rays, the ultraviolet of the sun that have existed before there was any life on earth; radiation is now the unnatural creation of man’s tampering with the atom (Carson 1962, p.3).
As an unsettling ontology the notion of the Anthropocene disrupts a persistent ‘humanist’ paradigm in disciplines such as education by allowing new conversations to emerge around human-dominated global change; human exceptionalism; and the nature/culture divide (Lloro-Bidart 2015). As a disrupting ontological tool it reveals there is no homogenous/universal species and the scale and impact of ecological damage is unequal, unethical and unjust; indigenous peoples, woman, children, and the other-than-human species we share this planet with are in it more than those entrenched in dominant western masculine cultures. Were we asleep at the wheel the, while corporations metastasized into these monstrous creatures of capitalism, did we ignore the clarion call of the Anthropocene? There has been critique from many in regard to the naming of the Anthropocene. One argument has been its universalist nature. Universalism produces an assumption that we (humans/nonhumans) are all in this together and implicated in a balanced and uniform manner. This universalizing of the human predicament neglects to acknowledge the extent of diversity in the human/nonhuman experience and the ways in which wealth, nationality, ethnicity, gender, class, age, location and so on mediate relationships with the planet (Malone 2018). And that the burden of the Anthropocene overpopulation, limits to growth is often placed at the feet of the most impoverished even though they often contribute the least to its manifestation. That is, the scale of human ecological impact is unequal, unethical and unjust; the poor, the children, and the nonhuman are more in it than the wealthy (Malone 2018).
The uptake of radioactivity associated with the proliferation of nuclear weapons testing in the mid-20th century, for example, has been identified as one of the golden spikes indicative of the era of the Anthropocene. The nuclear age has left an invisible but global and affective reading of radiation, so by employing the disruptive concept of porosity as a means for revealing our shared fragility – exposing our naked bodies and providing for an undressing of the exceptionalism of humans. Radiation is the affect of an entangled mattering of materials, objects, and bodies.
Strontium 90, released through nuclear explosions into the air, comes to earth in rain or drifts down as fallout, lodges in soil, enters into the grass or corn or wheat grown there, and in time takes up its abode in the bones of a human being, there to remain until his death (Carson 1962, p.3).
Massumi (2015) drawing on the work of Spinoza speaks of the “body in terms of its capacity for affecting or being affected” (p. 3); “to affect and be affected is to be open to the world, to be active in it and be patient for its return activity” (p. ix). At this time of the Anthropocene we are “in a far-from-equilibrium situation” (p.114) we are beings affected and affecting the complexity of our times, this attunement to the ‘experience of precarity’ brings with it chaotic situations, uneasiness, uncertainty. Those systems our ‘bodies’ (in its broadest sense) we have relied on are in catastrophe and “there’s no vantage point from which to understand it from the outside. We are immersed in it” (Massumi 2015, p.114). We are it, it is us. It is in us and we are in it.
diffraction
Exploring the complexities of children’s lives in the Anthropocene. Attuning to their entanglement within an assemblage of human-nonhuman matter, this is the work I am doing. I am queering awkward binaries – human/nature; subject/object; I self /other not self, adult/child, through diffractive theorising by working with Barad (2007, 2014) Haraway (2003, 2015), Nancy (1991), Derrida (2005), Smith (2013) as the means for interrupting discourses of human exceptionalism. Posthumanist approaches have the direct task of de-centering the human, it problematises the notion of human as exceptional. The exceptional human assumes what matters to humans is the most important, and what matters to other species and things matters less. Posthumanist approaches demand a disruption of the human story, that we are somehow exempt from the consequences of our own contaminating ways – such an approach demands an ‘unlearning’ of anthropomorphic ways of being and knowing the world, an onto-epistemological recasting of difference, a queering of binaries through diffractive theorising. The focus of my recent research work is the onto-epistemological study of ‘lively matter – radiation’ in the cities of Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan (see Malone 2018 for more specific details on the purpose of this project). I am curious to consider how radiation is entangled with humans and the collective of human-nonhuman things that are tied together; knotted in knots in an intricate ecological collective. Onto-epistemology assumes epistemology and ontology are mutually implicated ‘because we are of the world’, not standing outside of it. I am working with Donna Haraway’s (2003) notion of relational natures of difference and Karen Barad’s (2007, 2014) tools of diffraction – not to map where differences appear but rather map the effects of difference. I explore the technique of diffraction as an analytical tool by exposing the paradoxical potential of the diffraction of radioactive waves that interfere with the cellular composition of all worldly objects, including human bodies. I am seeking to find ways to express my own unexceptional humanness. I am an animal, an organic being with all its fragilities.
porosity
Frogs have a permeable skin, it makes them particularly vulnerable to chemical contamination, pesticides, herbicides, oil, heavy metals, and radioactive wastes, in the water, the air and the soil. When the pH of creeks or ponds drops below 4.5, frogs disappear. ‘Frogs are an indicator species of toxic pollution – a kind of canary in the mines’ proclaims my year 7 biology teacher. It is 1977 we are making our way through chapter one of the ‘Biological Science: TheWeb of Life’. There is a picture of a pyramid humans are at the apex, ‘humans are a complex intelligent social being’ my teacher notes, all other living things are distributed below “they are ‘simple’ nature” he says. I was both fascinated and concerned; there was a storm water drain near my house where I would go to be with a host of frogs and others; a shimmer of oil sometimes glistened on the water surface in the late afternoon light, I worried toxins would be killing my storm water companions.
Scientist claimed humans were biological islands, (exceptional creatures) entirely capable of regulating their own internal workings. The specialized cells of our immune system taught themselves how to recognize and attack dangerous pathogens while at the same time mostly sparing our own tissues. Just as we have come to see we are not exempt from the Anthropocentric impacts we are having on the planetary systems, in recent times researchers have demonstrated that the human body is not such a neatly self-sufficient island after all. It is, like the planet, a complex ecosystem – an assemblage – containing trillions of bacteria and other microorganisms that inhabit our skin, mouth and internal organs (Smith 2015). In fact, most of the cells in the human body, my body, are not human at all. Bacterial cells in the human body for instance out number human cells ten to one (MacDougall 2012). Haraway (2003) writes: “I love the fact that human genomes can be found on only about 10 per cent of all the cells that occupy the mundane space I call my body … To be one is always to become with many” (p. 3-4).
This mixed community of microbial cells and the genes they contain, is collectively known as the microbiome (Ley et. al. 2006). All humans acquire this microbiome from very early in life, essentially during the birthing process and breastfeeding. Even though they do not start out with one: ‘Primate fetal development is thought to occur within an intrauterine microbiota-free environment, and yet within a short interval following birth the human microbiome is colonized’ (Aagaard et. al. 2012, p. 1). Each individual acquires their own community from the surrounding environment – our bodies therefore are an assemblage of nonhuman matter, the genealogy of our amorphous engagement with the ecosystem that makes up our being on and with the planet over our lifetime. I am a porous being.
lively matter
The wind that begins off the coast of Japan also typically travels eastward across the Pacific Ocean making its way to the west coast of North America, which is what happened immediately after the Fukushima Daiichi reactor explosions on March 11 2011. ‘When those radioactive dust clouds turn into rain, the radionuclides become absorbed in the soil and, subsequently, the food chain’. These invisible waves and particles of radiation flow like starlings in murmarations. I chose vital materiality as a theoretical space for exploring my data as it acknowledges the aliveness of matter – active, self-creative, productive, unpredictable. Matter as alive in entangled porous bodies is illustrated in this paper theoretically through the story of radiation. I ascribe agency to this inorganic matter radiation to acknowledge it has a certain efficacy that defies human will ‘enchanted materiality’ (Bennett, 2010). This enchanted materiality of radiation becomes entangled in the genealogy of my own being, and those bodies and things through which I share the planet. It is no longer a ‘human’ body as an island but a posthuman assemblage of entangled things at a cellular level. The playgrounds in the cities near the disaster site still sit quiet and empty many years later (Kinoshita and Wolley, 2015). Children play inside. After the Fukushima meltdown, many parents were uncertain as to whether children should be forbidden from outdoor activities. Many parents restricted their children’s outdoor play to reduce their exposure to radioactivity. Indoor play centres are booming cities close to the nuclear site. In an old supermarket centre in Koriyama city you can find a large public indoor activity space. The centre supports 600 users and a variety of activities including a jogging track, a playhouse complete with large wet sand box and a large variety of activity based equipment to support climbing, swinging and jumping. Due to increasing demand, families are limited to 90 minutes per visit.
Children tell me they use to make daisy chains in the spring. After the Fukushima disaster the government clean up teams stripped the outer bark off trees and removed the top several inches of soil. That kind of decontamination is specifically aimed at cesium, which falls out of the air like dust. It is transported by wind and clouds then it washes out, or it contacts and sticks to surfaces. If it falls on plants that animals eat, the animals get contaminated, too. On 27 May 2015 a Japanese citizen in Tochigi prefecture posted on Twitter the pictures of deformed plants in his neighbourhood. Like the mutated insects after Chernobyl these images conjure up monstrous matter. Swiss science illustrator Cornelia Hesse-Hoegger produced disturbingly beautiful watercolor paintings after collecting and documenting ‘morphologically disturbed’ insects affected by the fallout blown from Chernobyl into Europe (Mok 2011) (see https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/chernobyls-bugs-art-and-science-life-after-nuclear-fallout-180951231/). After being criticized that the images were speculative fiction and were creating sensationalism she documented insects from areas close to functioning nuclear power plants. Over 30 per cent of these insects also had some deformity: misshapen wings, feelers, altered pigmentation or tumors at about ten times the normal rates.
monstrosity
Jars of deformed dead bodies are contained in a local museum (dark tourism) in Semipalatinsk. The children in the city I speak to tell me they have seen these ‘deformed bodies’ penetrated by monstrous matter. Like the mutated insects and daisy’s they ‘provoke fear but also fascination as their ghostly presence, same but not quite threatens to reposition or dissolve the boundaries of normality’. It is in the invisible bodies of human and nonhuman beings that co-exist in Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test site, in the ‘Steppes’ or plateau region in eastern Kazakhstan that my research studies on radiation and in particular a focus on childearthbodies, have been located. During the cold war the Soviet Union chose eastern Kazakhstan as a nuclear testing site, because it was one of its remotest, most desolate areas. From 1949 until 1989 Russia conducted 456 secret nuclear tests (116 above ground rest underground) at the site with a seemingly unfettered regard for the human and non-human bodies that co-existed there (the site is about 18, 500 square km) (Keenan 2013).
Over a 40 year period possibly as many as a million people, multitudes of birds, animals, fish, plants, water, the soil, the air were deliberately subjected to the impact of radiation exposure. No one was evacuated, nothing was excluded, with 1500 animals and thousands of local villagers placed strategically in the line of the fallout during each test. The ecological community and in fact the planet itself became a scientific experiment. Research by a Japanese team from 2002-2004 spoke to many villagers within 200km of the detonation sites. The outcome of their research was published in 2006: “90% of the respondents reported seeing the flash and 70% that they felt a bomb blast, 18% felt heat, 28% saw the mushroom cloud, 16% mentioned a ‘deafening roar’, and 7% ‘referred to animals that had lost their hair’, a typical sub-acute radiation injury”. (Kawano and Ohtaki 2006). The villagers made it very clear to the researchers that they had not been informed about the nature of the tests, or of the dangers linked to them.
It was in 2014 that I travelled to Semipalatinsk nuclear test site (STS) in Kazakhstan for the first time. I flew seven thousand kilometres by jet plane from Sydney to the capital Astana, and then onto a small Russian rotor plane to Uste-Kamenogorsk in the eastern region. Once landed I then proceeded to travel the next 400 kilometres across the Steppes to Semipalatinsk in an old Russian taxi. Around half way along our journey the driver pulled over to a dusty gas station to fill up with petrol. I decided to wander inside the small shack on site to see if I could purchase cold water. This was to be my first encounter with a dark ghostly stranger that traveled with me invisible, pervading, deadly radiation.
Radiation is the emission of energy in the form of waves. The most penetrating form of nuclear radiation are gamma rays, Radiation is invisible and not directly detectable by human senses as a result instruments such as Geiger counters are used to detect its presence. Inside the small shack I encountered for the first time being tested for radiation with a Geiger counter. I close my eyes – the sound reminds me off the photographs I have seen of children in Sendai, Japan where I imagined these beeps as the apparatus ran across a small girls body. The photograph reveals the reading is low, her parents standing by are relieved. Radiation is monitored in the streets, on the animals, on the plants, in the air after the Fukushima meltdown. In the days after the nuclear accident in Japan, the world’s entire supply of Geiger counters were sold out.
I realize I am sweating as they wave the Geiger counter across my body. I conjure up images; radioactive particles crashing through my body smashing into materials at such speed they are colliding violently with atoms along the way – they are destroying delicately balanced cells. They are penetrating deep inside my body causing fatal cancers to develop or, if they infiltrate my reproductive cells, they are causing genetic defects. Once embedded in the cell they may die, or they might just lay dormant recovering only to support the uncontrolled growth of cancer at some time in the future. The machine stops. I open my eyes. The Kazakh man clad in his white body suit, Geiger counter in hand waves his hand at me, to move on. I assume this means no radiation is detected. I don’t buy any water, I return to my taxi to continue my journey.
deadliness
Figure 3: Nuclear test image
Cancer rates were highest among residents of the villages and towns close to the test region. For many years during and after the nuclear tests, many of the local people complained of unexplained deaths, cancerous growths on them and their animal companions. Most of the birds, insects, trees were lost. It became a dead barren place. Life was tenuously hanging in the balance. Dirt and dust whipped around like great clouds of starlings and spread across the steppe and settled across the landscape reaching the city of Semipalatinsk, which is a little less than 150 kilometres away.
In an ecological study of childhood cancer incidence in four administrative divisions adjacent to the STS spanning from 1981 to 1990, an increase in relative risks for all cancers, including leukemia and brain tumors, were reported in children living less than 200 km from the test epicenter compared to children residing more than 400 km from the test site (Grosche, et. al. 2015, p.127).
Plutonium, a heavy metal, emits alpha radiation, this material is most harmful when inhaled or ingested. On the testing site scientists find very high levels of plutonium in horse bones. Kazakh shepherds have returned to the site to herd their horses, leaving them to graze in the empty pastoral lands that were once the nuclear site. Kazakh shepherds use the bones of their horses to make soup. Horse soup and horse flesh are offered to me. I politely say no. I am a vegetarian.
We take a walking tour of the neighbourhood Timur takes a photograph of a dead dog. As we pause one the child says to me, ‘I am afraid of the street dogs on the way home. Dead dogs stink’. ‘Do you know about the nuclear tests?’ they ask me as we walk. Yes I say I did know. ‘It is inside us’, one child remarks, ‘it is probably in you now’ (Malone, 2018). My family and friends ask me why I would go to cities where there is evidence of radiation. I could answer with a complicated discussion of ethics, morality, children here having to live with it yet, whereas I am just passing through. But my answer is simple: we are all entangled and implicated in an ecological posthuman community (Malone, 2018). There is no boundary for radiation, here or there, them or us – we are all fragile, porous beings, exposed to monstrous bodies.
Angelina shows me a photograph she has take during the winter, “I want a place where children can breathe fresh air. The factories make children sick in our city. Children get sent away”. She draws me picture of this dream place: I love mountains because there is no mountains in our city. I love nature and animals but there is no nature or animals in our city. I would like to walk in the mountains. I want to take pictures of animals. I would want to explore the underwater world. And I would want to dance because of being happy to be breathing fresh air and away from the pollution.
assemblages
Monstrous bodies co-existing in Semipalatinsk are all in ecological ‘community’. We are bound together in earth-body assemblages, a collection of genetically encoded messages and materials, passed on as radiation, reproduced in bodies, between bodies, and outside of bodies. The child/radiation/earth/bodies are not inert matter, but a community of entities exchanging through entangled relations cancerous potential. Through processes of terrorialization, deterroralization and reterrorialization the assemblage can selectively be ordered, disordered and reordered as newly reconstituted complex matters. Bodies are an assemblage of their traced histories as they act, react and intra-act through time and space.
This paper highlights the vulnerability of children in cities at times of planetary nuclear disasters as expressed through a concept of porosity as a significant material form that through diffractive theorizing has potential to be an assemblage of a reconstituted ecological entanglement. In this posthuman entangled complex world, ‘(w)e do not leave our history behind but rather, like snails, carry it around with us in the segmented and enculturated installations of our pasts we call our bodies’ (Hayles 2003, p.137). Children in the Anthropocene carry these material entanglements through their biome, in their stories, real and inscribed in the appropriation of what it means to cohabitate and reorder material ‘things’ and ‘matter’ in the damaged landscapes of their bodies and the earth.
Anthropo-obscence
Within a short period after the accident in Fukushima the Ministry of the Environment reported high radioactive contamination in frogs species. In May 2012 within a 20-km radius of the Fukushima accident all species of frogs were extinct. Through posthumanist ecological narratives of child-contaminated-earth assemblages in Semey, through the concept of ‘porosity’ I attend to the entanglement of all things, including the porousness of the unexceptional human species. The Anthropocene is not just a set of scientific facts, verifiable through stratigraphic or climatic analyses. Through a diffractive affective theorising it come to be a ‘discursive development’, an unsettling ontology that problematizes a humanist narrative of progress that has essentially focused on the mastery of nature, domination of the biosphere, and the placing of a God-like faith in technocratic solutions. It is a heuristic device for gaining a deeper understanding of how we ‘humans’ have come to locate ourselves as master of a 4.5 billion year old planet when we have existed for the mere blink of an eyelid. I am encouraged through our storying of the Anthropocene to ‘track histories’ to wander ‘through landscapes, where assemblages of the dead [and dying] gather together with the living’ (Gan et. al. 2017 p.G6).
It reminds us that traces of the past live on through those bodies who are amongst us; disasters and devastation formed our present; and that hope lies in considering these many pasts, as part of our future (Gan et. al. 2017). The naming of the Anthropocene produces opportunities to galvanize already emergent forms of thinking and acting in education. Changing the entrenched habits of modern western humanist thought, which is so adept at dividing humans off from nature, it requires persistence, vigilance and a preparedness to take risks. It is hard work. It demands continually interrogating what it means to be human, to resituate humans firmly within the environment, and to locate the environment within the ethical domains of a past and posthumanist landscape. Taking from Marisol de la Cadena (2015) who spoke in a conference I attended in Chile in October 2017, all bodies are “more than one – but less than many”. The Anthropo-unseen/obscene, are the new assemblages of our catastrophic times. Sites of obscenity where we are ‘being worldly with’ nonhuman kin in a landscape imbued with a fading past traced onto an uncertain present. These assemblages of fragile bodies, reaching out with threadlike tendrils encircling and clinging to an imagined shared future.
As humans reshape the landscape we forget what was there before … our newly shaped and ruined landscapes become the new reality. Admiring one landscape and its biological entanglements often entails forgetting many others (Gan, Tsing, Swanson & Bubandt, 2017, p. G6).
By queering binaries and creating ontological openings, I am not offering up a flat ontology rather earth/child/bodies is a movement, an encounter – not human – not radiation – child is human but not only, radiation is lively matter but not only. We are implicated in our existence on the planet with other matter despite the human predilection to reiterate human exceptionalism, including within many epic and heroic narrations of the Anthropocene. As humans, we are not exceptional or exempt, the Earth will continue on with or without us.
The children in Kazakhstan share their stories of childearthbodies’ penetrated by monstrous matter. Like the tumorous dogs, they “provoke fear but also fascination as their ghostly presence, same but not quite threatens to reposition or dissolve the boundaries of normality” (Goodley et al. 2015, p. 3). To attend, attune to, and be affected by the uneasy childearth encounters in the streets of Semipalatinsk is to recognise the porosity of bodies, radiation, lively matter, the catastrophic encounters that have been and continue to be the monsters of our contaminated toxic world.
This shortened version of a recent book chapter published in the edited collection Children, Elders, Earth. Citation: Malone, K. (2019) Uneasy assemblages of childearthbodies, in Janice Kroeger and Meyers, C. (eds) Children, Elders, Earth, Routledge.
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Environmental Sustainability in the Anthropocene 