The School of the Future:
The Social Construction of Environmental Hazard in the Post-industrial Fringe
A Senior Thesis by Bridget Corbett Hanna
Bard College, Annandale-on Hudson, NY
December 2003
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PROLOGUE......
INTRODUCTION......
Historical Commission Lore......
THE BEST DOCUMENTED TOWN......
The Great Swamp......
Digging Holes......
Transformations......
Mapping the Neighborhood......
THE EDUCATIONAL ENVIRONMENT......
Muskrat Pond......
“A Midway Philosophy”......
The School of the Future......
Managing the Facilities......
Testing the Air......
Intuiting Danger......
The National Weather Service......
Russian Roulette......
Hot Spots......
CHANGING PLACES......
Play Grounds......
Open Spaces......
Safety Zones......
Waste Lands......
Exporting Toxins......
THE RIGHT TO KNOW......
“Bhopal’s Babies”......
An “Event” Occurs......
Remember Bhopal......
It Was Not Possible......
We All Live in Bhopal......
Safety in Knowledge......
CONCLUSION......
Relevant Differences......
BIBLIOGRAPHY......
APPENDIX......
1
PROLOGUE
I was ten years old when I realized that my mother couldn’t protect me from everything. But because I’ve never been a parent, I hadn’t understood until now, nearly thirteen years later, how much more traumatizing that knowledge must have been to her than it was to me. “Don’t you understand?” she asked me intently last week: “don’t you understand that a mothers’ only job is keeping her child safe?” She paused. “And I” she continued, “…I have failed at this job.”
Of course she wasn’t talking about me. She was talking about my younger sister Molly. Molly died of a extremely rare pediatric cancer called neuroblastoma at the age of eighteen, after fighting – with all the explosive energy and exceptional dignity of youth that approaches death – for four years against the disease. Although my mother told me that her one consolation, when Molly died, was the knowledge that “I had tried everything, and done absolutely everything that I could to save her,” she ultimately perceives Molly’s death as her own unredeemable personal failure.
I think that most mothers would agree with her; that the failure to save their child is unbearable. I will speculate further that it is perhaps those deaths that are most arbitrary that are the most difficult, when disease or accident arrives suddenly and invisibly. Though the poor must tolerate arbitrariness on a daily basis, cancers are among the ills that visit arbitrariness upon all classes. Not in equal measure; but equally suddenly, equally invisibly and violently.
Everyone who has had a sudden calamity befall them has asked the question, Why? They have asked, How? With cancer, frustratingly, the answers are both everywhere and nowhere. The world is increasingly suffused with carcinogenic compounds and untested substances, and yet the science does not exist that can prove, beyond statistical speculation, the exact cause of any given case. And that is not enough. I would like to point a finger. I would like to say there.
However, particularly within clusters of disease, there are often very strong correlations. In 1990 a book was published called The Truth About Where You Live. Using new computer technology to interpret statistics from the Census Bureau of the United States, Benjamin Goldman created over 100 maps that ranked all of the counties in the US on the basis of mortality rates, toxin emissions and concentrations, and demographics. The vivid colors illustrating the distribution of illness make explicit the relationship between pollution and disease, and the tremendous geographic disparities in mortality rates. Generally the maps show a strong correlation between disease and industry. There is also a very strong correlation between those sites and demographics that are urban and/or poor and/or minority. The distribution of arbitrariness, again, is not completely arbitrary. And in some of the worst areas, there are so many industries and so many hazards, they are so suffused with poisons, that to point a finger at one, and say, you, becomes similarly impossible.
The neighborhood that I grew up in, North Cambridge, MA, is by no means poor. Statistically, for diseases like cancer, it is not the worst place in the country to be living; but then, it is by no means the best either. It is a gentrifying neighborhood in a university town, slowly recovering from its tenure as the semi-industrial fringe of the growing city, and it has had some growing pains.
One of these growing pains was the John M. Tobin school, where my sister spent three years, and I spent less than one; the fifth grade, in 1990-1991. My mother had transferred us to escape bad teachers at another school. I immediately got sick: I developed allergies to our pets, began to get repeated pneumonias, respiratory and sinus infections and colds and was diagnosed with asthma. An article from the The Boston Globe (Landon, 1991) writes that I had “an immune-suppressed condition.” I just know that my health has never been the same: and for the first time, I realized that my mother couldn’t protect me from everything.
As she would later do for my sister, she did everything absolutely everything she could. She took me to every kind of doctor, she pulled me out of school early in the year and she became involved in a parents group that was convinced that the Tobin school was suffering from “sick building syndrome.”
The story I remember as a ten year old about what was going on at that time went something like this:
I am sick because the Tobin school is sick. It was built on top of a hazardous dump, and toxic gas seeps up into the classrooms, where the windows don’t open. Almost everyone in my class has an inhaler.
My sister didn’t get sick then, and because the school was supposedly safe after a series of renovations, she remained there for several years with a teacher that she liked. When she died, I couldn’t get the Tobin School out of my head, where it embodied, for me, the environmental “problem.” I wanted to point. I wanted to say, there.
I went to the Cambridge Historical Commission and asked to see their file on the Tobin. When I got there, the woman who helped me said “I remember when your mother came in and looked at these same files ten years ago.” There were pictures of the “dump” from 1933, trash and old cars strewn across the landscape ; gritty, ambiguous and suggestive.
But suggestive of what? I took a photocopy home, and I kept looking at the smoking pit, staring in, trying to push through into the photograph where I could stand up, sniff the air, walk around and touch the ground; pin down the rumors, thick as thieves, that were blowing round and round.
I was not naïve enough, even then, to presume that I would find some kind of irrefutable truth in all this searching. In fact, I wasn’t even sure what the question was. I just desperately wanted to look. I wanted to pinpoint the “environmental” problem. I wanted to know where this story I knew so well had come from and whether it was true. This was where I knew to begin.
Because I was investigating one “environmental” problem, a professor suggested that I might be interested in a project on another “environmental” problem. It was a project for the 20th anniversary of the chemical disaster in Bhopal, India: and I said “the what in where?” Although Bhopal had caused changes in the way hazardous chemicals were viewed and treated in this country that had impacted my life and my ideas about environmentalism, I had never in fact heard of it. Having mentioned it to a lot of people since then, I know that I wasn’t alone.
Working on the Bhopal project (and eventually traveling there briefly) alongside my little investigation about the Tobin brought me daily to a frustrating state of cognitive dissonance. It did not make sense that these could be the same kind of issue. The more I looked at these two issues, the more they rubbed against each other in my mind, the more the idea of an environmental problem began to separate into layers: one that was about people using all of the resources available to them to fight for the health of themselves and their families, and another that was about the vastly different informational, economic and civic resources available to do that among different constituencies. While the stories that connect cause and effect are as ubiquitous as the air that we breathe, it turns out that the process that converts them into evidence and ultimately proof is terribly expensive and only available to a few.
The issues at the Tobin are not, to this day, completely resolved. However, in essence it is a story of successful activism and wielding of narrative: that is, a problem was identified and re-presented and then money and cooperation were procured in order to stymie, if not recoup, its potential dangers. Bhopal on the other hand, catastrophic twenty years ago, is, even today, a gigantic open wound, perpetually unresolved and intensely without justice. The scale of the event is beyond my comprehension: it had taken only one death, only one loss, to profoundly traumatize and forever change my family and my community.
Yet mothers in Bhopal have come out of traditional homes to take on the Indian government, and an American Corporation and fight for the health and welfare of their families and neighborhoods. My mother, an artist, is returning to school at the age of forty-eight to pursue a career in “bio-informatics,” a field that she describes as “part medicine, part computer science, part biology and part chemistry.” All, in their own way, are continuing the fight to create safe spaces for the children they still have.
And so although I am anchored in Cambridge, the undercurrent to this project has become the need to be able to face these two issues on the same page. This has become my way of trying to say, there. Not at cancer, or any place, or anyone; but at the specter of suffering and the logic of tragedy. To the ways that ideas about environment, safety and justice have to be able to negotiate with each other around the world, and what their implications are. It is the best I can do.
1
INTRODUCTION
Historical Commission Lore
On October 12th 2001, an employee of the Cambridge Historical Commission (CHC) wrote a letter to two teachers at the Tobin School in Cambridge Massachusetts. The bulk of the letter was an apology, as follows
Now, I must correct a major mistake of mine- the fault, I think, of “Historical Commission lore.” In my talk [to your group at the Tobin School] I said that, when the Callanan playground and the playing field were built (both substantially completed by 1938), the trash in the dump had not been removed, but compacted then buried beneath layers of sand. Knowing how important it was to verify this, I looked again in the survey files for the Cofran Pit site and the school for supporting documentation I could not find any information on the treatment of the dump in the creation of the playground and playing field. I asked Charles Sullivan, the Commission’s Executive Director, if he knew of any additional information, which he did not. I am very sorry for making such an important misstatement.(K.R. 2001, emphasis in original)
The teachers had brought the CHC in to speak about the history of the site of the Tobin School, one that has been the subject of much conjecture and much investigation. Still, it remains in 2001,at the writing of this letter, that in spite of themselves, no one alive knows, or is ever likely to know, what went into the onetime dump below the Tobin School, or who put it there, and when and where precisely. All that is possible is an understanding of the site as it is today, and the combined effects of the building and its history. Why then this obsession with the history of the site? Why this incessant retelling of a story that, as the letter above evidences, cannot even be proven by the historians, who yet, continue retell the story? Why, as importantly, am I compelled to re-tell the story?
There was a young woman who in my class at the Tobin in 1990-91 began working at a house wares store near my mother’s home in Cambridge a few years ago. When I walked by we would exchange a few words. She said she was trying to get to college. As the years past, we exchanged fewer words. Recently I walked by and went in to speak with her and the conversation went as follows:
Bridget: Hey S. Can I ask you a question?
S: (stacking glass mugs in a precarious pyramid) Yeah.
B: Were you ever sick with anything when you were at the Tobin?
S:No.
B: D’you know anyone who was?
S:No. What’re you trying to be the next Erin Brockovich or something?
B:Um, no, not really… I’m writing a paper. (pause)
S:I live right next to there and I never had any problem.
B:Where do you live?
S:(pause) C____ St…(pause) Did you hear Ms. C___ just died?
B:No. Who was she?
S: Second grade teacher.
B:I heard Mrs. S___ died too.
S:Yeah but that was a few years ago.
B: What’d Ms. C____ die of?
S: Cancer. But so what. There’s a whole ton of people in Cambridge with cancer.(Hanna Conversation 2003)
I hadn’t thought the question was that strange: I’d been sick. From my point of view the story made sense. But this conversation is a microcosm: it shows the narrative of neighborhood environmental activism in relief. The question as to whether there is illness is a flat no. The asking is, however, immediately identifiable: “What’re you trying to be, the next Erin Brockovich?” Meaning making is part of a narrative world that is precisely separate from the actual world. The story has already been told: any other protagonist is an imposter, an indulgent replica. The question is tantamount to “what’re you trying to be, the next Julia Roberts?” However illness is a baseline, used in circular logic to reify its own normalcy.
The appropriate reaction becomes “so what” because the normal situation is that “there’s a whole ton of people in Cambridge with cancer.” She wasn’t the only to think so either. The first page in a binder full of notes from a teacher who had gotten sick while he taught at the Tobin begins with the header “Kids that, I know of, who died,” and proceeds to list 5, along with anecdotal stories about their illnesses – mostly cancers (Z, archive).
In this project I address a question about the reproduction of narratives about environmental problems and the politics of collecting information that seeks to validate them. I draw a loose curve which follows from Cambridge – my hometown – a city obsessed with mapping, whose residents in the face of an unknown hazard call on all of the resources available to analyze and re-present a story that can frame a set of inexplicable ills at an elementary school, into the 1984 chemical disaster in Bhopal, India and the urge to document that it generated, and how the narrative of Bhopal has betrayed the city with its portability, that has betrayed the bodies of suffering people by transporting the narrative with returning a meaningful effect.
I compare these two situations not because they are comparable or in any way equivalents, nor because they have any particular connection. That is, they are no more or less related than any two “environmental issues.” It is in fact the paradoxical way in which they are both related and unrelated that I wish to plumb; the ways they are both participant in a global discourse about “the environment” and yet have utterly different ways of accessing it. How does this disparity manifest itself through mapping, evidence and education?
There is particularly no basis for comparison of these two instances in terms of their scale as human tragedies. One is tiny, contained, generic: the other gigantic, catastrophic and singular (though not because the same chemical has never leaked in other places at other times). It is simultaneously not my aim to set up any type of relative, hierarchical or moral scale upon which to place the activists and actors who have worked on or are implicated in either of these issues. Everyone wants a safe life; moreover, everyone wants safe, healthy children. It is my opinion, for what it’s worth, that everyone deserves these things. Still the question of the differing scales of resources available to provide these things is very important; the imperative to protect and fight for the health of one’s family and community is, if not sanctified, far beyond my judgment.
David Harvey writes in his book Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference, that “… the ‘environmental issue’ necessarily means such different things to different people, that in aggregate it encompasses quite literally everything there is.”(Harvey, 1996 118) So what does it mean to talk about the “environment” on differing scales? Kim Fortun asks in her book, Advocacy After Bhopal: environmentalism, disaster, new global orders, “What does it mean to be an environmentalist when the label is shared by George Bush and a tribal from the hills of India? Is the mineworker who cooks his rice with firewood from ancestral lands a ‘forest thief,’ as conservationists contend?”(Fortun, 2001 182) Harvey defines the problem as one of perspective: