Environimntal Crimes #2: The Play--“Capitalist Animal Farm: Beware, Technocrats!”
Set-Up: Some
Results of Interactive Journalism (From Part 1)
This play about Stock
Island’s landfill and its chemicals springs from last week’s contributions to my article, “Let’s Write a Play:
Scripting the Economics, Science, and Politics of Death: “Fifteen Shameful
Lethal Acts” in the Blue Paper
(1/22/2016)[i]. Jerome Grapel, Alex Symington, and
John Donnelly pointed out that any discussion of dangerous and polluting chemicals, and how these are
handled by government had to include: (1) The role of capitalism in the
economic and political system in which
pollution occurs and is hidden; (2) In
assigning blame to a government
actor’s particular political party affiliation since one party can be as bad as
the other; (3) The government’s role in enabling,
enhancing, ignoring and pollution disasters.
To join these points
and suggest how capitalist governments
and corporations act jointly against
their constituents and customers,
respectively--with both Democrats and Republicans doing so—I asked the
following: Have some actors who
interface with governments and corporations
been allowed to use their assumed
‘preeminence’ to issue
pronouncements that are unquestioned and unquestionable? Enter the ‘Technocrat,’ who wears the formal
credentials, as “scientist,” ‘engineer,”
“city manager,” and increasingly “risk manager.”
What are technocrats’ characteristics? They are the educated we call ‘specialists.’
We are cowed by the sophistication of their very specialized ‘knowledge,’ which is kept bureaucratically by their
government and corporate employers in a form that is protected by its bring complicated
and difficult to access. “Technocracy”
is claimed to be “pure,” ordinarily
assumed to mean that technocratic decisions are not influenced by politics or
any other non- “scientific” or
non-technical concerns or body of evidence.
One characteristic of being a ‘Technocrat’ is that the person can work
for anyone, because as their
technocratic ethos goes, the technical ‘expert’ just scientifically assesses
and delivers ‘facts.’ Another feature of
technocrats is that ‘facts’ become an end-in-themselves—usually to the exclusion
of ‘messy’ moral and humanist concerns.
Consequently, as German sociologist Max Weber argued long ago, “the more
an actor devotes himself to [something] for its own sake,…the less he is
influenced by considerations of the consequences of his actions.”[ii] In social psychological terms, technocrats become de-sensitized to the human injuries created by their
“facts.”
Our model for a play about
Stock Island’s landfill, in particular,
and chemical dumping and monitoring, in general, is an existing play that
focuses on Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union.
V.I. Lenin and Stalin placed great reliance on the ability of technocrats to industrialize Soviet society. Benito Mussolini and Adolph Hitler did so as
well, and US government bureaucrats—many
of them ‘technocrats’—place a very high
premium on the ‘exclusive’ value of ‘technocrats’ to solve local, state, national,
and international ‘problems,’ as technocratically defined, of course.
It is less recognized that George Orwell’s Animal Farm is a critique of technocracy, so to reconcile any
differences among the responses to my
last week’s Blue Paper submission, I selected
Orwell’s Animal Farm to guide our play’s
drama: “Capitalist Animal
Farm: Beware, Technocrats!”
“All Animals Are Equal
but Some…are More Equal Than Others”
In 1945 George Orwell’s fable, Animal Farm, was published, but it was then banned by Josef Stalin from all areas
controlled by the Soviet Union. A not-so
thinly-veiled critique of repressive government,
especially Stalin’s, in Orwell’s Animal
Farm the powerless animals come together nightly on “Manor Farm” to discuss
their lowly plight. Led initially by “‘Old Major’ the animal farm’s “prize white boar,” raised the other animals’ consciousness
about their exploitation and violent
mistreatment by “The Humans”—“Man.” “Our lives are miserable, laborious, and
short. We are given just so much food as
will keep the breath in our bodies….Forced to work to the last atom of our
strength...we are [then] slaughtered with hideous cruelty.” The marching orders for those in the struggle against humans was, “Never listen
when they tell you that Man and the animals have a common interest. It is all lies. Man serves the interests of no creature
except himself.”
Even as some comrades were being co-opted by the “enemy,” the animals continued their struggle against mistreatment and the one-sided distribution of animal-produced surplus. A central tenet, “that in fighting against Man, we must not come to resemble him,” was eventually disregarded as larger portions of the ‘more privileged’ animals began acting like “Man”—“Pigs supervising farm work “carried whips in their trotters”; Animals were executed by their own for “entering into a plot to murder Napoleon,…a large rather fierce-looking Berkshire boar.” By Animal Farm’s end the revolutionary dream was over: Preeminent pigs are seen drinking beer with their former enemies--the farmers. Mr. Pilkington, a farmer at the ‘social’ announced—with the pigs lifting their beer mugs to him-- that “Between pigs and human beings there was not…any clash of interests whatever….The period of misunderstanding was at an end.” Napoleon, the once respected boar in the animals’ struggle to overthrow “man,” stated his happiness that “the period of misunderstanding” had ended, by “clink[ing] his mug against [farmer] Pilkington’s. …” The ‘Eminent’ Animals had been co-opted into the enemy’s system that they had once struggled to overthrow.
Performing Power and Privilege, and their Outcomes
Our play, “Capitalist Animal Farm: Technocrats, Beware!”—like Orwell’s Animal Farm-- will deal with power, privilege, and their outcomes by contrasting capitalism and scientific and other forms of technocracy, against civic engagement.
The play’s central
questions: Do residents and visitors to Southernmost Island
know what its landfill conceals under its tattered containment grasses? Are scientific, technocratic, and government ‘experts’ honest about the landfill’s contents? Can ‘technocrats’ working for governments and
public corporations ever be completely honest?
Is government ‘transparency’ little more than a smokescreen for
convincing curious civilians that ‘all
is well’?
The location
of our play is a sub-tropical region in the
southernmost United States with a landfill that is now in what technocrats
label ‘long-term care’--it’s closed to dumping but still potentially dangerous
enough (as risk managers see it) to contaminate water, animals, marine life,
and people, the only ones who might sue.
Precisely
where this landfill is located is one of the conundrums in our play: how will we set the play’s geographic location when those who could be
most damaged by it cannot find the landfill on a map. Most maps of Stock Island
do not even indicate that a landfill is there. The “Welcome to Stock Island”
website[iii]
shows a blank grey space where the landfill stands, pasted over with the
letters, “Key West Naval Station.” Someone
who is persistent could locate the
Florida Department of Environmental Protection’s (FDEP) map of
‘solid waste facilities,’[iv]
which contains a lightly indicated
height map of the landfill and some
inspection wells. If you live on Stock Island or pass by it frequently,
it seems impossible not to see the landfill’s imposing height-- A “trash
blogger” assessed Stock Island’s
landfill to be, “three times as high as anywhere else in the Keys.”[v]
And on many days you’ll locate the landfill by the smell of its methane gas
belches that “experts” claim are “safe.”
Yet
according to most maps for the lay public, Stock Island’s landfill—a behemoth of Lower Keys’ trash, simply isn’t
there. As a visiting “trash blogger”
wrote, “we build a mountain of garbage but act like it doesn’t exist”[vi]
Such
exclusionist geography exists for the city of Rio de Janeiro. Some years ago during one of my trips to supervise field
research in Brazil, one of my US students there picked up a map of the City
at an H. Stern jewelry Gallery in the upscale Ipanema neighborhood. The
map, likely published by the Rio de Janeiro municipal government, had green over a hillside region of the city —as
if to say that the area was a tropical forest, but which in fact contains the largest shanty town (favela) in the Western Hemisphere. Multiple Rio de Janeiro city governments had
created and then ignored the misery
there, but now acts as though that region and its misery don’t exist. That is, until the city needed favela spaces for the World Cup (2014)
and Olympics (2016) and a new
transportation system for shuttling sports fans between them. Since favelas
and their working-class residents were considered unsafe for tourists, the residents of these areas saw
their dwellings destroyed, and many got
a municipal government order to move to designated dwellings outside the city, where most worked. So much for
the tyranny of urban ‘scientific’ planners, criminal justice “experts,”
and their municipal government partners under pressure from tourism and real
estate interests and the International Olympic Committee.
Laying Out the Play
The Actors.
Our play’s villans are “scientific technocrats” along with the
government actors (often ‘technocrats” as well) who delegate almost
absolute power to them. ‘Scientific
Technocracy’ and its ‘super scientists’ and technical ‘experts’ will be
performed by four ‘scientists’: one with
the federal Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), another employed
by the Southernmost State’s Department of Environmental Protection, the third works for the Southernmost city’s
health department, and the fourth, a ‘lesser technocrat’ and a Willie
Loman-like character--is the powerless and overworked inspector of landfill soils and wells. He just “does his job, nothing more,” and
then stops for a beer with other nameless bar trollers who he hopes will distract
him from thinking too much about his work.
Lay
publics, our potential heroes, are renters, homeowners,
tourists, and the homeless, among others.
They feel powerless to question the ‘expert knowledge’ of ‘technocrats.’ Granted, most of these publics are not yet politically
organized to confront “scientific
experts” and their governments, but this is not the greatest hindrance to their promoting
positive social change. The biggest
barrier is their almost religious belief in the ‘exclusive and superior’
knowledge’ of scientists and associated technocrats—“Lay people do not have the
requisite knowledge to challenge scientists’ ‘facts’.” The play’s central character, a mother whose
child is seriously ill--very likely from a pollutant still unrecognized and
thus not monitored by federal or state governments (for example, perfluorooctanoic acid
(PFOA), the chemical substance in DuPont Chemicals C-8)—dares to challenge
those whose actions and inactions have made her daughter desperately ill. Will our play end with these lay publics at
least discovering that they can digest and understand “expert knowledge”
without consulting an “expert”?
Scenes and Settings. Our sets visualize the ways that
government “transparency” can disguise government and scientific dishonesty through
the appearance that government is ‘on top of ’ monitoring potentially serious
chemical problems.
I.
Pre-school field trip to Southernmost’s Landfill:
Teaching the ‘As,’’Bs,’ ‘Cs,’ and ‘Ds’ and having a class Picnic.
II.
Missy Smith’s living room in Southernmost City.
Four year-old Missy tells her mother, Martha, about the pre-school’s field
trip, asking if her own ‘sickness’ is from “Cccc-Em-E-Calz.” Her
mother, Martha, decides to investigate the chemicals in Southernmost’s landfill.
III.
State Department of Environmental Protection’s waiting room is wall-papered with the Environmental Protection Agency’s list of chemicals in Southernmost’s landfill[vii]—a pad, pencil, magnifying glass, and ladder are
provided to facilitate Martha’s reading wall data;
IV.
“Office
of Citizen Information,” at the Southernmost city’s County Health
Department: Our heroine, Martha, was told that she could find an “expert” there who
would “help her understand chemicals.” The Office Citizen Information is piled high
and deep with outdated science text books stacked floor to ceiling with no room
for an “expert” or his desk;
V.
Dark Stage and Theater. Since a
chemical--even one that could be dangerous to human life--does not exist for government
if it has not been declared such by government and validated by its scientific
experts, an empty dark scene represents the possibilities for those seeking
“valid” information about “emergent” chemicals.[viii]
Martha, seeking information about her chemically-contaminated dying child--
whose bad luck was to be contaminated by a legally
non-lethal and thus unmonitored “emergent chemical.” The audience hears Martha crying and shouting as her city and state’s ‘risk managers’ explain quietly, knowingly, and in complicated
legal-eze that “she has no grounds for a lawsuit,” even though she hadn’t threatened to sue;
VI.
Pediatrics room in Southernmost hospital.
The room where Martha’s daughter
lay dying from DuPont Chemical’s C-8 product’s[ix]
contamination of Southernmost’s water
system, is located in the hospital’s wing built through a “generous a
partnership” between Southernmost government and DuPont Chemical. A nurse enters and asks the child’s mother if
she’d like a class of water--curtain falls.
Ending the Play with Teasers: Scenes I and II
Scene
I: Teaching
the Alphabet, “A” to “D”: Children
from the Southernmost Horace Mann Early learning Center sit with their teacher
on the sun burnt, partially grassless mound of
Southernmost Florida’s landfill. Miss Diana, the landfill’s overseer, has been invited to teach the preschoolers the
first four letters of the alphabet.
Arriving prepared for her task, Miss Diana carries four large cards of visuals to help the children learn the letters
“A” through “D.” Her presentation is
sung with them to the tune of 
“Do-Re-Mi” from the “Sound of Music.”
“Do-Re-Mi” from the “Sound of Music.”
(The
children’s teacher, Miss Audrey, frantically looks up the words that illustrate each letter
presented by landfill manager, Miss Diana:
“A” is for ‘Arsenic,’ in the dirt below:
“B”
is for the ‘Barium’ that lurks under our feet;
Little
Johnny blurts out, “What’s That?”
Suzie
pouts and screams, “I do not like this song.”
Miss
Diana continues to sing and teach:
Becoming
more distressed with each chemical presentation, sweat dripping visibly from her forehead,
Miss Audrey looked for the children’s reactions: Most seemed oblivious to what
they were hearing--they rustled back and forth on the landfill’s dirt but
seemed to be enjoying themselves just concentrating on the music.
“C” is for the ‘Chromium’ that settles
uncomfortably below us;
And
“D” is for the dying iguanas who burrow into the garbage mound.
With the picture of the dead and belly-up Iguana the
previously (mostly) obedient children became visibly nervous, angry, and in
tears. The children became silent and refused to continue singing with Miss
Diana. Little Jeremy and his ‘bestie’
Suzie got up and are ran down the landfill hill screaming, “no, I don’t want to
learn that alphabet letter, it’s cruel to animals” Two other children—seeing an iguana thrust
his snout out of his landfill burrow—run
over to scare the iguana back into his deep burrow.
Miss Diana is stunned: she doesn’t
understand why the children as so upset, after all, she works at the landfill every day and never
kills an iguana—the refuse company does that away from the landfill. What’s the big deal, she wonders? Landfill inspectors tell us that iguana
burrowing can loosen soil and enhance erosion:
Science is protecting children from possible illnesses by taking killing
iguanas.
Miss Audrey has lost control of her class and is
shaking from what she has seen and heard.
She calls for the bus to take the
children back to school for lunch, no picnic at the landfill for them. On the overly quiet ride back-- some of the
children are heard sniveling and whimpering somewhere in the back of the bus--Miss
Audrey frets over how she will explain what has happened to her superiors? She shivers at the thought that the children
might have gotten contaminated by landfill chemicals. What if the kids tell their parents about the
field trip and they launch a protest against her, will she lose her job? Why didn’t she think of these things before
arranging the trip? Indeed, she had
exercised some due diligence.
Scene II: Researching Stock Island’s Landfill: Now You See It, Now You Don’t
Miss
Audrey asks herself, if Monroe County
and Stock Island businesses have the chutzpah to ‘disappear’ a 66 foot
landfill from tourists, real estate prospectors, Stock Island dwellers, and
development ‘experts,’ what is being
done to chemical collection information about landfill contents? The answer she found was that a lot of
information exists in a lot of different
places, but you’ve got to be a chemical
expert to understand it. You’ll need to go to the official websites of Key
West City, Monroe County government, Florida State government, in general, and
the Florida State Department of Environmental Protection, in particular. Then you’ll need to cross-check between these four sites to
flesh out the information of each site
against the other three sites.[x] However, you’ll still be in the dark if you
never studied chemistry or did but
cannot remember what you learned. In
other words, common citizens, even educated ones, have become subservient to
“experts.” We live in a world in which
‘experts’ prevail.
That
said, apparently even Florida State’s Department of Environmental Protection is
not fully comfortable with what its “experts” discover about the state’s
landfills, since the state begins its report on Florida’s landfills, including
Stock Island’s, with the caveat that
State government offers, “No guarantee as
to the accuracy of the information in this [chemical] database…. Manpower and
resources are not always available to ensure [that] updates of this information
to the database are made in a timely manner.”[xi] But Florida’s DEP, upon whom we most place our lives and that of our children
and grand children, offers some hope: If
the concerned person wants “Any specific
information missing from the database”…[they]
may obtain…[it] by a file review
for the particular facility at the appropriate District office.” (Italics
emphases added).
[i] http://thebluepaper.com/lets-write-a-play-scripting-the-economics-science-and-politics-of-death-fifteen-shameful-lethal-acts/
[ii]
Max Weber, 1978. Economy and Society I, G. Roth and C. Wittich, Eds. U of California
Press, p. 26
[iv] http://ca.dep.state.fl.us/mapdirect/?focus=solidwaste&zoom=query&querytype=swacs&queryvalues=79636
[vi]
Ibid
[vii]https://fldeploc.dep.state.fl.us/www_wacs/Reports/SW_Facility_Testsite_Results_Date_res.asp?txtFacility=79636&txtBegin=01%2F01%2F1999&txtEnd=01%2F11%2F2016&cboOutput=B&cmdCheckForm=Submit
[viii]
Ref for emergent chemical
problem
[ix]
See Huggins, the Blue Paper,
reference ‘i’ above and see also, Nathaniel
Rich, “The Lawyer who Became DuPont’s Worst Nightmare” 1/17/2016
http://theparalegallitigator.com/found-in-the-blood-of-99-7-percent-of-americans-and-it-never-breaks-down/
[x]
To
identify the chemicals and their levels at the Stock Island landfill you’ll
need to go to the Florida State Department of Environmental Protection’s report
on the “Solid Waste Facility Test Results”[x]
for Stock Island (2003-2015)—that the results are not listed in chronological
order will complicate your investigation.
Then you’ll need to guess that if the words, “not detected,” with
respect to a particular chemical, indicate that this pollutant was not present
in dangerous quantities (in someone’s
estimation according to some unstated standard). You’ll also have to assume that if nothing is
written in the box labeled “Description”—where the words “not detected”
occur--that the named pollutant was present at some undesirable level, without
knowing what this means for human, land animal, environmental, and marine
well-being in the short- and long-runs.
I hate to assume when mine and others’ health may be at risk that I know
what is going on with landfill tests.
[xi]https://fldeploc.dep.state.fl.us/www_wacs/Reports/SW_Facility_Inventory_res1.asp?cboDistrict=SD&class=100&status=&chkFacAddress=on
[H1]Arsenic
is one of the most toxic elements that can be found. Humans may be exposed to
arsenic through food, water and air. Exposure may also occur through skin
contact with soil
Read more: http://www.lenntech.com/periodic/elements/as.htm#ixzz3ySiAy6N6
Read more: http://www.lenntech.com/periodic/elements/as.htm#ixzz3ySiAy6N6
[H2]Many
hazardous waste sites contain certain amounts of barium. Health: People that live
near them may be exposed to harmful levels. The exposure will than be caused by
breathing dust, eating soil or plants, or drinking water that
is polluted with barium. Skin contact may also occur.
[H3]Chromium (0) is a solid
metal used for making steel and other alloys. It is also used in nuclear and
high-temperature research.
Compounds of chromium (III) and (VI) are used for chrome plating, manufacturing dyes and pigments, leather tanning, and wood preserving. Smaller amounts are used in fireworks, photography, process engraving,….Tobacco leaves and tobacco products, including cigarettes, contain chromium.
Compounds of chromium (III) and (VI) are used for chrome plating, manufacturing dyes and pigments, leather tanning, and wood preserving. Smaller amounts are used in fireworks, photography, process engraving,….Tobacco leaves and tobacco products, including cigarettes, contain chromium.
Health: Exposure levels of
chromium will be higher if you live near hazardous waste sites containing
chromium or industrial facilities that use chromium, or if you live near waterways
that receive industrial discharges from electroplating, leather tanning, and
textile production. You can also be exposed if you live near busy roads,
because emissions from automobile brake lining and catalytic converters contain
chromium.
[H4]Here’s
the logic, if there are dangerous chemicals in Southernmost landfill why not
test Iguanas for the kinds and levels of toxins in them and their rates of ‘natural’ mortality there over other dwelling
places. Right now the iguanas are taken
away periodically by a refuge company
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