Bodies & Burdens
This quarter, graduate students enrolled in ENVS 597: Power, Privilege, and the Environment are writing short responses emerging from readings and/or discussions in class.
Bodies & Burdens
By: Rebecca Williams
Narratives of health in our society all too often pin the responsibility of disease on the person experiencing it: cancer, diabetes, obesity, depression, anxiety, addiction. These diseases are told they stem from what the individual did, did not do, or should have done. That narrative extends beyond our individual health into the health of our planet; it is the responsibility of the individual to recycle, to drive an electric car, to just say “no” to plastic straws. It is our burden as individuals to navigate our society and planet’s deteriorating health with catch all slogans and quick fixes about special diets and carbon consciousness.
How effective is it to place all responsibility on the individual?
The dominant narrative fails to account for the current power structures that create the illusion of the choices we think we are making about our health and our planet. Is it really a matter of personal choice or willpower when the decisions have already been made by, and in favor of, those in power?
The Environmental Breast Cancer Movement (EBCM) is just one movement that is questioning the dominant paradigm of health and environment. Phil Brown’s 2013 book “Toxic Exposures” discusses how the EBCM challenges the status quo of how breast cancer is addressed. While the dominant epidemiological paradigm (DEP) related to breast cancer focuses on individual level causes and factors leading to breast cancer, the EBCM examines environmental, and therefore industrial, causes of breast cancer. By displacing the focus from individual level factors of genetics, diet and exercise to environmental factors such as industrial pollution, the narrative of breast cancer begins to take on a new shape. The shift from treatment of the individual to the prevention of a growing epidemic shifts the burden of responsibility onto those corporations that manufacture and release carcinogenic compounds into our environment and our bodies.
This burden of responsibility extends beyond the health of our individual bodies to that of the planet’s. Images of sea life strangled by plastic litter our social media streams and news clips about whale bellies full of microplastic fill our screens. These messages are followed by heartfelt campaigns convincing us to ban straws and buy reusable coffee cups in effort to curb our destruction of the planet. It is the individual consumer that is responsible for the mess, and it is up to us to control it. While we as individuals can undoubtedly reduce our single use plastic consumption to address the amount of plastics entering our oceans, who does this narrative of responsibility benefit?
Thomas Lindquist introduced the idea of Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) in the 1990s. EPR proposes that manufacturers and distributers of the materials that pollute our planet are ultimately responsible for where their products meet the end of their life. This idea supposes that this shift in responsibility would push companies to make their products more easily recyclable or reusable. In the context of EPR, the decision would move upstream from the individual choice between paper or plastic to those in power who present us with these decisions in the first place.
While we as individuals should continue to actively reduce our waste production and protect our health, it is important to question whether the choices we are presented with regarding these things are truly our own. By accepting these individual responsibilities, who are we protecting from being forced to change? Who is making decisions for us before we get the chance?
https://bcaction.org/our-take-on-breast-cancer/environment/environmental-justice/
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/02/world/europe/plastic-whale-dead-italy.html
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2018/10/news-plastics-microplastics-human-feces/
Works Cited
Brown, P. (2013). Toxic Exposures: Contested Illnesses and the Environmental Health Movement. Columbia University Press.
jessicaibes • May 26, 2019