NotNormativelyHuman 305
dissimulated or outright denied. The National Environmental Justice
Advisory Committee to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
has highlighted as exemplary the city of Chester, Pennsylvania, as one
of the worst cases of environmental racism in the nation:Chester, a
predominantly African American community, is burdened with one of
the largest collections of waste facilities in the country.Chester is
"home"toalargegarbage-burningincineratorandalsotoThermalPure
Systems, once one of the largest infectious medical waste treatment
operations which allegedly deposited medical waste in public spaces
where children were free to play (Chiles n. pag.). More often than not,
placeslikeChester,PA,aredisownedsiteswhichleavetheir"disabling"
tracesonthepeoplewholivenexttothem,ontheirmindsandbodies.
Denial of any link between "persistent and growing disparities in
mortality, morbidity, and disability between whites of high
socioeconomic status (SES) and people of color who are less
advantaged" (Brulle and Pellow 103) is particularly pronounced when
these factors manifest themselves in the Global South. These sites are
also, and not coincidentally, locations where the global and the local
intersect, where the global capitalist economy (its earlier colonial and
also its current neoliberal formations) has left indelible traces in local
ecologies, which condense the effects of an uneven allocation of
resourcesandrisks,asinthe2010BritishPetroleumGulfofMexicooil
spill or the nuclear waste dump on tribal lands in Arizona and New
Mexico.^134 The "violent environments" (Peluso and Watts) thus
produced are violent in many ways, not always in open acts of
(^134) There is no space here to do justice to the wide-ranging discussion, also in
AmericanandCulturalStudies.MyargumenthasbeenresourcedbyPelusoand
Watts's edited collectionViolent Environments; also by Crosby'sEcological
Imperialism:TheBiologicalExpansionofEurope,900-1900; by Brook, Daniel.
"Environmental Genocide: Native Americans and Toxic Waste."American
Journal of Economics and Society57.1 (1998): 105-13. Print.; Chari, Sharad.
"DetritusinDurban:PollutedEnvironsandtheBiopoliticsofRefusal."Imperial
Debris: On Ruins and Ruination.Ed. Ann Laura Stoler. Durham: Duke UP,
- 131-61. Print.; and by Ahuja, Neel.Bioinsecurities:DiseaseIntervention,
Empire, and the Government of Species. Durham: Duke UP, 2016. Print., and
here especially the chapter on "Species War and the Planetary Horizon of
Security"(195-205).