The book’s argument is sort of like the airborne toxic event of White Noise crossed with microplastics. except with the drama and spatial order turned inside-out. As with White Noise, toxic risks are potentially about everybody everywhere, not just obvious sites of ongoing large-scale exposure shaped by social and economic inequality. The twist is that these sites of exposure are hard to recognize, localized, and ever more increasingly scattered.
“In our story, the vast majority of potentially risky industrialized lands are located on smaller urban lots, not larger ones, and whatever hazards remain on those sites today were likely deposited some time ago, perhaps decades earlier by manufacturers who are not gone. Most of these sites have not been redeveloped for other, mostly nonindustrial uses. Thus they do not look, feel, or smell like risky places today. Instead, these lots may contain houses, retail stores, parking lots, restaurants, and even a few playgrounds. Importantly, many tend not to be in predominantly low-income or minority neighborhoods, and the proportion of those that are has been declining over the past few decades, as new generations of white residents churn back into the nation’s urban cores….
“Both stories [a) urban environmental racism, and b) the steady dispersion of risk across social groups through “churning”] are accurate and meaningful—and inextricably related. The unjust exposure of marginalized groups to industrial hazards, especially large, active ones in particular neighborhoods, is a big part of the contemporaneous process, the now…. Environmental injustices of today beget and hide systemic risk of tomorrow, as past and present continue to unfold atop one another, against and again.” (104-105)
