Tóxicos invisibles: La construcción de la ignorancia ambiental ed. by Ximo Guillem-Llobat and Agustí Nieto-Galan

Abstract

Reviewed by: Tóxicos invisibles: La construcción de la ignorancia ambiental ed. by Ximo Guillem-Llobat and Agustí Nieto-Galan Laura Barbier (bio) Tóxicos invisibles: La construcción de la ignorancia ambiental Edited by Ximo Guillem-Llobat and Agustí Nieto-Galan. Barcelona: Icaria, 2020. Pp. 336. Robert Proctor and Londa Schiebinger's work on agnotology opened a new research field in 2008, "ignorance studies." This volume, edited by Ximo Guillem-Llobat and Agustí Nieto-Galan, draws on their work, addressing both the "active" and the "passive" or "structural" types of ignorance production. "Active" types refers, for example, to the production of doubt, and passive or structural types—which seem to interest the authors more—result from the way that science or risk assessment is produced. The book aims to analyze the processes of invisibilization and ignorance production regarding the toxicity of products and territories from the end of the nineteenth century until today. All the chapters are based on Spanish case studies—except chapter 9 presenting a Chilean one—but they aim at more general conclusions. Contrary to what the title might suggest, the ten chapters comprising the volume do not only deal with ignorance and invisibility but more generally with the politics and materiality of toxicity, including the ways in which exposed communities deal with it. A central place is granted to visual archives, each chapter starting with a description of newspaper illustrations and photos, pictures from documentary movies, artistic photos from diverse sources, or photos used in activist contexts. The book chapters approach two major issues: "dangerous products" and "ill territories." They show the failures of regulation of dangerous products, which is based on the respect of exposure limit values and leads to confinement of people and places more than interdiction or elimination of harmful substances. Thus, some places are converted into "sacrifice zones" where marginalized, racialized communities live. The book highlights the ambivalent role of science and scientific experts, showing in some cases how the same data can be interpreted in contradictory manners according to the interests at stake and disclosing forms of invisibilization and ignorance that take root in the very production of expertise. In other cases, the authors show how experts and science can be powerless in bringing about regulatory measures even when there is strong evidence of a product's toxicity. When science proves powerless, chronically exposed victims left invisible and abandoned can resist by performing unspectacular, daily acts of care, cleaning, and healing that enable them to generate spaces of solidarity and recognition that remain invisible to people outside these communities (ch. 9). The book chapters expose different tactics of invisibilization that are sometimes used in combination. Media campaigns are one of these, whether they focus on one spectacular aspect of an issue and invisibilize other critical [End Page 599] aspects of it, deliver a flood of contradictory information, or give reassuring news with no empirical basis. Scientific popularization can also play a crucial role in the invisibilization of toxic dangers, concealing risks related to the utilization of dangerous products like cyanhydric fumigations (ch. 2). Other chapters demonstrate how landscape restoration of sites that once were a landfill (ch. 6) or a mine (ch. 7) or recognition of a polluted site as an ecological reserve (ch. 10) can be used as an efficient way of concealing toxicity. The book shows how the question of (in)visibility determines the way environmental problems are handled. Public actions tend to be centered on the most direct, visible, and vulnerable polluters, leaving more discreet and powerful polluters alone. The majority of the chapters describe both invisibilization and ignorance processes, some of them analyzing how invisibilization can lead to producing ignorance. They expose the material, epistemic, and institutional conditions that enable and maintain ignorance. Some show the production of "undone science" (even if that expression is not used) that leaves victims in epistemic inferiority, which can be the result of active, deliberate intents of withholding data, silencing criticism, and disqualifying independent expertise, but also of more structural conditions such as administrative constraints and technical limitations. Other chapters explore the material basis of ignorance and how it can solidify in norms. Ignorance can be tightly associated with...